Look to Flowers to Lift Your Spirits
Lessons Learned in 2022
It seems that 2022 has been one of the harshest years we’ve experienced. Almost in unison, the world’s media begin their traditional end-of-year columns with a sentence that may differ in its writing style, but whose narrative is one and the same: this will definitely not be one of those periods of one’s life that is looked back upon with fondness and yearning. War in Europe. This horrible headline dashed all hope of resuming a post-pandemic “back to normal”, and instead regurgitated the old axiom that people do not learn from their mistakes and are prepared to kill for simple greed – even in a region that we had associated (with hindsight, wrongly) with progress and contemporary thinking. This single event has created a global crisis and along with it, a prolonged mental, moral and economic turbulence where inner peace can only be regained by seeking an environment and space in which to recharge, calm down, find inspiration, and draw strength. It is our deepest conviction that art is unequivocally such a space – a space in which to regain balance, find answers to seemingly unanswerable questions, be inspired, or simply take refuge for a moment.
Ekebergparken Sculpture Park in Oslo is home to Marina Abramović’s The Scream (2013), which is located in front of the very same landscape that Edward Munch used in his legendary painting The Scream. Abramović’s work is composed of a picture frame that acquires its content/emotion/imprint when viewers/visitors experience and hear the scream. Their own scream, that is – thus encountering the deepest vibrations of their own being because no one can be changed by someone else’s experience. It is only your own experience that will always stay with you – evolving, transforming and making us into more authentic and conscious human beings.
This war has also brought with it a number of lessons that we have always known, yet are now looking at from a completely different perspective. These lessons not only help us survive and navigate the unpredictable but also make us contemplate – how do we use our one and only life to do the best we can?
Cooperation
The chaos of war has reminded us of the crucial importance of cooperation – of the ability to unite and consolidate forces – because not one of us can stand aside. Most of the region’s artists and art world members do not have large amounts of capital, and they do not have access to the levers of political influence; but they do have art that is full of love and awareness of the world, attentive to its smallest details and most varied expressions. By its very nature, this art opposes violence and war. Arterritory’s project “Atbalstissimo: Latvian Artists for Ukraine” was created four days after the war started – we invited professional artists to donate their works in support of Ukraine, and invited our readers to buy them. This initiative resulted in a donation of €17 820 to Ukraine. Cooperation and the desire to support each other were also at the heart of the Arterritory and Common Ground/Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art project in which Latvian artists exhibited their works in the refugee centre – the underlying desire was to provide comfort and a sense of security to the people who had experienced the horrors of war and/or fleeing from the war, and were now suffering from resultant stress and mental health burdens.
It is precisely this interest in others and the desire to share and create new synergies that was behind the creation of the book Projekts Cilvēks. Spiriterritory sarunas par esību, sūtību un būtību (Project: Human Being. Spiriterritory Conversations on Being, Purpose and Human Nature). Art is an essential part of the book – works by Atis Jākobsons from his Dark Matter series add an extra dimension to the book’s narrative by pulling the reader in and illuminating that which words cannot say. Words have limits, art does not.
Creativity
Global turmoil has encouraged us to be more creative and open-minded, and to remember that often times the simplest formula for success and joy is the ability to think imaginatively and give in to seemingly crazy ideas – to forget the familiar, the learned and the institutionalised. This is how the idea for energART, Arterritory’s nomadic gallery, came about. It is rooted in the desire to take art beyond the institutional space and to create new dialogues – between the environment, art and the viewer. We remembered that there was a time when there were no museums or galleries in the world, yet there was art. energART offers the opportunity to not only get to know a wide variety of art, but also to enter private spaces, dwellings and homes throughout Latvia that are not usually open to the general public. Two energART exhibitions took place in 2022: the first was in the village of Mazirbe, at Tīklu šķūnis (The Net Shed) owned by Una Meistere and Ainārs Ērglis; the second was held on the property of Andris and Agita Putāns in Dūrmuiža. We are grateful to the hosts of these spaces, to the artists (Iveta Gabaliņa, Atis Jākobsons, Artūrs Virtmanis, Luīze Rukšāne, Estere Grāvere, Pauls Rietums, Dainis Pundurs and Hele), and to the visitors for their openness, willingness to experiment, fearlessness and crazy ideas. The next energART exhibition will take place in February 2023.
Self-awareness
Strangely, the enforced loneliness of the pandemic and the madness of war have strengthened our senses of belonging and identity. The pandemic has dealt a severe blow to the constant urge to travel and the habit of circling the planet, however, this has been to the benefit of the local art scene, which has intensified markedly and has also transcended the mind’s construct of metropolitan city limits and has now also settled into small towns and the countryside. Many of us suddenly realised that great and excellent art is not exclusive to so-called epicentres – one’s local vicinity can provide a just as full-blooded experience. Daniel Birnbaum, former director of Moderna Museet, in response to a question from David Kaufman of The New York Times on how to achieve sustainability in the art world, said: “What’s needed is a more ’localised’ approach to art. Focus on exhibitions or shows within your own city or nearby in the countryside. Because it’s really no longer necessary to fly a big piece of art halfway around the world just to appear at a cocktail party.”
At the same time, we have become more self-confident not only politically, but also in an artistic context. After many years of desperately trying to be just like “them”, we have not lost the desire to belong to the global art scene, however, we have recognised that we are different from the western European art scene, where the challenges are milder compared to those in the eastern European art scene. Here, art is made basically because you want to make it – and without any high hopes in terms of potential opportunity to sell it and actually make money from it. Perhaps this diversity, saturation, and not being “within the box” of global tastes and fashions is what makes eastern European art particularly appreciated in these turbulent times. The Vitols Contemporary collection, on show at KUMU Museum in Tallinn until next spring, seems to be a clear demonstration of the potential and strength of eastern European art.
Joy
On March 15 of this year, Arterritory.com published an interview with the above-mentioned artist Marina Abramović. Among other things, in the interview she said: “I always remember one very important thing about the painter Matisse. During WWII, when Picasso was painting Guernica, and everyone was painting horror and all kinds of horrible war motifs, Matisse was painting flowers – just flowers. If you look at all this, you realise that, yes, we are in hell. That’s why we need to look at flowers, to lift our spirits.” It is very important to be aware of what we look at, what we see in our daily lives, and how it affects us. Because we are what we see. This is a time of uncertainty in which art plays a very important role because it can provide the most important thing – hope and joy in life.
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The last month of 2022 was white, bright and beautiful – the snow made the world look like a Christmas postcard. In a way, this landscape, a true masterpiece of nature, was a sign that even in the blackness of negation, light is always present.
As we look back over the past year, we have seen the time-worn truth that “nothing is black and white” reaffirmed; and despite things sometimes appearing hopeless, and us feeling powerless, this has been a time that forced us to become much stronger than before.
