Taus Makhacheva at the Riga Art Space, Latvia

Taus Makhacheva will participate in the touring exhibition Lost in the Archive at the Riga Art Space from 4 February – 27 March 2016. Curated by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, the exhibition is set to tour regional culture centres throughout 2016, and will be accompanied by the educational programme The Big Magnifying Glass.

 

The exhibition material has been sourced from the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s database and archival materials, which is the largest source of information on contemporary art processes in the country. A tandem of artists and curators will highlight the potential of archive as a significant collection of culture, exploring its functions as a multidimensional carrier of information, constantly forming and redefining our relationship with history, while simultaneously involving the viewer as an active user of the archive and artwork.

 

Makhacheva will present her new video work Tightrope, in which a tightrope walker named Rasul Abakarov is depicted crossing the abyss of a canyon in the highlands of the Caucasians mountains using 20th century artworks of various Dagestani artists to maintain his balance instead of a balancing pole, creating a structure that evokes a museum storage space. The way the artworks are moved above the void suggests the fragile balance of post-soviet subjectivity reinventing itself and looking for an equilibrium between the traditional past and the national, local and contemporary culture. Ultimately the precarious balance of the tightrope embodies the existential experience of an artist always vacillating on the verge of appreciation and oblivion.

 

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December 28, 2015