© 2008 Latvia Canada Business Council
Vid Ingelevics
Vid Ingelevics is a Toronto-based artist, writer and independent curator. Currently he is employed at Ryerson University, Toronto, as an Associate Professor in the Image Arts faculty. His artwork has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the US and Europe. These include: “The Metropolitan Museum of Edward Milla”, York University, Toronto (2007), "Inconvenience Store", Convenience Gallery, Toronto (2006-07); "Platforms" at Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto (2006); "Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination" at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2006); "The Space of Making", Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2005); "Die Kamera und das Museum", Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2004); and, the Fotobiennale Rotterdam (2000). A solo exhibition, “hunter/gatherer”, will cross Canada in 2008.
Extract from Archives of Ontario
See also Vid Ingelevics’ web-site
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Born to Latvian parents four years after their immigration to Canada in 1948, Vid Ingelevics reconnected with his Latvian heritage in the late 1980s. After having produced an exhibition about an amnesiac, titled museum of a man, that toured across Canada from 1987-1989, Ingelevics realized that his own unfamiliarity with his family's history made him similar to the amnesiac whose story he had explored. Sparked by this realization, Ingelevics visited Latvia in 1989, and later that year mounted his show, Places of Repose: Stories of Displacement. The installation, which combined photographs, video and thrift store furniture, reconstructs from memory the journey of Ingelevics' mother and her two sisters as they fled Latvia in 1944 just ahead of the Red Army. Eventually they found themselves in 1945 in Bavaria living in one of the many displaced persons camps that dotted Germany after the war. This work toured across Canada and throughout Europe from 1989 - 1994. While in Latvia in 1989, Ingelevics encountered the photography scene deeply influenced by Glasnost (Openness), which led to his curating the show, Latvian Photographers in the Age of Glasnost (1992) bringing Latvian images of daily life and upheaval to Canada. A second installation work, Alltagsgeschichten (some histories of everyday life), followed in 1994 in which Ingelevics revisited the present-day sites of these former displaced persons camps. This work was comprised of personal texts, large-format colour photographs of the former camp sites, historical images from various archives and a transparent, functional filing cabinet. Central to this work conceptually were the often conflicting roles of memory and history as the public archive as a site of both remembering and forgetting became increasingly important issues for Ingelevics. This work was featured at the Rotterdam Fotobienalle in 2000. This latter installation carried within it the seeds of the two directions in which Ingelevics' work has continued to simultaneously evolve - a strong interest in local urbanist issues in Toronto, where he lives, and in the contemplation of the complex role of the institutional photographic archive for our understanding of the past. Ingelevics teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.
