Tempo Tempo
Albin Looström
23/09 – 5/11/2022
We enter the space and we sense things have happened here. Even before the fireplace. In a time
zone that exists parallel or sideways and yet shares environments, the piping systems and even
household items with the one we are supposedly in currently. We may feel some unexplainable
longing for that world where paintings and objects that seem to move along and make faces. Do you
reply with a wink?
Support: VKKF
Photos: Līga Spunde
Dreams and Cocktails
Raids Kalniņš and Shady Ladies
Curator: Kaspars Groševs
17/06 – 30/07/2022
We started with fish, wrapped up and served with generosity. We wandered through Malenia to Courland, from Prague to Vērmane Garden. Occasions of meeting – always sporadic, yet fruitful, with sediments that were floating over the waves and caught mid-air. While listening to the voice of Mārīte Veisberga, we drew strokes and debris in an imagined happening, that after all reveal themselves as a conversation between materials and threads.
-KG
Support: VKKF
Photos: Līga Spunde
Ⓗ ᴣ⎣⎣
ᴤℙ◎☈†ϟ
is made from our repeated hits at the grid wire cage when star blinded and spinning we kept poking the motherland-and-,,aend/end-end
through shared antipower accelerations upwards
circling the core
in the bottled static electRIXcity with light at the end of the freshly burned barrel
we turn the blocked underwater signals into Big Hertz of bowed strings
seventy stabu street
4/20/2022/427 – 5/20/2022
nutritional value 236kJ
[ chupakabra + 0.0.01.0.0 + robertsbliezais97 + simba.20 + snarkans + CHOLAISIS + andrejspoikans11 + glociks + eternalusa +++]
Support: VKKF
Joy of Living, Fear of Dying (ft. Fran)
Aapo Nikkanen
11/03 – 9/04/2022
What a name, right?
I originally chose it to refer to the bittersweetness of the fleeting moments in life, but now it reads more like a cold shower, and not the kind Wim Hof’s meditation app is proposing.
Joy of Living, Fear of Dying is the first of a series of works that are dealing with the notions of intimacy and empathy through fundamental psychological questions. “Fundamental” has in the last week started to drag a heavy weight with it, and maybe it’s a good moment to focus on things that are less aestheticized, less trying to aspire us to always “become”, and more basic to what we already are.
If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
or
For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
or
When did you last sing to yourself?
Atbalsts: VKKF, Frame Finland, LMA
Photo: Līga Spunde
Salt on my Asphalt 2.2
Uģis Albiņš
21/01 – 26/02/2022
With us seemingly knowing this and that about them, forms are building imaginary scenarios in the space of their use and interrelations. By dispersing and shuffling the usual methods of constructing functionality the industrial mechanisms reverberate in the surfaces and uneven continuations of the space to converse about the unnoticeable, the self-evident while trying to untangle the social and aesthetic choreography of form creation.
Support: VKKF
dwelling
Philip Hinge
4/12/2021 – 15/01/2022
Windows, closed with broken panes, augment quartered interactions. If you stand close enough sometimes it’s difficult to figure out if you’re looking in or out. The intimate scenes squeeze small dramas into their shallow space. A cat, since expired, is coddled by a spermatozoon ghost. A distraught snowman knocks on a window, desperate to get inside. In another, a ghost is stopping in the doorway to take a long glance before finally leaving.
Although linked by proximity, these works span the distance between the pre and post-pandemic world. Their reflections invert and distance each felt moment, blurring the timeline of events and instances. Neglect is measured against happiness, indifference against a joke. The spectrum is run ragged, self-populating infinitely in the absence of an audience.
