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 through acts of construction, maintenance, repetition, and transmission. Their point of departure is 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Historical references, ranging from prehistoric figurines and medieval church interiors to contemporary households, are approached as fragments rather than evidence.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 approaches history as something continually assembled through acts of remembering, borrowing, and reinterpretation.
At the centre of the exhibition, two large frescoes rest upon plastic drainage wells, supporting an altar-like structure constructed from sheets of baked biscuits. This central work proposes an alternative monument, one that acknowledges the everyday, often invisible, practices through which communities are built and sustained. Traditionally painted directly onto wet lime plaster, frescoes are among the longest surviving forms of painting. Their durability connects contemporary making with some of the earliest surviving works of human culture. Elsewhere in the exhibition, frescoes appear partially unearthed amongst the existing rubble of TUR, suggesting archaeological discoveries whose meanings remain open. Together with layered paper collages, archaeological illustrations, and readymade elements, they invite visitors to consider history as something assembled through fragments, interpretation, and speculation.
The exhibition itself is shaped through the relationships it reflects upon. Alongside the practices of Inga Meldere and Elīna Vītola, contributions from mothers, daughters, sisters, and invited participants become part of the installation, extending the exhibition beyond the boundaries of individual authorship. While some elements, such as the frescoes, carry the promise of endurance, others, including children’s chalk drawings, exist only temporarily. Together they suggest that knowledge survives in different ways: through materials that withstand centuries, and through gestures, habits, and practices that remain alive because they continue to be shared.
Women’s Structures is concerned with the present and with the ways knowledge continues to move through contemporary life. Some forms endure through materials that outlast generations; others remain alive because they continue to be practised, shared, and passed from one generation to the next. In bringing these different forms together, the exhibition expands our understanding of what it means to build culture, recognising that communities are shaped as much through everyday practices as through the structures they leave behind.
