Review by Zane Onckule, Survival Kit 11, Artforum, December issue
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202009/riga
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Video documentation
https://youtu.be/eaNl9frKDd0
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Impulse (J or Imp), 2020;
Interactive site-specific installation: 12 channel sound, green lights, electricity 220 v, 12 movement sensors, electromagnetic microphones, contact microphones;
Photograph: Madara Gritāne © The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art;
Commissioned by Survival Kit 11;
The production of the work is supported by Mondriaan Fund, The Netherlands and State Capital Fund of Latvia;
Sound and light advisor: Agris Līdaks;
Special thanks to Jurģis Peters
Evita Vasilijeva’s site-specific walk-through piece Impulse (J or Imp), which the quarantining artist installed over the course of several nights during her forced solitude, seems to find a countervailing certainty. Rooted in Vasilijeva’s haunting childhood memories of multiple robberies of her family’s apartment, the work operates in complete darkness. Through a microphone system, the room gives out a humming noise resembling that of a computer-server room. A few steps into the space, sensors placed on a tight vertical-grid structure read visitors’ movements to gradually light up sections of the installation in bright green – similar to the signage marking an emergency exit and evoking the state of high alert.
Evita Vasiljeva ©