Support: VKKF
Photos: Līga Spunde
El Camino 427
Ricardo van Eyk
15/09 – 16/10/2021
Often large in scale, many of Ricardo van Eyk‘s works resemble, at first glance, neglected or else partially restored surfaces familiar from the built environment: temporary panels put up around construction sites that have attracted crude graffiti, say, or else cracked walls that are halfway through the process of being re-plastered. Perhaps his practice is, at base, a meditation on time. Not only because his paintings hum with an awareness of the history of his medium, but because of their playful way with the language of entropy and repair. Patching something up – whether it’s a wall, or an entire cultural edifice – is not a done-in-one job, but an ongoing process. As van Eyk is aware, palimpsests are where we are fated to make our homes.
During a two-week working period at 427 in Riga, observations during walks in the Baltic city will inform a site-specific process in the exhibition space. As a guest to the city, Van Eyk’s fascinations for the public domain and its traces of the old and new as expressed in architecture, infrastructure and other visual identities will surely be met, resulting in a temporary interpretation.
Support: VKKF, Mondriaan Fund, Ammodo and Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Beerfox
Photos: Līga Spunde
Laika Tips (Necessary Illusions)
Ola Vasiljeva
30/07 – 28/08/2021
Ola Vasiljeva (1981, Latvia) lives and works in The Hague, NL. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at BOZAR Centre for Contemporary Art (BE), Passerelle (FR), Vleeshal (NL), Kunstverein Münich (DE), Kunstverein Graz (AT), Supportico Lopez (DE), Pori Art Museum (FI), Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (DE), Art in General (US), kim? (LV) , De Appel (NL), and others. Ola Vasiljeva is the founding member of OAOA (The Oceans Academy Of Arts).
Vasiljeva creates immersive installations, in which she fuses literary, social and cultural references to create evocative choreographed tableaux. Her practice is informed by theatricality and often seeks to subvert the sense of place, bringing the work to the realms of fiction and stage. Vasiljeva’s practice is currently concerned with the notions of decline, collapse of knowledge forms and social and cultural temporalities.
The installation at 427 Gallery, entitled “Laika Tips” (“Necessary Illusions”) reinterprets the physicality of the gallery space, formerly a small business storefront. The installation combines architectural interventions, sculpture, cultural residues and industrial remnants. “Laika Tips” articulates a sense of vacancy permeating the city, and gives it a tangible, forlorn presence. While the entire front space is staged as barely a décor, the incentive backstage hides more in its sleeve.
Supported by VKKF, Stroom Den Haag
Photos: Līga Spunde
Cybervikings of Mars
Līga Spunde
19/06 – 19/07/2021
The future visions don’t sound like acid jazz anymore and – whatever sound the future holds – it won’t be audible in space. But before, each garage is seen as forge, each latte and each cigarette – as rocket fuel. Falling down a chart staircase Martin Eden sank in depths of the ocean, and at the instant he knew he was surrounded by darkness, he ceased to know. In streets of cities people join in chants while waiting for flood, waiting for darkness, waiting for the end of tuna steak era, waiting for instastory to upload.
– 37YO DOOMER
Support: VKKF
The Anticipation
Daria Melnikova
11/05 – 5/06/2021
Support: VKKF
Photos: Līga Spunde
Tiled River
Jānis Dzirnieks
30/10 – 19/12/2020
The show is part of NADA Miami 2020 Riga presentation in collaboration with Kim? and Low
Support: VKKF, Rīgas dome
Memory
Kaspars Groševs, Marta Trektere
2/10 – 17/10/2020
Support: VKKF, Rīgas dome
Photos: Līga Spunde
Things after things
Anna Ceipe
7/07 – 15/08/2020
– Why don’t we ever eat from this plate?
– You don’t understand, there are things to gaze upon only with your eyes. This dish has long turned into a relief and we will never eat from it.
Anna Ceipe graduated from the Department of Visual Communication at The Art Academy of Latvia in 2016, and has also studied in The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Belgium. Since 2011 she has been participating in exhibitions in Latvia as well as outside of it. Her most notable projects include her solo-exhibition „Seeking oasis” at LOW gallery (2018), group exhibitions “Serial solutions (Banalaics)” at Riga Circus elephant stables (2020), „Melos” at Exhibition hall Arsenāls (2019) and „State of Contemplation” at Riga Art Space (2016), and participation in the exhibition „Never ending journey, invisible island” at K. K. Fon Stricka villa (2016).
