"Memory of Light” is a visual essay about the longing for freedom and moments of presence at the centre of a woman's experience. In their work, the artists strive to convey what cannot be expressed aloud. The exhibition invites the viewer to be open and honest - to listen, to feel and to remember. "Memory of Light” is created by two artists - Līva Graudiņa and Katrīna Marta Riņķe. For both, this exhibition is a kind of reunion in which time is not linear, but cyclical. The viewer is also invited to reconnect, to relive and to co-remember.

Līva Graudiņa is a singular talent in the world of Latvian painting. With a series of new works— created in the last two years—she breaks through the shadow. Her clear and unwavering signature brings fresh new winds to the Latvian contemporary cultural and artistic canon - the genre of abstract landscape painting. Her creative practice is rooted in oil painting, exploring the presence of light and the representation of spatial structures.

Katrīna Marta Riņķe also focuses on light, which occupies a central place in her works; she consciously allows herself to chance and light wave exploration. Riņķe works with analogue photography and experimental cinema, is active in contemporary art and photography, creates spatial works and is also an author of artist texts. Both artists share an interest and desire to explore the nature of light - its mutability, its ability to illuminate and simultaneously conceal. While Graudiņa observes and paints light, Riņķe flashes it - even literally - allowing it to live independently. The artists' works in the exhibition intertwine - the moving with the static, colour with space, and materiality breaks out of the frame, creating a unified world. The artists' work embraces their personal experiences, highlighting their significance and their different approaches to creation.

This exhibition is not about femininity per se – it resonates through the female body, where the body is an autonomous space – a changing, rhythmic and cyclical landscape. Years pass in the body, belonging to no calendar, in which the invisible happens: movement, metabolism, tension, devotion, the power of creation and silence. It coexists - the desire for freedom with deep love, and the desire to be oneself does not exclude the desire to be a mother. Light is not just a symbol - it is a perception. It flows from within, transforms the environment and reveals that every body has a memory, be it human or plant. Light flows through this space, it illuminates, absorbs and refracts the environment. The memory of light marks an intimate, complex honour of being oneself, and the paintings become a place where identities - mother, creator, dreamer - can coexist. We are visible to each other, but often do not feel seen. The outer presence and the inner void create a gap, and light becomes a bridge - an opportunity to return to oneself. The artists emphasize the inner contradictions that everyone experiences, while also addressing a universal human experience - the conflict between duty and freedom. Writers note - a few years ago I wrote about belonging - about the fact that the only thing we really own is our bodies. Now I realise that this connection is not a given either. Setting boundaries is often perceived as selfish, the search goes on and the loneliness never leaves. But then the question arises: how to be without being too much or too little for anyone?

Collect moments of light. As memories. Light is not just an optical phenomenon - it is also an inner state that simultaneously heals and illuminates, exposes and shades. It can point out what we sometimes want to hide and make us see the familiar with different eyes. It is ambivalent - at once exposing and concealing. Light is like a frame marking the corner of my room, or a pointing finger pointing to it.

The making of a work is like giving birth. The fine textile is like a fragile, transparent skin, on which the brushstroke creates its own story and message. This emphasises the importance of light in the perception of the image and highlights the nuances of the working process - specific priming and paint application techniques, which result in the warm white - chalk ground tone of the canvas becoming a reflector of light. The surface of the canvas resembles the wall of a room, and all we can do is observe how the light - without sound - travels through time, imperceptibly changing and morphing, so that, in this moment of stopping, there is clarity and an unambiguous sense of here, I am. The perceptual space is also complemented by Katrīna Marta Riņķe's experimental films, material created by guiding light rays through coffee grounds, resulting in coloured fields on photographic film that morph like organic bodies. The moving image is not documentary or fictional, it is an audiovisual expression, an independent landscape that reveals itself by submerging. It is an emotional projection - a hunch that awakens a feeling.

Light is not merely a symbol or a visual phenomenon, but a living substance - a fluid event, like painting with light on photo emulsion - an interaction of material and light, where movement and chance become a performative act that records the presence of light in space and time. In the works, light, water and mortals become equal in the creation of meaning, as the bench in the shape of a cloud is not just a design object - it becomes a conceptual stop for silence, a place for contemplation or something else. The overall image of the exhibition is an intertwining of languages, with a common impulse to reflect on perception, movement, light and one's inner, outer landscape. The works of Riņķe and Graudiņa are not simply juxtaposed - but rather integrated - forming in a new landscape and meaning.

Reaching for light is not just a feeling we inherit, it is a biological and instinctive urge that connects us to all life. Like plants, which even in winter retain the potential to photosynthesize and reach out towards the light, humans have this phototropic impulse - the memory of light. It is an adaptation to light, temperature and the rhythm of the seasons, a feeling that is inexplicable, a drive to grow, to hibernate, to feel the returning of the Sun and, like a plant, to "photosynthesise" - to transform light into internal energy. In northern Europe, light is not a constant phenomenon, so you have to feel it. Light is not just a physical element in the paintings, it becomes a metaphor, symbolising the intensity of a memory moment, encapsulating a moment that cannot be repeated. I was sitting in the shower and I thought: what is it like to be light? It’s perhaps akin to imagining what it is like to be a plant or a rock - just being, without thinking. Light becomes a state that allows you to experience immediacy - a stillness, a blurring of the landscape, and in that moment it doesn't matter how long I'm going to be, or if I'm going to be at all - all that matters is that I am now.

