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installation at the Eduards Smiļģis Theatre Museum

in collaboration with Elina Vitola

Flo Kasearu is an artist from Tallinn, who transformed her family house into a unique kind of contemporary house museum, where she lives and works. Elina Vitola is an artist from Riga, who lives around the corner from the Eduards Smiļģis Theatre Museum. Not only did she spend her teenage years playing hide and seek in its garden terrace, but she went to art school together with Smiļģis granddaughter, and also resided for a year in Flo Kasearu’s House museum.

Together they look at the question of the divisions embedded in the current legal status of the museum and in the larger mechanisms of partition in general.

The museum’s garden is divided between the city of Riga, the state, and the successors of Smiļģis, forming an unresolved bind. The plot gets more and more divided with each generation until it is perhaps dissolved. For the artists it becomes a theatre of cuts, partitions and lines. They use the theatre curtains, which they first wash in the garden’s pool and then hang as laundry. The curtain-laundry-sculpture called a Cut will divide the garden in a straight line, trespassing any obstacles in its way: be it a fountain, an existing sculpture or pathways. The curtains, a traditional theatre metaphor of a cut, but also of a desire or a beginning, are themselves both elements of division but also of a common line. Recently, they have actually disappeared more and more in the theatre context and re-appeared in visual arts, making any borders more porous and more dissolved.

Commissioned and produced by Survival Kit 21, curated by Joanna Warsza & Övül Ö. Durmușoğlu