An exhibition by INA VARE

This exhibition presents a multimedia installation by artist INA VARE, exploring the interplay between personal identity, cultural memory, and the shifting boundaries of femininity. Originating from a performative gesture that began as a humorous provocation, the project has evolved into a complex inquiry into symbolic dualities – softness and violence, nostalgia and threat, realism and distortion.
Central to INA VARE’s visual language is the recurring image of the axe, initially introduced as a performative prop and gradually transformed into a symbol of embodied contradiction. Drawing from post-Soviet cultural memory, personal history, and the artist’s own gendered experiences, the axe emerges as both tool and metaphor – intimate, poetic, and disruptive.
The exhibition is structured around two distinct spatial zones. The first evokes a softened, sentimental domesticity, inspired by Eastern European summer homes and childhood iconography, complete with porcelain figurines, vintage television footage, and tactile materials that reference play, labor, and sensory memory. The second zone, divided by a semi-transparent screen, confronts the viewer with a darker, digitally glitched reinterpretation of these same motifs. Here, the red porcelain axe and fragmented self-portrait stand as emblems of external perception, censorship, and cultural misunderstanding.
By contrasting internal experience with external interpretation, particularly through the lens of gender politics, media aesthetics, and transnational reception, INA VARE invites to reflect on how symbolic gestures are read, misread, and mediated across different cultural and political contexts.

My project started out as a joke.

Avant Galerie : Why did you start playing around with an axe ?

Ina Vare : I was drawn to contrasts – visual and conceptual ones. Softness and harshness, femininity and masculinity, bluntness and poetry, realism and glitch. So I started playing around. In my artworks I'd pick up an axe, chop some firewood, throw on a dress, chop some more. I’d carry the axe around with me and soon it became kind of like an extension of my body. I’d go places, touch different things, play a note on the piano, run my axe across the fringe of a crystal chandelier, or just touch myself.
I was referencing the aesthetics of vintage films, playing with nostalgia and visual poetry, modern feminism ideas and biases related to them. The axe stopped being just a chopping tool – it became the tender part of myself.


Avant Galerie : How did it move from a playground to a joke ?

Ina Vare : I started thinking more seriously about where the line is between what we usually think of as feminine or masculine, gentle or aggressive. What do those things even mean today?
I shared the work online and exhibited it in various places around the world. I watched how people reacted, and that became part of the work too, part of my research.
At some point, I realized this joke is a story that has two sides.


Avant Galerie : What is the first side of the story ?

Ina Vare : It’s about me. It’s introspective, a kind of therapy. What is femininity, really? What does it mean to feel feminine and what means to act like a female?
When I was about six or seven, my uncle taught me how to chop wood. He was a great teacher, and I was genuinely into learning how to chop. I grew up in a time and place where chopping wood wasn’t anything special, my mom did it too. A lot of people did. We had stoves, and firewood was just how you heated your home.
After a day of chopping wood or digging in the garden, I’d come inside and play the violin. Later I studied at Music School that was built for especially gifted kids. It was demanding, but also incredibly refined, sensual even. Music is, after all, an art of the senses.
Maybe it was too sensual for me so I ended up switching to Art School. I felt more connected to visual art because it involved more physicality. Yet there my drawing teacher used to criticize me for having a “heavy hand.” Am I not gentle enough?
Sometimes I wonder – did that come from early exposure to the axe? Or is it just how I’m built? I’m a woman, and I feel completely at home in my own body. But I’ve often been told I’m too 'rough' for delicate things. I’ve tried, to fit into society’s expectations of what 'feminine' should look like. Yet, for most of my life, I’ve been shaped by post-Soviet society and its own ideas about what a 'real woman' should be – ideas that can often be deeply conflicting. So I always end up back where I started – sooner or later I’d go to chop some wood, or do other heavy physical work. That’s where I find peace. Same with making art. It’s calming, it’s like therapy. It brings me closer to my own, personal version of myself and femininity.


Avant Galerie : What is the second side of the story ?

Ina Vare : From the very first time I published an image of myself with an axe online, I started getting a lot of responses. Some were pretty expected – people surprised that a woman could handle an axe, comments with sexual undertones, others linking the axe to aggression.
But as time went on, I noticed just how wildly interpretations can vary, especially in today’s online space where everything circulates without context and where cultures clash in strange ways.
I realized that a lot of people, especially from the US, saw my work as threatening. They imagined violence. Some even saw 'blood', though there was none. They assumed the axe was a weapon. That I was about to strike. When my video piece 'THIS IS A SHADOW' (Video, 4:3, 2024) was selected to be shown on one of the huge screens in New York’s Times Square, the axe part got censored. Last minute. No one informed me. They put a bright red rectangle over it with the word 'PRIVATE'
At first, the work didn’t even seem to violate any guidelines. Images of weapons are allowed as long as they’re not aimed at anyone. And mine wasn’t. But it was the 2024 and presidential pre-election season. Later, an US-born artist Empress Trash, who also happened to be one who curated me for the screen, remarked on this: 'Americans are violent and raised to be violent – the propaganda controls who is violent and when. Women are not allowed to be violent right now'.
That censorship became a turning point in my research.
Later that year, I was invited to an art event in Montreal, Canada. I walked into a dollar store and bought an axe for five bucks. Seems like in Canada it’s just a tool. In the park, I spray-painted it red, planning to bring it as an installation piece to the event. A security guard watched me from a distance. I think he was more worried about the spray paint than the axe. Once he saw I wasn’t doing anything illegal, he walked away.
Of course, in Latvia or elsewhere, there are stories now and then about axes being used in violent crimes or else. Still, it’s kind of amazing how one of humanity’s oldest tools can mean such completely different things to different people now, especially as a symbol. So it’s become a big part of how I think about my work now.


Avant Galerie : Can you say more about the show at Avant Galerie ?

Ina Vare : For my upcoming exhibition at L’Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris (July 3–18, 2025) I’m creating a spatial installation that divides the gallery into two symbolic zones.
The first space will feel soft, detailed, and nostalgic. Imagine a seaside summer cottage somewhere in Eastern Europe. There’ll be an old television screen playing a poetic documentary, shelves full of porcelain figurines, a porcelain axe resting beside some logs, screens that resemble windows looking out onto a sunny world, and an installation that evokes a sandy beach or playground. This is the gentle, nostalgic space from my childhood memories – where even harshness seems soft, the axe is just a tool, and porcelain kitsch takes over every surface.
And then comes the second space – a representation of how my work is often perceived from the outside (or anything else deemed unfamiliar). It’s separated by a semi-transparent curtain printed with the same 'PRIVATE' label that censored my axe on Times Square. Behind it: red walls, glitchy digital versions of the figurines from the first room, a red porcelain axe, a spotlight on a porcelain self-portrait of me holding the axe, and broken shards of failed porcelain figures. The mood is darker. More dramatic. Maybe even a little threatening.
The contrast between these two rooms raises a question: Which one of them is the real private space? And maybe not just mine, maybe yours, too.