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The three collages Indra Gleizde (1991) is showing at Prospects are part of Eternal Calendar (2024-ongoing), a long-term research project the artist is conducting in the Latvian village of Rogovka, where her grandparents are from. Rogovka is located close to the Russian border, on the edge of the European Union. Recent threats in this area triggered flashbacks to a history of russification and oppressive policies by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. But they also brought back memories of the community’s resilience and resistance, for instance of the time when printing Latgalian texts was prohibited, which encouraged the villagers to keep their language and literary traditions alive by copying books by hand.
During her visits to Rogovka, Gleizde noticed that imperialist threats were not the only things the community rebelled against. The villagers were also offering resistance to complex processes like the creation of a unilateral, national Latvian narrative, the marginalization of their culture by Western-European centres, and the neglect of rural regions by urban ones.
In her collages, Gleizde does not so much focus on the historical details of Rogovka, but emphasizes the personal and universal themes she recognizes. According to the artist, these themes mostly have something to do with freedom: freedom from oppression, freedom to contradict dominant narratives, and freedom to heal from collective traumas. In her artworks, Gleizde incorporates a wide variety of sources and materials, including photographs, handwritten texts, and found objects or images. She regularly brings all these elements together in installations that combine video, photography and text.
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)