You are invited to contribute to an exhibition about life before the internet

In December this year, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art will open the exhibition "YOU HAVE 1243 MESSAGES". Life Before the Internet. The Last Generation" at the Latvian National Museum of Art. It will tell the story of the recent past, when the search for oneself and others took place in an analogue rather than a digital environment. 

The artworks and various items of everyday life selected for the exhibition will serve as microhistorical evidence of individual 20th-century lives or entire movements that questioned the boundary between art and everyday life. The exhibition is being created by an international curatorial team comprising Kaspars Vanags (LV), Zane Zajančkauska (LV), and Diana Franssen, curator and head of research at the Van Abbemuseum of modern and contemporary art in the Netherlands. 

“Do you remember the time before the Facebook era and mobile text messages? When meetings in the city had to be arranged well in advance, while one could drop in on someone uninvited. A time characterised by telegrams, address books and handwriting practice notebooks. By the clatter of typewriters in offices and queues at public telephones. Such memories belong to the story of the last generations before the internet. To their lives. That is what this exhibition will be about,” says curator Kaspars Vanags. 

The creators of the exhibition “YOU HAVE 1243 MESSAGES” are looking for objects from the period in home archives: 

1. diaries of various kinds – personal notes, weather-recording notebooks, memory albums, travel journals, as well as ship’s logs or similar registers. Of particular interest are those containing entries from 1973; 

2. handwriting practice notebooks from the 1950s and 1960s; 

3. homemade cookbooks from the 1960s–1980s; 

4. newspapers from the 1960s–1980s that people are willing to part with for the creation of an artwork;

5. carbon paper – the exhibition creators are equally interested in both used and unused sheets, in large and small quantities.

Send photographs for reference or brief descriptions of the items you have found to the “YOU HAVE 1243 MESSAGES” team at atradumi1243@gmail.com. 

The exhibition will take place in the Great Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art from 8 December 2017 to 4 February 2018. The exhibition’s principal supporters are the ABLV Charitable Foundation, the State Culture Capital Foundation, the European Union’s Creative Europe programme, and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia.

The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, a curator and producer of international and national-scale art events, is Latvia’s largest institution of contemporary art. Since 1993, it has researched and shaped contemporary art processes in Latvia and internationally in order to provoke critical reflection on issues facing contemporary society. Among the LCCA’s hallmarks are Latvia’s largest annual contemporary art event, Survival Kit; contemporary art exhibitions at the Latvian National Museum of Art; Hardy Lediņš Year; and Latvia’s representation at such international events as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, Manifesta, the Rauma Biennial of Contemporary Art, and others. The LCCA maintains Latvia’s only archive of contemporary art.