A retrospective of Hardijs Lediņš’ creative practice and his influences ‘Lediņš. Between This And The Other’ will open to public on 13 November at the exhibition hall of the National Library of Latvia. It resonates with the spirit of Approximate Exhibitions organised by Lediņš and his confederates by focusing on process driven art forms in particular. Several artist performances will also take place as part of this exhibition. The exhibition has been organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, its curator – Līga Lindenbauma.
The curator Līga Lindenbauma describes the concept behind this exhibition: ‘The ‘subtitle’ of this exhibition ‘between this and the other’ has been borrowed from articles written by Lediņš, where he attempts to formulate the area of his creative interests. He states that it is hard to name just one or two specific authors or creative fields that appeal to him simply because there are too many answers. Hence it is much better to select several options as points of reference and thus create a roughly defined area of interests. This territory can then potentially encapsulate a wide, unnamed and otherwise unrelated amplitude of personalities, events and occurrences.
The approach of defining occurrences by means of marking out a field of related manifestations has also been applied to creating this retrospective dedicated to Lediņš. If his artistic territory were to be mapped out, it would be squarely located between such key points as multimedia, process and collaboration. Lediņš freely experimented with the possibilities offered by a range of mediums, weaving together text, music, performance and the theory of architecture while often working together with other co-authors, confederates and collaboration partners. He cast a strong influence on the currents of alternative culture in Latvia during the 1980s and organically integrated Western art occurrences characteristic to that period of time in the local art environment. Similarly his personality reflects this position between different eras and conceptions of art.’
The exhibition at the National Library of Latvia will be open from 13 November until 30 December. Several performances, actions, discussions and meetings with the artists will also take place during this time, including an open lecture by the curator Barbara Štrāka. In 1988-1989 she curated the legendary exhibition ‘Riga – The Latvian Avant-garde’ in West Berlin, which saw the works of Hardijs Lediņš and his confederates exhibited outside of Latvia for the first time.
The exhibition has been organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and curated by Līga Lindenbauma. The exhibition and its parallel program is a part of a collaborative project "This is Tomorrow. Back to Basics: Forms and Actions in the Future" that is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, the State Culture Capital Foundation, ABLV Charitable Foundation, and The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia.