Daiga Grantiņa

Saules Suns is a multi-centred landscape that unfolds around several suns, several sources of light traversing manifold materials and shapes. As if the scene of some cosmological dawn, it opens itself up as a site and moment for the generation of possibilities. Our sense of these possibilities, which is mirrored in the diversity of the shapes that appear across the landscape, in the range of their spatial and physical attributes, is strengthened by the multitude of possible perspectives and paths through the installation.

The revelation of both the corporeal and immaterial qualities of substances is at the centre of the work. Daiga Grantina uses a wide range of everyday materials, from the synthetic to the organic, often inverting and trespassing beyond the limits of their traditional uses. She bends metal into spirals, casts light into shadow, fluffs cotton into fuchsia purple blossoms. Her soft and porous objects bear the fresh imprints of their moulds and are interwoven with white strings that stretch in every direction—ontological signposts extending upwards and outwards.

However, signs should not be read as fixed or finale but as temporal, morphing and generative. For instance, what may be read as the signifier may also function as the signified, the real may be registered as the imaginary, and the imaginary may extend into the symbolic. Through inviting an awareness of the multiplex ties between the work on display and our experiences of it, the installation suggests the possibility that each of the encounters it precipitates might extend towards an all-embracing openness.

- Valentinas Klimašauskas and Inga Lāce

Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Saldus, Latvia) lives and works in Paris, France. She has recently had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018), Kunstverein Hamburg (2017) and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2016). Grantina has also participated in the Baltic Triennial (2018), Vienna Biennale (2017) and Bergen Assembly (2016), as well as in group exhibitions at Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2018), Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2018), Latvian National Museum of Art (2018), La Panacée, Montpellier (2018), Platform-L, Seoul (2018), Kunsthalle Mainz (2017). She studied at HFBK in Hamburg and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Daiga Grantina is represented by Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris.