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Inta Ruka |
The Baukunst Galerie, Cologne, dedicates the forthcoming exhibition to the Latvian photographer Inta Ruka. The opening takes place on the 26th of January 2005 from 6 to 8 p.m. with an introduction by Sylvia Böhmer, curator at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen. At the beginning of 2003 the Gallery introduced the artist, who lives in Riga, with a solo-exhibition showing pictures of the series “My Country People”. Inta Ruka represented Latvia with this series at the 48th Biennial of Venice in 1999. The second large exhibition with the artist primarily shows works of her new series “Amalias Street 5” and photos of the series “People I happened to meet”.
Inta Ruka is one of the most important contemporary photographers of the Baltic States and she is already internationally known. She lives and works in Riga, where she was born in 1958. In 1978, after her graduation at a business school as a sewer, she began to take photos. Afterwards she finished her training at the ‘Nation’s-Photo-Studio’(V.E.E.). 1986-88 she worked as a freelancing photographer. In 1998 she had got a scholarship of the Hasselblad Foundation and a working grant of Villa Waldberta in Feldafing/Starnberger See in the summer of 2002. Works of Inta Ruka are shown in Germany, p.e. in the collections of the photography museum in the museum of the city of Munich and in the photographic collection of the Folkwang-Museum, Essen. Ruka’s photos have already gained international attention: in 1990 her work was shown at the Musée de l’Elysee, Lausanne, in 1991 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, U.S.A., and in the context of the exhibition ‘The memory of pictures. Baltic photography now’, which took place in 1993-94, her work was shown in several European cities. In 2003 the artist was appreciated with a considerable exhibition at the State Art Museum of Riga, and in 2004 Ruka’s work was presented at the Musée d’art moderne, St. Etienne, in the context of the large exhibition-project ‘Passage d’Europe’, curated by Loránd Hegyi.
Inta Ruka’s motives are the people of her country. For about twenty years the Latvian photographer has been taken photos of her countrymen in small villages of the rural area Balvi and in the capital Riga. Sometimes she documents the same persons for several years. Almost every picture is accompanied by a short notice – similar to notes in a diary – which tells us in which situation Ruka met the persons and what she knows about their lives. Thus in her photographic series the artist documents the faces and histories of whole families. Ruka’s task to portray a spectrum of the Latvian people reminds us of August Sander, who tried to create a documentation of society by portraying workers and representatives of different social classes.
Inta Ruka works in series. Since 1983 she has been working on her series “My Country People”. On excursions to Balvi, where she spend her childhood, she regularly portrays her countrymen. In 2000 she started the series “Poeple I happened to meet”, where she asked people in Riga, if she is allowed to take a picture of them. In her new series “Amalias Street 5”, which she began in summer 2004, Ruka is portraying inhabitants of a house at the address mentioned in the title. As in many parts of the capital the houses of Amalias Street 5, which enclose a backyard, are to be renovated. Young families are buying properties and moving in. By the different portraits of people, who are living there, Inta Ruka fixes the mood of change, which dominates Latvia since its integration in the European Union.
Ruka uses a Rolleiflex-camera of the year 1937 and a stage for her black and white photos (classical gelatin silver prints on baryta paper with a format of 33x35 cm). She doesn’t use any kind of artificial light. The artist succeeds to use the light for an expressive but also subtle demonstration of her motives, which convince by their perfect contrasts of light and shadow. Inta Ruka chooses the situation for her photos together with the portrayed person after a long conversation. Sometimes they choose a common surrounding, but it has to be always connected with the life of the person. The portrayed persons look into the eyes of the spectator. In most cases they are positioned in the middle of the picture and shown at a half-distance, which allows to include the surrounding of the person.
Inta Ruka’s photos combine the search for her own origin and the anthropological-sociological documentation of her countrymen’s environment with the exceptional artistic ability to transform her own experiences into images of great intensity.
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