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Accompanying Programme to the Exhibition

22.11.2024. - 16.04.2025.

As part of the accompanying program for the exhibition "Gleizds, Scissors, Little Paper", several events intended for a broad audience will take place—exhibition tours with its creative team, discussions and tours with specialists from related fields, as well as a film lecture and a performance.

APRIL

Exhibition Tour
Researcher Anna Žabicka
April 16 at 5:30 PM

Museum researcher and social anthropologist Anna Žabicka will discuss the exhibition, focusing on the male gaze and the medical gaze on women—both in the art of Gleizde and in documentary photography, which were inseparably linked to his life and professional work at the Scientific Research Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics.

FEBRUARY

Exhibition Tour
Exhibition Architect Līva Kreislere
February 15 at 3:00 PM

Architect Līva Kreislere’s talk will focus on the process of creating the exhibition—explorations of the materiality and aesthetics of the era, curatorial-spatial decisions in storytelling, as well as the search for design solutions and compromises within the team’s work.

Tickets: €2.70–7.50, available via the Mobilly app. Limited seating.

Exhibition Tour
Museum Director Kaspars Vanags
February 22 at 3:00 PM

A Saturday walk through the museum with Kaspars Vanags will offer insights into the museum’s transformation process and provide an opportunity to view the exhibition dedicated to Jānis Gleizds as an example of the museum’s efforts to approach health topics in an interdisciplinary manner.

Tickets: €2.70–7.50, available via the Mobilly app. Limited seating.

 

JANUARY

Curator-led Exhibition Tour
January 11 at 3:00 PM

The exhibition’s curatorial duo consists of photo editor and book compiler Anna Volkova alongside photographer and poet Vladimirs Svetlovs. During the tour, the curators will share their discoveries about photographer Jānis Gleizds’ professional and creative work, as well as his long-term collaboration with medical professionals at the Scientific Research Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics.

Tickets: €2.70–7.50, available via the Mobilly app. Limited seating.

Museum Talk
“Gleizds’ Photographic Art Through a 21st-Century Lens”
Visual Culture Researcher Liāna Ivete Žilde
January 18 at 3:00 PM

The discussion will focus on the intersections between Gleizds’ daily work as a photo lab technician and his creative life as an award-winning master in the flourishing Riga Photoclub. Both environments were united by complex technical experiments and a certain fascination with artificial beauty.

Gleizds and his photoclub colleagues were pioneers whose artistic nudes secured Latvian photography’s recognition at the USSR level, at a time when depictions of sexuality, pleasure, and corporeality were excluded from the public sphere. However, today, these images have become a kind of “awkward heritage,” demonstrating outdated perceptions of gender roles, positioning the active “master” against the passive “muse.”

What do these images tell us about the time they were created, and how should we interpret them today?

Tickets: €2.70–7.50, available via the Mobilly app. Limited seating.

Performance
“Let’s Focus on Love!”
A Reconstruction of Sexologist Jānis Zālītis’ Lecture with a Slide Projection by Jānis Gleizds
January 25 at 3:00 PM

In 1981, 99,000 copies of sexologist Jānis Zālītis’ treatise "In the Name of Love"—illustrated by Jānis Gleizds—were sold out in a short time. However, the second edition of the book was destroyed by order of Communist Party leaders, who deemed its content pornographic.

Despite the book’s scientific discussion of sexuality and sexual health, Zālītis and the photographer created an infinitely poetic image of love. At the time, Zālītis was blacklisted from publication, yet he continued giving lectures, and his popularity only grew.

This performance, together with artist Toms Auniņš, will attempt to understand Zālītis’ ideas about the connection between creative and sexual energy in humans. It will feature a reenactment of the lecture "On the Erotization of Family Life" and a projection of Gleizds’ color slides. The performance will explore how Zālītis’ methods work and how contemporary audiences perceive them.

Dramaturgy: Nellija Visocka
Curator: Vladimirs Svetlovs
Producer: Jevgeņija Šermeņeva

Note: The performance will be recorded. By participating, attendees agree to being filmed and to the publication of the recording.

Tickets available via bezrindas.lv: €16–18. Limited seating.

Film Lecture
“The Image of the Doctor in Latvian Cinema”
Film Historian Kristīne Matīsa, Director Alise Zariņa, Film Critic Dace Čaure
January 30 at 5:30 PM

In collaboration with the online magazine Kino Raksti, the museum will host a film lecture and discussion about the portrayal of medical professionals in Soviet and contemporary Latvian feature films.

The Soviet promotion of scientific achievements widely employed the image of the genius—doctors were depicted as noble, invulnerable, and standing above ordinary mortals. This is also evident in Jānis Gleizds’ photographs, which show medical professionals (typically men in white coats) gazing over anonymous patients.

The film lecture will examine whether these same characteristics apply to modern Latvian cinema’s portrayals of doctors and explore the differences between the depictions of doctors and nurses. The discussion will be supplemented by excerpts from films.

Films to be discussed:
"A Day Without an Evening" (1961), "Lake Sonata" (1976), "Carmen Horrendum" (1989), "Nocturne" (1966), "Limousine in the Color of Midsummer’s Night" (1981), "These Dangerous Balcony Doors" (1976), "Mother’s Milk"(2023), among others.

The event will also offer an exclusive preview of Alise Zariņa’s upcoming film "Fingerprints" (2025), set to premiere at the end of this year.

Admission is free.

Museum Accessibility

When planning attendance for the curator-led tour or museum discussion, please note that the exhibition spaces are located on the 3rd floor of the building, where, unfortunately, elevator access for visitors with mobility impairments is not available at this time. However, the performance and film lecture will take place in the Conference Hall on the 1st floor, which is accessible to individuals with mobility impairments.

Additional information on museum accessibility.

Please be advised that the exhibition materials include depictions of nudity and surgical procedures.

Exhibition “Gleizds, Scissors, Little Paper”

The exhibition is dedicated to the connection between photographer Jānis Gleizds’ (1924–2010) creative experiments and the scientific research of surgery at the time, intertwining themes such as disability and Soviet-era erotica, the aesthetics of the medically altered body, and society’s first steps toward accepting “the other.”

The exhibition highlights Jānis Gleizds’ work from the 1970s and 80s, with a special focus on his long-term collaboration with medical professionals at the Scientific Research Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics.

At a time when official art had to conform to the dictates of the Soviet state, the “self-taught” photo lab technician Gleizds and the highly creative medical professionals developed aesthetic principles that, through innovative technological solutions, allowed erotic fantasy to imbue the Soviet citizen’s ideologized body with gendered features enveloped in an aura of light.

More information about the exhibition.