La Petite Mort

Works on view include Nights You Spent Without Me, Say Yes to the Dress: Hallucinations Ended, Ending Sentimental Feelings, Drizzling (im)perfection (2023) and Love, Mom.Marriage comes with ceremony, witnesses, symbols and a public declaration. Divorce is more often reduced to documents, negotiations and private grief. For Maria Gvardeitseva, this absence became personal after twenty years of marriage. She began speaking with other divorced women and transformed eleven women’s experiences into 5-Minute Bedtime Stories (Skira, 2025). The book turns to the fairy tale, one of the first cultural scripts through which we learn what love and marriage are supposed to look like. Gvardeitseva’s heroines begin where the fairy tale stops. They are not rescued: they leave, choose and redirect their own stories. “Rather than telling stories about divorce, the exhibition attempts to construct the ritual architecture that divorce itself lacks,” says Gvardeitseva. “Works originating from the research behind the book are brought together with new sculptures, moving image, installation and participatory gestures to imagine what a contemporary rite of separation might look like.” The exhibition’s structure draws on Arnold van Gennep’s model of the rite of passage: separation, the liminal state between identities, and incorporation into a new one. It moves from rupture and mourning, through the uncertain territory between what was and what comes next, towards the body, autonomy and pleasure. Divorce is framed not simply as the failure of a relationship, but as a passage: the death of one social identity and the possibility of another. Works on view include Nights You Spent Without Me, Say Yes to the Dress: Hallucinations Ended, Ending Sentimental Feelings, Drizzling (im)perfection (2023) and Love, Mom. The title, as curator Tīna Pētersone explains, “evokes the symbolic death of a relationship, a shared future and an earlier version of oneself; in French, it is also an expression for orgasm.” The exhibition, she adds, “asks whether an ending can be given its own ritual, its own dignity, its own story.” Born in 1982 in Minsk, Belarus, Maria Gvardeitseva is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice includes performance, installation and sculpture. Her multi-layered works move between reality and mythology, often with an ironic twist, and address loss, pain, identity and feminism. Her practice delves into the complexities of memory, sublimating pain in ways that are at once realistic and fantastical, and the political plays a key role in her installations. Gvardeitseva has taken part in group and solo exhibitions, staged performances, and was a finalist in the national selection to exhibit at the Belarusian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. La Petite Mort Maria Gvardeitseva Curated by Tīna Pētersone CUT ART, Pulkveža Brieža iela 15, Rīga, LV-1010, Latvia Opening: November 13, 18:00 Opening hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 15:00–18:00