Frančeska Kirke. trauslums / fragile

From 14 December 2019 to 16 February 2020, the permanent display of the Art Museum RIGA BOURSE (Riga, Doma laukums 6) will be supplemented by Frančeska Kirke’s exhibition trauslums / fragile.

The trauslums / fragile project is a dialogue between the artefacts in the exposition of Art Museum RIGA BOURSE and artist Frančeska Kirke’s creations. The exhibition is about reverence in relation to the spirit of a museum as an unchanging, constant and eternal unit.

Frančeska Kirke describes it as follows: “I have always been interested in works of art before restoration, with their damaged surfaces and layers, everything that can be linked to the concept of TIME. Recent events only confirm how I feel, the lost Palmyra temples and the burning of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral – nothing is eternal. This feeling of LOSS is a keyword for the entire exposition, where we walk through the floors of the museum with an exhibition ‘map’: to the Dutch, the Chinese porcelain, the Japanese and Indonesian collections, and also to the forever young nymphs. The whole museum becomes a place for creating an inconspicuous production.

I look at museum works with the eyes of a person living in the 20th–21st century, with the memory, experience and traumas of my generation. The story is about the extent to which intervention is possible, supplementing or replacing individual works of art. The solemn order of things at the museum is disturbed for a moment. The exhibition works in each permanent display hall could be in a different technique: painting, ceramics, graphics, a spatial object or audio installation. They are encoded, and mapping takes place with a guidebook specially prepared for the exhibition while walking through the museum. ‘Stopping-off points’ are indicated in it: articles that I have created are placed in the display cases with Chinese porcelain where the vase paintings are signs from the Mao era, the sound installation in the Meissen Hall reflects on Kristallnacht prior to World War II in Germany, Dutch painter Albert Jansz Klomp’s Landscape with Cattle has been replaced by an identical work of similar size, but with an explosion in the background of the scene, deliberately mixing up two historical genres in one painting...

Visually, and in terms of their content, I would like to compare the creative principles of my exhibition works with the concept of ‘palimpsest’. I want to place certain facts from recent world history to contrast with the hermeticism of the museum using he most suitable form of visual expression.”