Evelīna Deičmane’s artistic work comprises a crossmedia spectrum including video, sound objects, drawings and installations. The Latvian artist scrutinizes the conditions experienced by the people in her home country. She links present socio-cultural developments in Latvia with the traditional and familiar, concentrating on rifts that develop when the transition from the old to the new has not yet been fully realised. Her current exhibition “Burt Nieks. (The flying lake looked down upon the village.)” captures the ambivalent atmosphere of her village. The starting point for the new works is an old Latvian legend that Deičmane remembers from her childhood; she weaves her objects around this legend in a magical way. The artist merges memories, traditional stories and facts to create a magical sphere telling of a flying lake that once floated above her village. It was said that if the name of this lake was pronounced correctly, it would fall down and cover the village. And that is what happened: the lake came down and from then on people feared the correct words, things that could not be spoken out loud – in other words, their own emotional worlds. Deičmane’s drawings and sound installations, a wooden triangle containing water, and an oversized sound box with taut strings retrace the inhabitants’ encounters with the lake and generate fantastic, mystical worlds in the fantasy of the viewer. Deičmane is concerned with the courage to break apart old structures, to face up to one’s own human nature and call things by their true name.