20.04.2024 - 24.11.2024

The Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition— La Biennale di Venezia, 2024

Commissioner: Daiga Rudzāte, INDIE

Curator: Adam Budak

Architect: Niklāvs Paegle, ĒTER

Photography: Līga Spunde

Venue: Arsenale

Amanda Ziemele’s is a newly defined painting as a spatial extravaganza of irregular geometry and organic volume. A space of an imaginary encounter, and broken memories; as it actively unfolds and opens in an uncontrolled rhythm and suspense, it orchestrates a ritual of a form-in-becoming, a celebration of cosmic multidimensionality, staged in a cubicle of historical legacy.

Precision and modesty equal poetry in Ziemele’s painterly environments, that are choreographed in a masterful way across all parameters of a given space. Here, the painting is a performative act: stripped bare, it wanders across the room, adorns the doorway, levitates over the ceiling, adapting classical architectural components by almost mimicking them in a freestyle embrace. Amanda’s is a generous gesture — towards the painting itself, towards space, as well as (and perhaps most importantly) towards the viewer. The artist keeps activating the viewer’s attention, guiding the gaze in an almost cinematic manner, a one-long-shot-camera movement, comparable with the painterly move. The simplicity of an elemental form, along with the basic brushstroke act, makes it an unusual proposal which seduces the viewer with its freshness and certain wickedness, a sense of humour, allure of temptation. Here, the painting appears as a sensual practice, with care for materiality, with a focus on a texture, with gentle narrative nods towards childhood, memory, a need of protection, a critical nostalgia.

In a subtle though bold act of subversion, Amanda Ziemele transforms the pavilion’s interior into a living organism, taming space, animating dimensions, letting us, the viewers, develop a romance of polyphonic space. This is a space of a desired welcome, a habitat of hospitality. Here, a space is both — a promise and a doubt, “upward, and yet not northward”, or as yet another poet would say: “hinauf und zurück”, a heterotopic zone of movement and exploration, a transition towards wondrous simultaneity of a (hyper)spatial experience.

Following Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions’s Shakespearian thread: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange… and therefore as a stranger give it welcome’, Ziemele unfolds the mysteries of three dimensions in a fluid transition from flatland to thoughtland by creating a microcosm of embrace and unconditional hospitality under threat.

This is Amanda’s version of a mature space, a counter-phantasmagoria, resisting exhaustion and fatigue, a space with an attitude, ready to think and host the irregular world of contemporary society. The healing — the necessity of healing — is what Amanda’s project ultimately offers to us.

Adam Budak, curator