Annas Malicka solo show “Dowry Chest (((pure lady)))”

Curator: Anna Laganovska

Opening: February 7,  18:00

In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” writer Ursula Le Guin speculatively describes the beginnings of material culture. Prehistoric societies, which survived predominantly on plant products, could achieve subsistence by working around fifteen hours a week. This allowed them to devote plenty of time to other activities and practical concerns. Meanwhile those who had fewer practical concerns had the time to go hunting, bringing home, along with the game, various stories – stories that centred on the adventure of the brave hero. In contrast to the story of the masculine hero, Le Guin describes the feminine narrative model, which results not from action but from everyday activities and caring for the community.

Taking inspiration from Virginia Woolf, Ursula Le Guin suggests symbolically replacing the hero with a container – an object that holds something else. She stresses that the container should logically be considered the very first cultural device – a container for storing food, a bag for gathering food or for holding a child. Long before the weapon – a tool that directs energy outwards – there was a tool that brings energy home. Le Guin characterises gathering as the most human of activities: putting something into a bag or basket because you like it – or because it is useful, edible or beautiful – or wrapping it in tree bark, a leaf or hair and bringing it home for later use or for sharing with others. Unlike the story of the hero, which centres on weapons, attacks and murder, the story of the container centres on care and life. In contrast to stories which centre on conflict, Le Guin proposes a story that is like a bag which can carry different things.

This container, this woman’s purse or dowry chest – the container we drag along, and which contains all our stories and our important things, as well as our trinkets and knick-knacks – is the central element in Anna Malicka’s exhibition Dowry Chest (((pure lady))). Expanding on the idea of the dowry chest as a symbolic container, Malicka’s exhibition is conceived as a materialisation of memory space, where subjective experience merges with material heritage, and characteristics of a vernacular interior merge with the human search for shelter.

As an object, the dowry chest is most directly connected to a woman’s life, figuring in the transition from the status of maiden to the status of wife. In this sense, the dowry chest is a space between the past and the future. It is characterised by liminality – a property which is derived from the Latin word limen (“threshold” in English), indicating a state of transition. In the works of Anna Malicka, this liminality is treated as the totality of personal experiences, on the one hand, and an observation of changes in general societal norms and customs, on the other. In the context of Malicka’s work, the image of woman aims to combine traditional forms of subjectivity with the urges, desires and possibilities of the contemporary world. The artist is interested in the investigation of stereotypical images of women – dainty ladies, scatterbrains, damsels, lasses, mademoiselles, chicks, babes, household managers, and e-girls.

Her alter ego, Otra Pussyte, wants to be a good hostess and handicraftswoman but also an artist. She is looking for a dream castle, but along the way is haunted by the spirit of fibre. In Malicka’s videos, executed with the aesthetics of a video blog, Otra Pussyte embodies a playful and somewhat infantilised image of a woman, reminiscent of Věra Chytilová’s protagonists in the film Daisies. By embodying the stereotypes to an absurd degree and following the rules of their fantasy world, the film’s main protagonists subversively acquire agency in a male-dominated world. In a similar manner, Anna Malicka’s work weaves in references to forms of subjectivity which are characteristic of the depiction of young women’s worlds in a post-internet context, where girlishness is used both as an affirming as well as a subversive means of expression. These are also characterised by liminality, as in the lyrics of Britney Spears’ “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” –girlishness as a refuge from the tension caused by the standards imposed by the society. Malicka’s work is a playful depiction of these problematics of women’s roles while in search of new forms of identity.

Anna Malicka’s visual language is reminiscent of the aesthetic categories Sianne Ngai describes in her book Our Aesthetic Categories. Zany, Cute, Interesting. These aesthetic categories can relate not only to subjective experience and sensations, but also to relationships and social structures. The category of cuteness, which is commonly associated with the feminine and the infantile, reveals the asymmetry of power. It always entails a position of power on the part of the subject over the cute object. Meanwhile zaniness as a category, which is mostly encountered through the usage of a comical persona in performative gestures, reflects intense, even chaotic effort, emphasising the affective labour necessary to navigate social structures under capitalism. It is an aesthetic of hyperactivity akin to camp, in which the boundary between work and play is purposefully blurred and where humour masks tiredness from demands for increased productivity.

Within contemporary culture, there is a widespread return to handicrafts as resistance to capitalist structures and norms. Craftsmanship, which is characterised by a prolonged work process and intimate connection with the material, is becoming an alternative to the trends of consumer culture. While handicraft traditions also contain traces of intercultural exchange, their adaptation to local materials and aesthetical sensibility, today’s internet culture requires a faster and broader circulation of knowledge and skills. Instead of being symbolically tied to local identity, as they have historically been seen as being, in contemporary culture handicraft products are associated with post-national, hybrid cultural trends.

Dowries, which, in the context of Latvian material culture, are linked predominantly to wooden chests or boxes and textile goods, in Anna Malicka’s interpretation are characterised by the non-traditional use of traditional techniques. The textile works found in the dowry chest embody memory and identity; they are related to home and homemaking. Textiles are materials that are generally closely linked to the body. It hides, underlines, covers, traps, adorns, protects, warms, dries and in many other ways acts in symbiosis with the body. Textile elements, which traditionally have been used in interior decoration, retain this functionality within the exhibition Dowry Chest (((pure lady))) by decorating a spatial installation which is conceived as a representation of imaginary spaces or memories.

With this exhibition, the artist continues in her practice with the themes of uNrEaL EsTaTe Agency, positioning the installation in space as infrastructure that fuses together the real and the unreal. In his book The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard looks at the home not only as a space in which we dwell ourselves but also as something that dwells in us – we shape it but it simultaneously shapes us. As poetic units, spaces contain sensations, memories, dreams and experiences; they are containers of imagination, storing that which, in its essence, is indescribable but also real and tangible. The notions of imaginary spaces and asemic writing that are characteristic of Malicka’s works both activate this poetic perception, inviting the viewer to read the room as one would read a text.

Anna Malicka (1995, Latvia) is a multimedia artist who creates works with the materialities of textile and drawing, as well as in audio-visual art and performance formats. In Malicka’s works, elements of craftsmanship, handicrafts and ornamental abstraction interweave with internet culture and aesthetics. Malicka currently lives and works in Riga. She graduated from the interdisciplinary department POST at the Art Academy of Latvia (2023) and in 2024, as part of the ACADEMIA prize, was resident in London as part of the ACME Studios Early Career programme. Her most recent exhibitions include: the solo shows lint weaver at the project space Middlesex Presents(London, 2024) and sTiTcHeS of iTcHeS atTUR telpa (Riga, 2023); the duo exhibitions Stardoll Heaven at the art space KOMPLOT (together with Julie De Kezel; Brussels, 2024) and Armours at Collega (together with Rikke Diemer; Copenhagen, 2024); and the group exhibitions Groundwork at Kupfer Project Space (London, 2024), In the Name of Desire atLNMA (Riga, 2024), and Sardines at Garage Gallery (Prague, 2023).