For the first online edition of NAC Library Talks, the artist Liene Pavlovska, in residency at NAC since September 2020, has invited the artists Maike Statz and Harriet Foyster along with cultural critic Vents Vīnbergs to share and discuss methodologies of work determined to exploration of one's relationships with their immediate surroundings. The talk looks at the socio-political grids inherent to architecture, historical narratives, and the conditioning of personal aspirations. The format of informal sharing of experiences and practices proposes to dwell on the question of how to raise awareness of manipulative end exclusive spatial conditioning.

25 November, 5 pm

Online

We kindly ask you to register: Zoom Registration

Liene Pavlovska lives and works in Riga. She is a visual artist and scenographer. Her work initiates with an interest in social-economic society models and the collective desires resulting from them, as well as how they determine the living space of humans and other beings. Pavlovska is researching and using theatrical modes of expression and the experience of catharsis in the context of visual art. In Nida, Pavlovska analyses the spatial politics of the Curonian Spit, continuing research started during a HIAP residency on the Suomenlinna island of Helsinki, another Unesco World Heritage Site. Within a process towards a new work series When I Walk In Boots I Found she gives value and focus to emotions provoked by immediate surroundings, as a way to resist patriarchal and capital-led spatial perception.

Maike Statz lives in Bergen, Norway. Working across the fields of interior architecture and art she is interested in the influence of architecture on individuals and society. Currently engaged in research on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and space Statz uses writing and installation as a means of examination. In her work she considers how history is embedded in space and what power dynamics are at play. In 2019 she graduated from the Studio for Immediate Spaces Interior Architecture Master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and until recently has been working for Harry Seidler and Associates an architecture office in Sydney. Statz wrote her thesis Out of Place Out of Time.

Harriet Foyster is an artist, writer, and editor, who lives and works in Amsterdam. Her practice is strongly rooted in research and explores how logics of private property are central to contemporary subjectivity production, and ways that material circumstance and ideology converge to construct, reinforce, and perpetuate behavioural patterns that strengthen the neoliberal agenda. Her works and texts have been shared at PEER, London; De Appel, Amsterdam; the 26th Biennial of Design, Ljubljana; Jupiter Woods, London; Praksis, Oslo; and Ambit Magazine, among others. Foyster recently published an article Urban Legends.

Vents Vīnbergs is an architectural and cultural critic, based in Riga. He is the author of over 200 publications in various media outlets, both professional and general, in Latvia and other countries, including the book series Process (2008-2013), V*X. Latvian Architecture Since 1991, and most recently – Soon (2020), published by Riga Biennial. He has been co-curator and participant of 10 architecture and art exhibitions, with the group show Retina (2017) in Kim?/CAC, Riga, among them, as well as a set designer for several productions in Dailes Theatre in Riga. Vents is interested in the role of personality in architectural processes, and the means of other art practices to affect the perception of space.

Co-funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.