Pūra lāde
(((pure lady)))
The exhibition Dowry Chest, or Pūra lāde (((pure lady))) presents the works of Latvian artist Anna Malicka, encompassing a site-specific textile and wood installation, a mural series, and a newly commissioned video work. Exploring women’s roles through feminist cultural history and contemporary internet culture, Malicka weaves personal experience with material heritage, merging vernacular interiors with the human search for shelter.
The dowry chest is reimagined through Ursula K. Le Guin’s concept of narrative-building, where “containers”—from chests to handbags—symbolise women’s roles in preserving material culture. In Malicka’s work, the image of woman fuses tradition with the desires and contradictions of contemporary life. She examines stereotypical representations—dainty ladies, scatterbrains, damsels, lasses, mademoiselles, chicks, babes, household managers, and e-girls—through her alter ego, Otra Pussyte. This character, inhabits Malicka’s video works with the playful, self-aware aesthetic of a video blog, recalling Vera Chytilová’s Daisies while also referencing post-internet femininity, where girlishness becomes both affirmation and subversion.
In Latvian material culture, dowries are often tied to wooden chests and textiles, but Malicka subverts traditional techniques in unexpected ways. Her textile works, deeply connected to memory and identity, reference homemaking while remaining intimately linked to the body—hiding, revealing, adorning, and protecting. In Dowry Chest (((pure lady))), textile elements, traditionally used in interior decoration, shape an immersive spatial installation—an evocative representation of imagined spaces and memories. As poetic units, Malicka’s spaces contain sensations, memories, dreams and experiences; they are containers of imagination, storing that which, in its essence, is indescribable but also real and tangible. The notions of imaginary spaces and asemic writing that are characteristic of Malicka’s works both activate this poetic perception, inviting the viewer to read the room as one would read a text.
Full exhibition text in Latvian and English
Floorplan
Photos by Ansis Starks
Supported by the Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia