Ivars Drulle “To My Homeland” (until 22.06.19.)

The exhibition “To My Homeland”, which was nominated for the Purvītis Prize in 2017, captured the portrait of the Latvian countryside landscape and a kind of visual code of this time – the parallel existence of rural abandonment with people of the future, living in rural areas. The artist collected the materials for the exhibition in the countryside of Latvia and created a map with abandoned rural buildings and a kinetic object “Latvia”, in which depicted cyclist who travels without stop on a sliding landscape as in an infinite film. Creating exhibition, the artist has photographed and mapped out the abandoned houses within a radius of 15 kilometres around his house in Druviena (Latvia). There are 350 in total, and currently a little more than a half has been captured in photos. About this exhibition Ivars Drulle says: “This exhibition is about the visual stop points in the landscape. I am an obsessed cyclist and all this story started several years ago when I rode my bicycle around my district. The main companions are houses, different houses, lot of abandoned houses. Then I found out that one house that was in the previous year is no longer, it has broken down or demolished and the logs are taken. It seemed that these houses should be captured, to create such as a diary. As my companions. They were my companions. So it all started, I started taking pictures of houses that were not around. The technique is specific. I think I have discovered it by myself. When I created this exhibition, I wanted to follow the right, real values – that’s why there is analogue photography, slides, huge iron frames and rusty iron ground fragments. It was important to show that time passes and these rust works also change as they are exposed to the influence of atmosphere. This kind of works are in some way my diary. If, after a hundred years, someone looks at it, he sees that one hundred years ago, when Ivars Drulle lived, it looked like that. He was surrounded by hundreds of houses that meadows and forests take over.”