Exhibition “Averting the Gaze. Women Artists in the Zuzāns Collection: 2000-2026”

The exhibition focuses on contemporary women artists and their works created in the first two decades of the 21st century, forming a distinctive collective biography of this period. It brings together more than 40 works by women artists living in Latvia, the Baltics, and elsewhere in the world, whose authors are represented in the Zuzāns Collection. The idea for the exhibition was inspired by the large number of women artists represented in the collection: it includes more than 500 names of authors and works from the early 20th century to the present.

The conceptual basis of the exhibition can be found in British visual culture theorist Irit Rogoff's 2005 essay “Averting the Gaze - Modes of Participation in Visual Culture,” in which she examines turning the gaze away from the object of study as another way of engaging with culture. Twenty years later, the exhibition develops this idea further, inviting the artists themselves to focus not on the finished work, but on the circumstances of its making.

The exhibition curator, Snježana Krsteva (Bulgaria), together with co-curator Jevgēnija Hamudajeva, carried out this idea through individual conversations with all the participating artists, providing the context for the artworks that has been lacking until now and at the same time laying the groundwork for further research into the financial, personal, and creative environment in which each work was created. The open format of conversation allowed diverse, often unexpected, and at times deeply emotional responses to emerge, without subjecting them to a predetermined narrative framework.

The content of the conversations continues in the exhibition: each selected artwork is accompanied by context layers chosen by the artists, allowing visitors to gain a closer understanding of the work’s creation process. These include handwritten notes, a smell, a fragment of a studio wall, or an artwork made by a friend - evidence that becomes meaningful only when we are ready to look beyond the artwork itself. The exhibition “Averting the Gaze” does not put forward a generalizing thesis about women artists in 21st-century Latvia, but documents what is revealed when artists are invited to present not only their works, but also part of the world in which they were created.

As part of the exhibition, the Zuzeum Art Museum is carrying out an accessibility project aimed at creating an opportunity for people with visual impairments to experience the artworks through touch and other solutions.