This solo exhibition uses digital imagery, video and personal artefacts to explore ideas about cultural displacement and loss. It is based on the experience of attempting to follow my mother’s journey from Latvia to Australia at the end of WWII through a series of displaced persons’ camps in Poland, Germany and Italy. The digital prints in the show were developed from images and video I took during my 3 month journey and one of my mother’s old school photographs, taken in 1936. I was particularly drawn to the school photo because it both captures the sense of innocence and uncertainty that accompanies childhood and provides a strange premonition of the war that was soon to affect everyone in the photograph. 

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One week after the opening of the exhibition, the floors in the stacks of the National Library of Latvia collapsed and 80,000 books had to be rescued. Many books were stored in the exhibition rooms and the result looked curiously like one of my book installations. One of the images shows the then President of Latvia, Valdis Zatlers, inspecting the storage of books in my exhibition. (source: diena.lv, 2010)

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The National Library of Latvia is now housed in a brand new building.

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