The landscape is a sensory space. The surroundings become an emotional environment - a moment to be in. It depicts a state of emotion that is personal, different for everyone. One has the feeling that one has been there before, experienced the exact same light, seen that river or dreamt about it. Perhaps it is a forgotten or imaginary childhood memory, or maybe you have simply felt the same thing as the changing images on the screen. This emotional atmosphere asks whether I am a place where longing and yearning accumulate, or a space to breathe and return to myself. The landscape is a visual frame, a field to look into - not as a fixed space of refuge, but a shifting surface that irradiates our presence and memory. The function of nature in the work is not a traditional place of solace - it is a construction through which to experience. The works are about a way of looking, about the feeling that an image can conjure. A fleeting moment is revealed - frozen, but full of movement and power, like a mirror for the viewer. Nature is not a constant backdrop - it is changeable... but I grasp at every sense of security and realise again that it is not mine. I have no roots, no foundation, I am not a tree. Perhaps that's what unites us - we are not trees rooted in place, but rather waves longing for a shore. A collectively personal experience, at once impulse and recognition. The environment is not static - it changes and breathes, creating time in flux. Perhaps an exhibition is a place to see your own light or shadow?
The scenography synchronises with the breathing of the works, creates a visual symphony, communicates with the paintings, highlights nuances - the chalk ground, the walls of the room. This creates a collective language - personal but shared. Graudina's paintings create the feeling that you have already been there. This is not an exhibition to understand, but a place to let yourself feel. One is not just a passive observer in the space, but a co-creator, because every point of view shapes the overall landscape. Perhaps the feeling of belonging comes quietly. Also, bewilderment can be an in-between state of seeing. Where the canvas ends, the light continues. Light becomes not only the subject, but the material and the protagonist - a sentient flesh that changes in the presence of the viewer.

Fragility, balance, chance - this is the language of painting and being, where impulse meets consciousness. Painting, like life, is based on controlled chance - on relying on impulse and the ability to stop. A stroke is not a mistake, it is an event. It is groping and relies on chance. The ability to flow and at the same time to point in a direction reveals both instinctive reliance and conscious structure and decision. In his 1965 short story “The Spiral”, the Italian fabulist Italo Calvino describes in whimsical first-person the process by which a mollusk creates a beautiful patterned shell: "Of course, I couldn't control the form I was making - I just stayed there, rooted, silent and sluggish/inerrant, and it flowed out of me." (Calvino, 1965)

There is room for emotion, spontaneity and a moment to move on. Creating can be compared to swimming - a movement that requires both effort and abandon. The body becomes the experiencer, carrying and being carried. Like the surface of water, one reflects and absorbs light, each reflection a new opportunity to look at oneself differently. So we grope through life, forever searching for a foundation, but what if there is none? Strength and fragility at the same time, always feeling like you have no foundation and trying to cling to something. Painting itself becomes a moment where the whole world flows through the body, this raw feeling is a real state of being perceptive, having clarity and being here. "I continued even when the shell had already covered my whole body - I started the next twist/cycle - in short, I was making one of those shells that spiral - the ones that seem so complex and difficult to make when you see them. But all you have to do is keep working and keep creating the same stuff and they grow - twist after twist." (Calvino, 1965)

There are two ways of looking at the world - understanding and not understanding. Both are valid. One watches the sun shine without knowing its structure, but experiences its warmth just the same. In contrast, another knows about spectra, the ozone layer and weightless photons - transparent, tiny particles that fundamentally affect our vision and perception - and experiences the same sun differently. As with an image, it can be perceived in different layers - as a purely visual response or as an independent sign system that is formed in each individual's perception. Both light and signs do not belong to one meaning or time, they change with the viewer. What we see is not simply an image, but a space in which what is represented resonates with who we are or want to be. This understanding creates the possibility to simultaneously see what is represented, but also how and why it is perceived in this way. I find that understanding gives comfort. The willingness to accept contingency, to understand oneself, one's confusion - that gives meaning. That is how we got here by chance.

Ever since I was a child, I have pondered about the stars and the universe, which is probably why I am puzzled by people who are inappropriately angry, people who, for some unknown reason, think they know exactly how others should live - what to do with their bodies, who to love. Sometimes you want to shake some sense inside that bag and say: “hey, maybe you didn't know, or have you forgotten, that you are going to die, that we are circling on a rock in the universe? Maybe you're worried about it? At least it makes some sense.” The works are dominated by chance - direct and indirect, it forms the language and rhythm of the exhibition. Sometimes life collapses just when we are trying hardest to hold on - to people and thoughts. There is something very beautiful about being a small part of everything, it reminds us that there is no reason to worry. Light pours into the cracks, where true peace arises.
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"...and this shell was as if it were alien from me, but at the same time the truest part of me - an explanation of what I was." (Calvino, 1965)

- Estere Artmane, June, 2025. Estere Artmane is a Latvian art critic and artist based in Rīga

The creative team of the exhibition "Memory of Light": 

Installer: Kārlis Kanderovskis, scenography by Anna
Meldera, Paula Graudaka, graphic design by Anna Priede, exhibition texts Estere Artmane.