Artist Talk and Short Film Screening with Ieva Epnere & Anu Allas
Artist talk with the Latvian artist Ieva Epnere and the curator of the exhibition “Unframed. Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaité”, Anu Allas.
The talk will include a screening of Ieva Epnere’s short film “The Bird of Paradise” (9 min 50 sec), which was made for the exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin in 2023. The film tells the story of DAAD scholarship holders in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s and, in addition to archival footage, features excerpts from a conversation with the artist Maija Tabaka. In 1977, Maija Tabaka received a DAAD scholarship to spend a year in West Berlin. For an artist from the Soviet Union at the time, this was an extraordinary opportunity; permission for Tabaka to travel abroad was supposed to confirm the liberal nature of the Soviet regime.
In this talk, the curator Anu Allas and the artist Ieva Epnere will discuss Epnere’s relationship with Maija Tabaka and Tabaka’s role in Latvian art history. Epnere will discuss the background of her short film, her collaboration with Maija Tabaka and the archival material. It will also seek answers to the questions of what it means for Epnere, as a contemporary artist, to relate to recent art history, and why and how the aesthetic mode of the film, which is part fiction and part documentary, was created.
Epnere will discuss the processes of creating the short film, including her collaboration with Maija Tabaka and work with archival materials. The discussion will also seek answers to such questions as what it means for Epnere, as a contemporary artist, to relate to recent art history, and how and why she arrived at the aesthetic regime of the film, which alternates between fiction and documentary.
Ieva Epnere (1977) graduated from the Textile Department (2001) and the Visual Communication Department (2003) of the Art Academy of Latvia and from postgraduate studies at HISK Gent (2012). Epnere creates photographs, textile works, video installations and films in which personal, private stories are the starting points for artistic reflections on identity, traditions and rituals. In 2019, she received the Purvītis Prize for her work “Sea of Living Memories”. In 2019 she was a DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service) artists in Berlin programme fellow. Ieva Epnere has held 23 solo exhibitions and has participated in group exhibitions and film festivals in Latvia and abroad.
This talk will be held in English.
This event is a part of the public programme of the exhibition “Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė”. The exhibition focuses on the works of three Baltic women artists – Malle Leis (1940–2017), Maija Tabaka (1939) and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė (1933–2007) – in the late Soviet era of the 1970s and 1980s. All three of the artists challenged contemporary art discourses through non-conventional approaches to self-representation, ways of creating space and reflections on being artists.