(C) Margit LõhmusTHE ROOM OF LOVE Exhibition by Margit Lõhmus (Estonia) will be opened at 6.30 pm on Monday 28th April at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) Office Gallery. The exhibition is a part of Riga Photomonth 2014 and it will be on view until 30th May.
Trained as a painter, Margit Lõhmus (b. 1985) is first of all known for her in a way naive, but at the same time brutal photos and videos, mostly depicting the artist herself. The theme which binds together all her artistic endeavours (painting, video, photo, literature, installation) is an opposition within close relationships, ranging from family to home alone domestic naturalism and sexual intimacy which is opposed to exhibitionism and/ or voyeurism.
Margit Lõhmus’s project “The Room of Love” consists of several little videos, depicting the author in different socially uncanny situations. The core of the project however, is not the awkwardness of the situation, but the aesthetic and emotional brutality of it. At first glance the videos describe personal, tragic situations, on the other side the theatrical passivity of the author in what is happening, exposes the provocation that is directed towards the voyeuristic interest of the viewer, which is feed through the innocent aesthetics of home videos.
In the Office gallery the projects scenography is presented as a situation where all the people working in the office have left for a moment, and a random visitor steps in and encounters accidentally the personal data, forgotten on the computer screen. The trap has fallen! What begins is an orgy of voyeuristic desire.
Margit Lõhmus (Margita Lehmusa, b.1985) graduated The Painting Department of The University of Tartu in 2007 and continued master studies in the painting department of The Estonian Academy of Arts, which she graduated in 2011 with the video series “The Room of Love”. The topic of those videos and partly the videos themselves have been part of her personal shows in Tallinn, Tartu and Pärnu, where they have been adjust by paintings, photos and different installational elements - a black box room in Tartu, a transparent room in Pärnu. The exhibition in the Office gallery brings to the viewers the original series of five videos. The exhibition is curated by Indrek Grigor (Estonia).
The LCCA Office Gallery is open on working days from 12 midday till 6pm; entry to exhibitions is free. Address: Alberta Street 13 (7th floor), Rīga, LV-1010.