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  • Riga Dating Agency:Art, Intimacy, and Narratives of Female Agency in Post-Soviet Latvia
  • Inga Untiks

The legacy of Anna Lācis has been overdetermined by considerations of her personal life, with her historiography thoroughly enmeshed in the scholarly study of Walter Benjamin. While these representations have ensured that there was at least some understanding of her life and work outside of Latvia, the emphasis on the "personal" (as represented and interpreted by and in relation to others) relies on forms of performance and translation that reinforce a gendered body politic to which women from Eastern Europe are too often subjected. As this volume contributes to the historical narrativization of Anna Lācis from the perspective of Latvia, we need to consider how the historicization of Eastern European female figures such as Lācis continues to affect and be affected by gendered determinations, in particular in the artistic practice in the region, which is my focus here. Art has played an important role in challenging gender norms and ethnic differences in Eastern Europe and has often been on the forefront of social critique.1 As Latvian and Eastern European women continue to be represented, translated and located in gendered narratives of East-West dynamics, the urgency to make the modes of mediation visible becomes more pressing.

Contemporary art in the Baltic Sea region in the 1990s explored issues of gender in various ways as the perspective of women as both subject and artist increased in prominence. Artistic experiments played a prominent role in evolving discussions of post-Soviet identity on both individual and collective levels, and some turned to the reappropriation and reinvention of histories and identities, which in turn reinformed social, economic, and political discourses. The reemergence of a conservative nationalist sentiment reaffirmed, and confronted women with, the stubbornly patriarchal nature of nostalgic ethnocentrism. Artists in the 1990s had to navigate a new and complex socioeconomic landscape of gendered notions of normative ethnonationalist love. [End Page 103] Extended artistic initiatives such as the Riga Dating Agency sought to make visible the gender dynamics of mediated representations of Eastern European women, in which women are presented as commodified heteronormative objects of desire in a form that conceals and restricts their agency. As the following analysis of Riga Dating Agency and two contrasting pieces, Estonian Kai Kaljo's A Loser and the LN Women's League, reveals, these art works invite discussion as multilayered yet problematic sites that construct gender and ethnicity in terms that allow for reflection on the process by which Lācis came to be known as Benjamin's "Latvian Bolshevik girlfriend" (see Ingram).

The premise of the Riga Dating Agency was simple. Initiated by recognized Latvian artists Monika Pormale and Gints Gabrans under the name The Riga Acquaintance Office, the locally based pseudodating agency was launched in 1997 as a performative gesture culminating in the display of portraits of their clients in various European exhibition spaces. The emphasis in this project on personal relationships, on the search for heteronormative love, makes visible the dynamics by which Latvian women are typically represented. Participants were "recruited" by Pormale and Gabrans in the same manner as "real" dating agencies at the time: advertisements were placed in local newspapers and on posters across the city in both Latvian and Russian. The women, and the few men, who responded were brought to meet the artists for a brief discussion and were asked to complete a brief questionnaire not atypical of contemporary dating websites and matchmaking services. Data such as age, weight, and eye colour were collected, as were brief personal statements of their interests and desires intended to provide insight into their lives, all of which were later translated into English.2 To complete their portfolios, the participants were provided access to makeup professionals and stylists for their glamour-shot-style portraits photographed by Pormale and Gabrans, in which they pose with coy smiles, provocative stances and careful sartorial choices, making the participants complicit in the representation of their image and demeanour. There is a clearly inherent performance of femininity in the portraits captured by Pormale and Gabrans, which reveals, not a critical exploration of gender and identity, but rather the self...

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