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La Petite Mort
Riga 2026
Artist: Maria Gvardeitseva
Curator: Tīna Pētersone
We celebrate birth, mourn death, exchange vows. But what happens when a marriage ends? Divorce has become an ordinary part of life, yet unlike marriage, it has few shared rituals, symbols or stories to mark the transition. There is paperwork, negotiation and private grief, but little to tell us what this ending means or who we might become afterwards.
"La petite mort" begins with this absence. After twenty years of marriage, Maria Gvardeitseva found herself at the end of a life she had imagined continuing, without a script for what came next. She began speaking with other divorced women, transforming eleven of their experiences into the book "5-Minute Bedtime Stories".
The fairy tale became an important point of departure. It is one of our earliest scripts for love and marriage: its heroines are prepared for the wedding, and the story ends at the altar. But what happens after “happily ever after”? The work of sustaining intimacy, raising children, changing desires, surviving betrayal, or simply realising that two people no longer belong together is left outside the story. Gvardeitseva’s women begin where the fairy tale stops. They leave, choose and rewrite what comes next.
The exhibition itself follows this passage. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep’s three stages of transition - separation, liminality and incorporation - it moves from rupture and mourning through the uncertain space between one life and another, towards the body, desire and autonomy. Objects, images and gestures become elements of a ritual that does not yet exist.
The title, "la petite mort" - “the little death” - names both the symbolic death of a relationship and, in French, orgasm. Between grief, uncertainty and desire, the exhibition asks whether divorce can be understood not only as the end of a marriage, but as a passage that might make another version of oneself possible.
Artist: Maria Gvardeitseva
Curator: Tīna Pētersone
We celebrate birth, mourn death, exchange vows. But what happens when a marriage ends? Divorce has become an ordinary part of life, yet unlike marriage, it has few shared rituals, symbols or stories to mark the transition. There is paperwork, negotiation and private grief, but little to tell us what this ending means or who we might become afterwards.
"La petite mort" begins with this absence. After twenty years of marriage, Maria Gvardeitseva found herself at the end of a life she had imagined continuing, without a script for what came next. She began speaking with other divorced women, transforming eleven of their experiences into the book "5-Minute Bedtime Stories".
The fairy tale became an important point of departure. It is one of our earliest scripts for love and marriage: its heroines are prepared for the wedding, and the story ends at the altar. But what happens after “happily ever after”? The work of sustaining intimacy, raising children, changing desires, surviving betrayal, or simply realising that two people no longer belong together is left outside the story. Gvardeitseva’s women begin where the fairy tale stops. They leave, choose and rewrite what comes next.
The exhibition itself follows this passage. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep’s three stages of transition - separation, liminality and incorporation - it moves from rupture and mourning through the uncertain space between one life and another, towards the body, desire and autonomy. Objects, images and gestures become elements of a ritual that does not yet exist.
The title, "la petite mort" - “the little death” - names both the symbolic death of a relationship and, in French, orgasm. Between grief, uncertainty and desire, the exhibition asks whether divorce can be understood not only as the end of a marriage, but as a passage that might make another version of oneself possible.
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