Supported by: VKKF, Rīgas dome
Photos: Līga Spunde
Sol LeWitt’s WD #719
Elīna Vītola and Amanda Ziemele
Curators: Kaspars Groševs and Marta Trektere
03/04 – 30/05/2020
Mosaic “Sol LeWitt”
In remote self-isolation in the countryside, where books have stayed in the city’s bookshelves and I don’t wish to use the internet, without small shell-shaped madeleine cakes to soak in tea made of linden flowers that aren’t even picked yet, I try—from what has been left at my memory’s disposal—to assemble a mosaic: one of the many possible portraits of LeWitt.
1. White quadratic bone-like structures, but also wavy lines and bright coloured areas; drawings, drawings; and drawings that—following instructions—are executed by others interpreting the unexpressed (and inexpressible); black-and-white masked colouring-in clock design and the synagogue project; studies and notes as ready artworks; and solid, substantial, open-air sculptures / structures / “special objects”. These pieces of mosaic are too trivial and already worn out (pale and colourless).
2. I’ll start again: “when an artist learns their craft too well, they make slick art”—LeWitt’s 34th sentence on conceptual art (1968). Ingūna Skuja once said that for ceramists, “slick” is a positive, even praiseworthy quality, though that only points out that the grammar of the new art’s language is transgressive, breaking past laws, and “theatrical”, as Michael Fried would have said (and did so in 1967).
3. Structures just like structuralist structuralism and post-structuralism, “even though not completely dead”, are left in the past. Even if the new virus will create “structural changes”— a phrase that politicians have tediously worn out—then the basis of its consequences include shortness of breath and pulmonary edema forming in a human body. What is bodily in LeWitt’s structures and drawings?
4. Fragmentation. The Primary Structures exhibition opened at the Jewish Museum in New York on 26 April, 1966. In the small gallery eight (a former library whose neo-Gothic details were covered with black drapery), next to Walter De Maria’s literally caged ‘Cage’ (a work made from thin metal bars), was LeWitt’s cubic structure of 3 x 3 x 3 cubes, which would have been understood as secluded and self-sufficient—like a hedgehog—by the Jena Romanticists: “A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog” (Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragment, 206). It was self-sufficient, and as if tuned out, for a moment, from the surrounding ecosystem (hedgehog), a case of art being from the global art world.
5. Even though the body stays here in the metaphor of the romantic that was Schlegel, in the context of LeWitt’s works, it wasn’t only a spectator’s body (and mind) that was needed to give meaning and scale to his processual structures and ideas, but in the moment, it’s the alienation of each one—an alienation from the seemingly organic unity that “late” (global and what not) capitalism is trying to present as instinctively inevitable, while simultaneously becoming fragmented but comprehensible, and able to be implemented, albeit at your home on an empty wall: a LeWitt drawing (tell them you’re in quarantine and the copyright agency won’t enter your room…).
6. But is there anything that I can’t instantly remember about LeWitt? What to fantasize about? Look, a shred of memory—he had a short text about the form of a ziggurat which—switching to city planning—would furthermore be better than the common skyscraper in New York (LeWitt had used ziggurat forms in several of his works). In some utopian past scenario, these kinds of skyscrapers wouldn’t be hit by airplanes (it wouldn’t be so effective and easy), and we would be spared from the bothersome airport control system (but it’s not important—now we will travel less, and hike more around our homelands, besides which there will be less air pollution). Such a number of towers of Babel would most likely confuse god, and they could cancel the Great Flood, initiated via global warming; the mix-up of languages would be reanimated with the help of some super-google-translate system, because all the small and dying languages, such as Latvian and others, would become intelligible, and we would get rid of the emaciated lingua franca, the crippled English.
