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COUPLING
Inga Meldere & Hanele Zane Putniņa
20 Mar – 23 Apr 2025
This spring, we welcome two artists from Latvia – Helsinki-based Inga Meldere and Riga-based Zane Hanele Putniņa – whose works engage in a dialogue of shared themes and artistic exploration. Initiated in 2021, COUPLING is an expanding series of curatorial projects, collaborations, or pairings, where two artists / practitioners are introduced to one another for the first time and exhibit together based on shared concerns within their work.
The arch of the space at PUBLICS becomes a site for layered storytelling. Inspired by the historic technique of sgraffito – a decorative technique of scratching through a surface to reveal underlying colours – Inga Meldere’s in-situ intervention Analogue Mark Making unfolds as both a material and conceptual work of revealing. The work references the micro-histories embedded within the building, from its construction in 1922 alongside traces of the present.
Through these overlapping presences – historical, digital, and material – the work explores the impermanence of surfaces: uncovered layers of paint, period-specific color variations, the composition structures of Finnish Ryijy rugs, smileys, and visualizations of emoji text art from 1990s video game aesthetics and early Nokia phones. The painted poodle playfully nods to the legacy of General Idea, bridging this Coupling exhibition with the previous show, while some characters reappear from the painted game Avium Aquae (Aquatic Bird), nesting on the other side of the exhibition space.