The exhibition Women's Structures by Inga Meldere and Elīna Vītola reflects on forms of knowledge that have historically been cultivated through shared practices of making, labour, and intergenerational exchange. Drawing inspiration from archaeological research, vernacular traditions, family histories, and everyday domestic practices, the artists consider how communities are sustained not only through visible acts of construction, but through the quieter processes of maintenance, repetition, and intergenerational transmission. Their point of departure is a reflection on a model of culture in which knowledge accumulates through shared experience, observation, and community.
Historical references, ranging from prehistoric figurines and medieval church interiors to contemporary households, are approached as fragments rather than evidence. Inspired by the speculative methods of Marija Gimbutas, Meldere and Vītola assemble images, materials, and stories from different moments in time, allowing associations to emerge across centuries and opening new relationships beyond a linear chronology. The exhibition proposes history as something continually formed and reformed through acts of remembering, borrowing, and reinterpretation.
In Women’s Structures, domestic objects, frescoes, layered paper collages, archaeological illustrations, children's drawings, and readymade elements become carriers of accumulated knowledge. Together they point towards the often invisible infrastructures that enable communities to endure. Like a drainage well that quietly supports the systems around it without demanding attention, the exhibition considers the forms of maintenance, continuity and shared labour that rarely become monuments yet remain fundamental to collective life.
The exhibition is itself shaped through the kinds of relationships it reflects upon. Alongside the practices of Inga Meldere and Elīna Vītola, contributions from mothers, daughters and sisters become part of the installation, extending the exhibition beyond the boundaries of individual authorship. In doing so, Women's Structures proposes artistic practice as a process of building through exchange, inheritance, and collaboration, where knowledge is continually formed and sustained through the relationships that connect one generation to the next.
About the Artists
Inga Meldere is a Latvian artist based in Finland whose practice spans painting, installation, and site-responsive environments. Through personal histories, vernacular traditions, and material culture, her work explores the ways memory, everyday life, and inherited knowledge shape contemporary experience. She has presented solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including KIM? Contemporary Art Centre (Riga), Temnikova & Kasela (Tallinn), Helsinki Contemporary, and Pech (Vienna), and has participated in major international exhibitions including the Helsinki Biennial, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, KUMU Art Museum, and the Latvian National Museum of Art. Meldere's work is held in the collections of KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, the Finnish State Art Collection, the Latvian National Museum of Art, Zuzeum Art Centre, and other public and private collections.
Elīna Vītola is a Riga-based artist whose practice encompasses painting, installation, and collaborative projects. Working at the intersection of contemporary painting and everyday life, her work explores the material, social, and psychological structures that shape lived experience, often combining humour, observation, and speculative narratives. She has presented solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including Kogo Gallery (Tartu), ARSENĀLS (Riga), Galerie Emila Filly (Ústí nad Labem), and Liste Art Basel. A finalist for the Purvītis Prize in 2021 and recipient of the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award in 2018, Vītola's work is held in the collections of the Latvian National Museum of Art and the European Patent Office, among others.
About TUR
TUR is a contemporary art space shaped by an exchange between artists, curators, and the space itself. Located in a large, cube-shaped area within a post-industrial building, TUR’s exhibitions are not imposed upon the space but emerge from a dialogue with its raw materiality, its scale, light, textures, and evolving conditions. Rather than treating the space as a neutral container, TUR invites artists to engage with it as a collaborator, highlighting a practice of attentiveness and reciprocity.
This approach reflects a broader ethical stance: a rejection of the impulse to dominate or neutralize one’s surroundings which is an impulse long embedded in human attitudes toward land, architecture, and ecology. In contrast, TUR’s curatorial model cultivates sensitivity to context, memory, and form. It proposes that to work with a space is also to listen to it, to acknowledge its histories and its material voice. In this way, TUR’s practice aligns with anti-colonial thinking, a practice of care, refusal, and reorientation.
TUR’s annual program follows a seasonal rhythm: three solo exhibitions in winter, three in summer, and a collaborative group exhibition with a partner European art space from outside of Latvia each autumn. This cycle mirrors the changing atmosphere of the space: introspective and stark in winter; open and expansive in summer; and a Fall exhibition that offers a moment for reflection and international exchange. TUR emphasizes long-term collaboration with artists, from early conceptual stages to final presentation and public engagement. The program incorporates interdisciplinary formats such as artist talk-concerts and other events that open new modes of encounter and understanding.
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