7. I remember lectures with quotes of memories of Adrian Piper—how she and Sol were ecstatic about Beckett—dialogues and situations without context (another “hedgehog-ist”) that fits so well with the unrepresentative literalism of the visual forms of minimalism. Every now and then, I have tried different texts by Beckett imagining examples of what they could have read, but in my opinion, the diagram with a slight time shift tracking the unsuccessful meetings of Mercier and Camier is still the best—these ridiculously absurd protagonists who share the name of the novel are immortal because they find it almost impossible to meet and… get infected (to tell the truth, I must admit that by stubbornly repeating their arrival, waiting for five minutes, going for a walk, returning and so on, they do meet after 45 minutes).
8. Literature. I rifle through the book shelf at the country house in Latgale looking for inspiration, until I find the unread Old Curiosity Shop by Dickens as a Russian translation. From the first pages, I meet the gaze of a collector type, as if described by Walter Benjamin: “There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there; fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters; rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory; tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.”
9. Lines that haven’t been seen even in dreams—if perhaps credited to some mad mathematician—is what someone might say about LeWitt’s drawings. Isn’t this the right time to look into your attic, in an old closet, at forgotten childhood memories, to turn to never before noticed people? Could it be a vocabulary for the new art whose grammar is yet to be found (or, whose grammar is only coming into being)? And could this young and unpredictably diverse art vocabulary—let’s indulge in the positive impulse, hidden in utopia—be the one whose influence will contort or knock down the ruling consumerist attitude and the critical art discourse, partly servicing it, and partly battling it?
Kombuļi rural municipality, 31 March, 2020.
Jānis Taurens.
Love to Katie Lenanton!
Very special thanks to Sofia LeWitt!
Photos: Līga Spunde
Die Geister. One Step Beyond
Curated by Marta Trektere and Kaspars Groševs
20/02 – 28/02/2020
Opening: February 20th 7pm
This highway goes one step beyond heaven. Stomps the weight of boulders. Breathy quadraphonic howls, you find yourself in fantazia while trying to grasp figureless haze in all colors imaginable. As a drip of sweat tickles the tip of your nose you start to see a color you never thought existed. You’ve become a sorcerer’s apprentice.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was a segment in Disney’s feature-length cartoon Fantasia (1940). The part where Mickey Mouse is an apprentice to a sorcerer and fools around with magic tricks is based on Goethe’s poem “Der Zauberlehrling”. The lines in which the apprentice implores the returning sorcerer to help him with the mess he created have turned into a cliché, especially the line Die Geister, die ich rief (“The spirits that I called”), a garbled version of one of Goethe’s lines (Die ich rief, die Geister, / Werd’ ich nun nicht los), which is often used to describe someone who summons help or allies that the individual cannot control, especially in politics. Or raves.
With works by:
Maya Bendavid, Baojiaxiang and SwS, Simon Kounovsky, Theodore Darst, Dave Greber, Valentýna Janů, Ville Kallio, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Anni Puolakka, Clifford Sage, Deirdre Sargeant
Supported by: VKKF
Rats Dream About The Places They Want To Explore
Maren Karlson
06/12/2019 – 10/01/2020
Opening: December 6th 7pm
it’s what the rock says
because the earth speaks
it sings too
lalalalala doo doo doo oooooooooo
No Where is quiet
she was in my dreams again last
night
did i swallow a spore that made me dream
Drink coffee in the morning
Ya it’s hazelnut
Refuse to write down dream
because the rat doesn’t write it
down why should i?
OK taurus is stubborn. I write it down:
she has short brown hair that’s somewhat brittle but it smells really lovely like a worn in t-shirt that hasn’t been washed. she must dye it that color. I think she has a lot of greys, but it doesn’t matter. If she didn’t dye it I’d still think she was beautiful. age doesn’t matter. i get to roll around in her bed and smell her sheets and smell her hair. i wonder why smelling things is so comforting. breathe in really deep and fall past this part of dream into another. into another. into another. singing in my ear, it’s so quiet it tickles. my ears are sensitive. but i breathe back into hers. hers is a shell that spirals inwards. trace the shape until the scale of my finger outgrows it. not sure i can reach the center of the labyrinth but she tells me I can and puts my finger back where it was and tells me to continue on my path.
