Amanda Ziemele: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange… and therefore as a stranger give it welcome

Latvian Pavilion, represented at the 60th International Art Exhibition—the Venice Biennale by the artist Amanda Ziemele with the exhibition O day and night, but this is wondrous strange... and therefore as a stranger give it welcome, is inviting viewers to take an open and accepting stance in order to better experience and comprehend the artist’s chosen original language of painting.

Following the Shakespearian thread from Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland, Ziemele unfolds the mysteries of three dimensions in a fluid transition from flatland to throughtland by creating a microcosm of embrace and unconditional hospitality under threat.

The curator of Latvian Pavilion Adam Budak describes the exhibition: “Amanda Ziemele’s is an emancipatory project; against the preconceived discipline of space, the viewer enters an illusionary hybrid zone of sharing and solace, protection and vulnerability, composed of haptic forms in dispersion and collapse. Shells and nests, shadows and echoes, and supporting structures negotiating in vain; ambiguity of a sublime nature, between beauty and danger, an uncanny factor, abstract yet familiar. Transgression at work: resisting gravity, forms levitate with both a joy and hopelessness. Hospitality is a critical act that is beyond the threshold of the possible—a paradox. At the confluence of absence and presence, daylight is an instrument inviting the viewer to a self-reflective journey through a world in disarray and out of joint—a world with no measure, a displaced universe of mutual hospitality, a warped space where the other is a gift. This is Amanda Ziemele’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 exhibition ultimately offers to us.”

Here, painting appears as a sensual practice, with attention to materiality, with a focus on texture, with gentle narrative nods towards childhood, memory, the need for protection, a critical nostalgia. Surfaces and fields are skin layers, tactile membranes, organic entities; this is a landscape of nature's corporeality. Fields of painting open up and close, folding itself in a gesture of self-affection, or perhaps of self-defence; looking for a shelter, and becoming one. Texture seduces and mesmerises by its unexpected pattern and tactility. Brushstroke carries out a tender process of distributing a thick dose of paint, layer after layer. Surfaces in polylogue. Forms looking for their matching loved ones. Forms in search of their missing parts. Strange yet familiar: an after-image (of a tradition). This is a romance of many dimensions: welcome to the Flatland, expanded.

“Eight figures caught in the space. Newcomers to this world, trying their best to exist; clumsy, tired but curious giants. Gravity is a new concept for them, they use whatever is at hand. Their skeletons are made of wood and torsos of stretched canvas, with limbs holding onto Arsenale rafters, shoulders leaning against walls. Oily creatures standing on tiptoes, centre of mass off balance. Here they are, testing and daring the limits of this masonry enclosure. Perhaps triggered by a sparring afterparty of escape from flatness, an awe to perpetual sunrise, or simply attempt to find their way of existing in this world, in this space, together. Bent, folded, wrapped and warped around themselves—some excelling at it, some exhausted and some just about holding on ‘to make it’ in here. Now, a moment of rest,” the architect Niklāvs Paegle adds.

Amanda Ziemele (born 1990, Riga) graduated from the Visual Arts Department of the Art Academy of Latvia, with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting. She completed diploma studies in the study programme of Interdisciplinary and Experimental Painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and was awarded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with a Post-Graduate Scholarship. Since 2016, she has held several solo exhibitions and has been engaged in various collaborative projects as well as actively participated in exhibitions in Latvia and abroad. Amanda Ziemele received the 2021 Purvītis Prize for her exhibition Quantum Hair Implants. In early 2023, her solo exhibition The Sun has Teeth was on view in the Dome Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. Her work can be found in several collections, in Latvia and abroad, including the Latvian National Museum of Art, the VV Foundation and Zuzeum, Riga.

Commissioner: Daiga Rudzāte, “Indie” Culture Project Agency, Ltd.

Supporters and cooperation partners: Jānis Zuzāns (“Alfor” Ltd), Investment and Development Agency of Latvia, Embassy of Latvia in Italy, Investment and Tourism Agency of Riga, technology company “Tet”, VV Foundation, “Latvijas Finieris”, “Antalis” and “Arctic Paper”.

For the media inquiries: Signe Lonerte, signe.lonerte@gmail.com.