About
Laura Veļa is a Latvian visual artist based in Riga. Her interdisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, video and participatory art, exploring social memory, identity and the ways historical trauma is transmitted across generations.
She holds a Professional Doctorate in Arts from the Art Academy of Latvia and an MA in Painting. In 2021, she received the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award’s Young Painter Award for her multimedia installation Time.Identity. Her major solo exhibition Wounded Memory was presented at the Latvian National Museum of Art in 2024, followed by an expanded iteration in Kuldīga in 2025–2026. Her work is represented in the Zuzāns Collection and has been exhibited in Latvia and internationally.
Laura Veļa’s artistic practice explores the relationship between memory and identity, focusing on how individual experience is shaped by collective history and the wider social environment. She is particularly interested in what is passed from one generation to another — through stories, gestures, objects, silences, fears and patterns of behaviour.
Beginning with family narratives, archival traces and fragments of everyday life, Veļa examines how historical events continue to exist in the present long after the events themselves have passed. In her recent work, this research has focused particularly on the legacy of Soviet deportations in Latvia and on the ways cultural trauma can become embedded within family memory and social behaviour.
Working across painting, installation, video, archival material and participatory practices, Veļa treats material and process as integral parts of meaning. Trained in both painting and digital image processing, she often constructs images through layers, fragments, reflections and traces. Transparent surfaces, plywood, epoxy resin, drawing and painting become ways of exploring the instability of perception and memory — suggesting that what appears visible may remain partial, distorted or concealed beneath another surface.
Her work often moves between the intimate and the collective, the private and the publicly visible. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the past, Veļa is interested in what remains of it in the present: how inherited experiences shape the way we see ourselves and others, and whether recognising these traces can allow us to decide what we carry forward — and what we allow to end with us.
CV
EDUCATION
2024 Art Academy of Latvia, practice-based doctoral studies
2020 Art Academy of Latvia, Master’s degree in Painting
2017 Art Academy of Latvia, Bachelor’s degree in Painting
2010 Riga Technical University, Professional Master’s degree in Image Processing
2005 Ventspils University of Applied Sciences, Bachelor’s studies in Information Technologies
2026 Ventspils Music College, Piano / Music Theory
AWARDS/GRANTS
2021 Winner of the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Painter Award
2017 Recipient of the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation grant
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026 Wounded Memory. Talsi, Talsi Museum, Talsi, Latvia
2025 Wounded Memory. Kuldiga, Kuldiga Art House, Kuldiga, Latvia
2024 Wounded Memory, Latvian National Museum of Art, Dome Hall, Riga, Latvia
2022 IZOLENE, Māksla XO Gallery, Riga, Latvia
2021 Wounded Memory, 5 malūnai Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania
2020 KEYFRAMES, Jūrmala City Museum, Jūrmala, Latvia
2020 NOTHINGNESS, Grand Poet Hotel Art Gallery, Riga, Latvia
2020 IDENTITY.TIME, Artist’s Studio, Riga, Latvia
2020 Defragmentation of the Mind, Māksla XO Gallery, Riga, Latvia
2019 Edge of Earth, Ozolaine Cultural Center, Carnikava, Latvia
2017 Face. Untitled, Kalnciema Quarter, Riga, Latvia
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026 Looking Away. Women Artists in the Zuzāns Collection: 2000–2026, Zuzeum, Riga, Latvia
2024 Different Personalities. Shared Values, Permanent Representation of Latvia to the EU, Brussels, Belgium
2023 Circle of Arts, Pinacoteca dell’Accademia di Belle Arti, Turin, Italy
2023 Don’t Dream It’s Over, Gallery Pallas, Tartu, Estonia
2022 A Fluid State of Mind, Pamėnkalnio Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania 2022 EuroFabrique, Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris, France
2021 Užutrakis Art Festival, Vilnius, Lithuania
2020 Točka, Točka Cultural Space, Riga, Latvia
2019 ARTVILNIUS’19, Vilnius, Lithuania
2019 Emerging Lines, Berlin, Germany
2018 Brederlo-von Sengbusch Grant Exhibition
2018 ORIGIN / Fabric as Concept and Material in Latvian Identity, Riga Art Space 2018 Latvian Art Academy, Gutersloh Museum, Germany
2017 Generations, Liepāja Museum, Latvia