I wake up.
– Brook Hsu, 2019
Maren Karslon is a drawer and painter living and working in Berlin.
Supported by: VKKF
Photos: Līga Spunde
Parasitia
Anni Puolakka
10/10 – 08/11/2019
Parasiting parasites in a psychedelic ceremony.
Parasitia
Parasitia
Blood blending into sepia
We are each other’s media
In my secret world
In my sacred words
Cats living in conspiracies
Infants are eating infancy
Sipatiara
Sipatiara
Mother is joining antifa
Business as usual mama
Raining bugs and birds
Snowing bats and moose
Breast bursting milk for immune boost
Feast hurting head my brain is juiced
Rapatiasi
Rapatiasi
True parasites are you and me
True parasites are you and me
Co-performers: Marta Trektere and Ieva Tarejeva
Costumes made in collaboration with Karolina Janulevičiūtė
Music made in collaboration with Miša Skalskis
Anni Puolakka is a visual and performance artist based in Helsinki and Rotterdam. She incorporates biographical and documentary materials into fictional worlds in her videos, performances, videos installations and images. They play with the boundaries and potential of humans as they seek meaningful and vibrant – sometimes drowsy or ambivalent – involvement with other beings and objects. Puolakka’s works have recently been shown at No Moon (NYC), Kunsthalle Bratislava, Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), Kiasma Museum of Modern Art (Helsinki), and Performance Space (Sydney).
Thank you: Kaspars Groševs
Supported by: VKKF, Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Nordic Culture Point
Photos: Ira Brut, Kristine Madjare, Miša Skalskis, Liga Spunde
Bludna Loza
Anna Slama & Marek Delong
Curator: Christina Gigliotti
04/09 – 27/09/2019
It’s not easy to find the Bludna Loza, but she’s there. After walking some half day, sleeping on the dried pine needles and earth, hungry and sore, you’ll find her. She is not the tallest tree in the woods, nor the fattest, nor lushest. In fact, Bludna Loza has no leaves at all. Her bark is dark and wrinkled. Some say her roots run so deeply into the ground you could never find where they end. Ancient, slow growing, she is the keeper of our memories. All lives that have transpired and died on our planet are held inside her belly.
When you find her, press your palm to her trunk. Run your hands along her craggy roots and you will feel the pulsations, the flow of energy emanating from her–the tree that knows not death.
– Christina Gigliotti
Marek Delong and Anna Slama are an artist duo from the Czech Republic, based in Prague and Stockholm. They started to cooperate while they both studied at Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, Czech Republic. Currently their works are created in a two seperate places and meet physically usually while installing a final exhibition piece, where they create an intended complex scenery.
Together they presented their work in solo exhibitions: “Andromeda” at Catbox Contemporary, New York, 2019, “Will I Be a Better Man If I Stop Dreaming of the Stars” at Futura, Prague, 2019, “Sticky Moment” at EKA Gallery, Tallinn, 2018, “Femme Fatale Brewery” at Karlin Studios, Prague, 2017), “Good Old Sober Addict” at City Surfer Office, Prague, 2016. Group shows: “Letting Go” at Trafo Gallery Budapest, 2017, “Afterbirth of a Dream” at Meetfactory, Prague, 2017, “Robin” at YABY, Madrid, 2018, “Wicked Anima Fun” at Gallery Stephanie Kelly, Dresden, 2018 and “When the Sick Rule the World” at Gr_und, Berlin, 2019.
