5 Dec 2025
On December 4, the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum opened Maria Gvardeytseva’s exhibition “Bitter Herbs,” which featured the artist’s photographic works, installations, and video. The opening of the exhibition was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Rumbula actions on November 30 and December 8, 1941, when 25,000 Latvian Jews were murdered.
Bitter herbs are the plants that grow on Holocaust sites—places where hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people were murdered. Overgrown grass can sometimes serve as a metaphor for forgetting, but here it becomes a vessel of memory: it has absorbed the blood of the innocent and retains the memory of the crimes that people sometimes prefer to forget. Its bitterness is a reminder of a tragic past.
The transformation of the natural and the corporeal plays an important role in Maria’s work. Grasses intertwine with bodies, growing into them, becoming silent witnesses to crimes. This is literally realized in works where plants collected from “bitter places” are superimposed on large-scale textures of skin. This is what life after death looks like, memory after an attempt at oblivion.
In her photographs, like a meticulous botanist, Maria documents the collected plants, labeling them with locations — Rumbula, Daugavpils, Kaunas, Minsk — and other sites of destruction in Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus. This forms a bloody herbarium — a collection of testimonies, if not evidence.
Another photographic series presents journals with plants inserted into them — precisely in this form were the grasses sent from various places by the artist’s friends. In this process, the grass and the journal pages began to interact both physically, leaving traces and imprints, and conceptually, creating an independent text, new meanings, and points of intersection.
In addition, the exhibition features video. To the sound of a Jewish lullaby, the camera flies over places of destruction and burial — some marked by memorials, some by gravestones, and some only overgrown with bitter grass.
This exhibition raises questions about memory and the importance of preserving tragic testimonies, inviting viewers to feel a connection to history through its material traces.
Curator: Ekaterina Vikulina
