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La Petite Mort
Riga 2026
Artist: Maria Gvardeitseva
Curator: Tina Petersone
We celebrate birth, mourn death, exchange vows. But what happens when a marriage ends? Divorce is now an ordinary part of life, yet it has no ritual of its own. Marriage comes with ceremony, witnesses and a public declaration. Divorce is usually reduced to documents, negotiations and private grief.
For Maria Gvardeitseva, this absence became personal after twenty years of marriage. She began speaking with other divorced women, and turned eleven of their stories into 5-Minute Bedtime Stories (Skira, 2025). Fairy tales teach us early what love and marriage should look like, but they end at the altar. “Happily ever after” leaves the rest unwritten. Gvardeitseva’s heroines begin where the fairy tale stops: they are not rescued; they leave, choose and rewrite their own stories.
La petite mort tries to build the ritual that divorce lacks. It draws on Arnold van Gennep’s rite of passage: separation, a liminal state between identities, and incorporation into a new one. The exhibition moves from rupture and mourning, through uncertainty, towards the body, autonomy and pleasure. Here divorce is not simply a failure. It is a passage: the death of one identity and the possibility of another.
The title holds both sides. “The little death” stands for the end of a relationship and of an earlier self, and in French it is also a word for orgasm. Moving from mourning towards desire, the exhibition asks whether an ending can have its own ritual, its own dignity and its own story.
Artist: Maria Gvardeitseva
Curator: Tina Petersone
We celebrate birth, mourn death, exchange vows. But what happens when a marriage ends? Divorce is now an ordinary part of life, yet it has no ritual of its own. Marriage comes with ceremony, witnesses and a public declaration. Divorce is usually reduced to documents, negotiations and private grief.
For Maria Gvardeitseva, this absence became personal after twenty years of marriage. She began speaking with other divorced women, and turned eleven of their stories into 5-Minute Bedtime Stories (Skira, 2025). Fairy tales teach us early what love and marriage should look like, but they end at the altar. “Happily ever after” leaves the rest unwritten. Gvardeitseva’s heroines begin where the fairy tale stops: they are not rescued; they leave, choose and rewrite their own stories.
La petite mort tries to build the ritual that divorce lacks. It draws on Arnold van Gennep’s rite of passage: separation, a liminal state between identities, and incorporation into a new one. The exhibition moves from rupture and mourning, through uncertainty, towards the body, autonomy and pleasure. Here divorce is not simply a failure. It is a passage: the death of one identity and the possibility of another.
The title holds both sides. “The little death” stands for the end of a relationship and of an earlier self, and in French it is also a word for orgasm. Moving from mourning towards desire, the exhibition asks whether an ending can have its own ritual, its own dignity and its own story.