The Room of Silence
Installation. 2016
Having returned from a journey to the East, where different ways of self-realisation, self-reflection, meditation and spirituality were sought, I had a vision about a room in which the visitors can experience silence. Where is such a room in Western society? Where does immersion take place, and how does one experience inner silence and personal growth? How does one enter an endless void? My aim is to create a space in which it is possible to ask these questions and to reflect on them.
There is such a place, such a room, in which everything stops upon entering it. You stop thinking, stop comparing, analysing, judging and desiring. You stop being you, you stop existing. Time stops, and both the past and the future disappear. There is such a place, where you are complete, untouched, clean. This place is made of much subtler substance. Our physical world ceases to exist.
To get to it, we must turn towards ourselves – not away from ourselves, as we always happen to do, but into ourselves. Stop looking for it, and you will remember everything. You are everything. And everything is in you.
Artist's Bio:
Atis Jākobsons (1985) lives and works in Berlin. He is looking for ways to reach the primal nothingness by blurring the boundaries between the subject and the object, the impossible and the mundane, the human and the divine, reality and idea. Using painting, charcoal drawing, video and installation, Jākobsons creates sensitive surfaces to perceive the space that lies behind. In 2010 Jākobsons graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia with a master’s degree in painting. He has had several solo shows in Latvia, the most recent of which are Frequencies (Euphoria) at the Māksla XO gallery in 2016 and Dark Matter at the Mūkusala Art Salon in 2015. For Dark Matter Jākobsons received the Diena Annual Award in culture as well as nomination for the Purvītis Prize 2017.