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Taboo or not
Jurmala 2026
Artist: Anna Matveeva, Vladislav Saveljevs
Curator: Viktoria Zaitseva
Taboo, at its root, is not a prohibition invented by law — it is an old, human instinct for boundary. The word itself comes from Polynesia, where certain objects and acts were set apart from ordinary life: not because they were impure, but because they carried too much weight to be touched casually. A tree could become untouchable this way, marked off simply by its own sacredness. Every culture since has drawn its own version of that line, and the human body — bare, aging, imperfect, alive — has always sat close to it.
Cut Art Gallery's summer pop-up in Jūrmala, Taboo or Not, brings together two artists working from opposite ends of that same instinct: photographer Anna Matveeva, who asks her subjects to step past the fear of being seen exactly as they are, and ceramicist Vladislavs Saweljevs, who shapes clay by hand and by fire until it takes on a form as unrepeatable as skin.
Matveeva's black-and-white photographs — printed on archival paper and, in places, on translucent positive film that lets light pass straight through the image — record women and men without their faces, so that no single body is asked to stand in for anyone but itself. What remains is presence: the particular line of a shoulder, the soft geometry of an unposed figure caught in natural light. The facelessness is deliberate — it removes portraiture's usual alibi, the name and the story, and leaves only the fact of the body, offered without apology or performance. For Matveeva, this isn't provocation; it's a quiet act of self-recognition, an invitation for the viewer to find themselves in someone else's likeness.
Saweljevs approaches the same question of exposure through an entirely different material. His hand-built vessels, formed from red clay and finished through wood-fired reduction, carry the record of their own making directly on the surface — the pressure of the hand, the unpredictable path of flame and smoke through the kiln. Nothing is smoothed over or corrected afterward. Like the bodies in Matveeva's photographs, each piece is singular, slightly irregular, and entirely honest about how it came to be.
Artist: Anna Matveeva, Vladislav Saveljevs
Curator: Viktoria Zaitseva
Taboo, at its root, is not a prohibition invented by law — it is an old, human instinct for boundary. The word itself comes from Polynesia, where certain objects and acts were set apart from ordinary life: not because they were impure, but because they carried too much weight to be touched casually. A tree could become untouchable this way, marked off simply by its own sacredness. Every culture since has drawn its own version of that line, and the human body — bare, aging, imperfect, alive — has always sat close to it.
Cut Art Gallery's summer pop-up in Jūrmala, Taboo or Not, brings together two artists working from opposite ends of that same instinct: photographer Anna Matveeva, who asks her subjects to step past the fear of being seen exactly as they are, and ceramicist Vladislavs Saweljevs, who shapes clay by hand and by fire until it takes on a form as unrepeatable as skin.
Matveeva's black-and-white photographs — printed on archival paper and, in places, on translucent positive film that lets light pass straight through the image — record women and men without their faces, so that no single body is asked to stand in for anyone but itself. What remains is presence: the particular line of a shoulder, the soft geometry of an unposed figure caught in natural light. The facelessness is deliberate — it removes portraiture's usual alibi, the name and the story, and leaves only the fact of the body, offered without apology or performance. For Matveeva, this isn't provocation; it's a quiet act of self-recognition, an invitation for the viewer to find themselves in someone else's likeness.
Saweljevs approaches the same question of exposure through an entirely different material. His hand-built vessels, formed from red clay and finished through wood-fired reduction, carry the record of their own making directly on the surface — the pressure of the hand, the unpredictable path of flame and smoke through the kiln. Nothing is smoothed over or corrected afterward. Like the bodies in Matveeva's photographs, each piece is singular, slightly irregular, and entirely honest about how it came to be.