In a unique and free artspace, “Pragovka“, you can now visit a special exhibition from Latvian artist Laimdota Malle called “OOZE”, looking at the fragility of life we often prefer not to think of in most cases.
Pragovka offers a beautifully haunting space. It’s a recently renovated complex of old factories turned into art space, coffee, and office space, something we love to do here in the Czech Republic. This can give quite an ample space with high ceilings and an eerie atmosphere, which adds to the exhibition’s topic.
OOZE is a concise but intriguing exhibition where Malle works with memories and how they slowly but surely fall apart, whether we like it or not. The form of photographs, paintings and sculptures in their many stages of breakdown is accompanied by bright and cold light, making the space feel almost clinical, like an old mausoleum from the distant past. It has a slight dystopian feeling, though that falls on the area in which it was presented.
I kept waiting for the work to be accompanied by an element of different mediums – music, perhaps visualisation. Still, even without it, I felt what the artist wanted to say.
What it made me think of when leaving through the Pragovka areal, the legacy of the 20th-century industrial era long past its communist era prime, was the decay theory.
Decay theory was formed by an American psychologist Edward Thorndike, who first published it in 1914 in his book “The Psychology of Learning”. Thorndike talks about how memories fade with time and become increasingly more distant and unretrievable.
This theory has its critics, but the decay theory could not be any more accurate in terms of physical memories. Everything we leave behind will decay – some things in a short time, some in a long, but they will all fade.
This is the emotional state Malle works within, an intimate but also dream-like state. Exhibition is available until 30.03.2023 in Prague, Czech republic.
TWO CUPS OF ART 
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