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another trilogy – Zane Mellupe solo exhibition – ifa gallery

Vernissage friday 21 november 5-9pm

From 22 november to 25 january 2014

thursday to sunday, from 10am to 9pm

 

ifa gallery welcomes the Belgium premiere of Zane Mellupe, unveiling an exhibition presented as a trilogy. Each of the three chapters reveals unseen works of various mediums and techniques, hovering between irony and conceptual construction.

Embarking on photography studies at the age of fourteen in Riga, and subsequently in London and Shanghai, Zane Mellupe devises her artistic work as a way of “thinking in images”. Her installations and mixed technique photographic work reveal hiddeninterpretations of our feelings. How exactly can moods and emotions be most accurately described? Zane Mellupe employs in her art works three mediums important to her: the image, the object and the body. The object merges with the image; the body reclaims its functions and enters the photographic image. These three mediums are in a dynamic of simultaneous coordination and opposition, in the same way of literary figures of speech. Linguistic constructs such as the oxymoron (juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory words), or the synecdoche (in which the term for a part of something refers to the whole, or vice versa) become for Zane Mellupe systems of creation, construction methods allowing objects and images to resonate together. A recurrent element in her work is a questioning of photography, treating the image as if it were an object, and also multiplying the suggestive powers of the image. This oeuvre becomes a visualisation of metaphors that allow us to express mind states. She creates textual pieces, the “physical world of literature”, in an echo of her works.

The first chapter of the trilogy of Zane Mellupe, Waiting, refers to the successive stages in individual changes. The second chapter, Milk, explores the sources of existence, through images and their relation to the medium. The exhibition final page, Family Relics, assembles works devised as witnesses to the passing of values down through the generations.

Photography and reality merge together in Zane Mellupe’s work, through compositions inspired from our own linguistic expression, a constant back-and-forth between the material and the conceptual; between the body, the object and the image.

Zane Mellupe

Zane Mellupe is a Shanghai-based artist and Sinologist from Latvia (born in Riga in 1981).

The artist has been working in photography since the age of fourteen. She concurrently studied Sinology at the University of Latvia before moving to China in 2001.

Following her studies in Theatrical Direction at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and completing her Bachelor Degree in 2004 in Chinese Language and Literature at the Shanghai Teachers University, Mellupe then pursued a Masters program in the UK, in 2007 graduating in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at the University of the Arts of London.

Between 2007 to 2010, Zane Mellupe worked as the creative director of the Island6 Arts Centre in Shanghai. In 2010, she developed a community art street “Yongkang Lu Art”, featuring several experimental spaces, renovated from an unsuccessful fashion street, in previous times converted from a vegetable market, in the former French concession neighborhood in Shanghai.

Zane Mellupe’s art has been shown in both China and Europe in various galleries and museum exhibitions. She is represented by ifa gallery since 2010.

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