22/05/2026
Animals in the yard, children playing, celebrations, cabbage fermenting, cemetery visits, and gardening: Archive of Zenta Dzividzinska, House Near the River, 1964-2010, Latvia. Part of Self-Defined exhibition, on at Open Eye Gallery until 7 June 2026.
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Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011) emerged from the Latvian amateur photo club “Rīga” in the mid-1960s as a distinct artistic voice.
Her practice was marked by experimental photograms, photomontage, staged photography, and an aesthetic of the everyday, as well as internationally exhibited n**e portraits. Dzividzinska’s works offered a perspective on women that diverged from the prevailing Latvian amateur photo club aesthetics of the time.
In the mid-1970s, Dzividzinska moved away from the photo club environment to focus entirely on graphic design. As participation in photo clubs was an amateur pursuit that offered no financial return, her work in applied design provided the family’s primary source of income. Consequently, the artist's archive remained largely dormant and unnoticed by the Soviet art establishment for nearly twenty years, as her unembellished self-portraits and documentation of everyday life were viewed as having little artistic value.
It was only through Dzividzinska’s late-career ‘autobiographical impulse’ and shifts in the Latvian photography practices that her early negatives and prints were reawakened in the mid-1990s. The documentary series House by the River (1964–2010), which documented daily life in her ancestral home in the countryside (Iecava), took shape during this period. By 2010, Dzividzinska and her daughter, photography scholar Alise Tīfentāle, had compiled a mock-up for a book chronicling a creative career spanning nearly fifty years.
Today, this ‘archival body’ continues to take on new shapes through the active engagement of curators, scholars, and artists who utilise it as a site for academic and practice-led research.
Text: Līga Goldberga
Images: Declan Connolly, Rob Battersby
In collaboration with the National Library of Latvia.