Support: VKKF
Special thanks to: Rebeka Lukošus and Laima Ruduša
Photos: Līga Spunde
Champs-Élysées
Botond Keresztesi, Emma Stern, Līga Spunde, Sandra Kosorotova, Tea Stražičić, Nick Zhu
Curated by Marta Trektere un Kaspars Groševs
7/06 – 16/08/2019
Support: State Culture Capital Foundation, Nordic Culture Point
Photo: Līga Spunde
A Guide to Making a Genie
Atis Jākobsons, Raids Kalniņš, Lev Kazachenko, Zane Raudiņa, Ieva Rubeze,
Viktors Timofejevs, Alexandra Zuckerman
Curators: Ieva Kraule and Kaspars Groševs
12/12/2014 – 6/02/2015
While the city is dressing up in bright Christmas lights and children are having fun in the ice-rinks with their parents sweating in the shops’ queues, in this darkest time of the year the shiny white walls of the gallery are wrapping themselves into a cloak of rosy light. Every now and again dizzying swirls of sandalwood smoke veil what has never been disclosed to the ignorant. Lifeless flowers have hung their heads down in the presence of winter. Artists’ works hiding in the dark corners of the gallery are peering back at the viewer – some in remembrance of the beginng of the world and ancient rituals, others striving to heal the ones weakened by the Christmas hustle. In a place now hiding beyond the strict rules of the rational and the material, these words are heard quietly:
“Om! I wish, I plead and I command for a lot of pure, good, strong cosmic prana and akasha to flow, appear and accumulate right away in this space around me. May prana and akasha flow from the East, the West, the North, the South, the heights, the depths, the vastness, the faraway and all the states where they are currently free and can assist in the work of creation. May the prana and akasha flow that can extricate from water, fire, earth and air.”
(Mirdza Bendrupe)
Support: State Culture Capital Foundation, VKN, Valmiermuižas alus, Veto vīni
Photos: Līga Spunde
κπ
Līva Rutmane
6/11 – 5/12/2014
The necessity of this symbol has been reviewed by the Latvianizing Society that considers it to be if not acceptable, then at least suitable and necessary addition to the Latvian language. After tiring yet fruitful debates lead by chairman D. K. it was decided that this symbol – ka-pa-pi? or KPP? – seems to be the most suitable Latvian version of the often used letter combination.
For the sake of further euphony it was decided to pronounce this new Latvian letter combination by basing it on the pronounciation of greek alphabet letters of κ (kappa) un π (pi) thus ensuring its attractiveness to the users of international language and youths.
Hence examining the essence of this letter combination it was concluded that it expresses surprise, but that its conotation is rather negative – in Latvian it could be described by “troubled” and “agitated”, that indicates anxiety, an unpleasant insertion in the daily routine, a perplexity of what is happening. With this letter combination indicating the very inability of describing the existing insertion in the occurence thus arriving at an exclamation, the subject’s reaction to the absurd. Similarly this exclamation could be used when recognising the discord arising in a moment of sudden appearance of the asymetry of physical reality, finding a distortion in the succession of habits, as well as the realisation of an awkward mistake, marking the beginning and end of a euphoric state, in case of a rapid change of circumstance etc.
Līva Rutmane was born in 1984, graduated MA in Graphic Art at the Art Academy of Latvia (2014) and currently draws. She has been participating in exhibitions since 2002. There are no remarkable changes or drastic turns expected in the future.
Support: State Capital Culture Foundation, VKN, Chomsky
Photos: Līva Rutmane
Dance Blue
Marija Olšauskaitė
18/09 – 25/10/2014
If I would write longhand invitation ‘I would like to invite You to an exhibition’, the word sexy could be transparent. Anchor plate binds a single My bar, it lingers for a new pole. Dance sad, while curtains are standing.
Marija Olšauskaitė (b. 1989) lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania. Olšauskaitė studied sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Marija & Petras Olšauskai: “Miss Bird”, Art in General, New York (2014), “What thinks me”, Saint-Petersburg (2014), solo exhibition at Round Studio, Vilnius (2013), “Auction” Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2012), solo exhibition at The Gardens, Vilnius (2012), “Ornament” National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (2012).
Support: State Culture Capital Foundation, VKN, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Malduguns, Veto Vīni
Photos: Rauls Pauls
Second Water
Monika Lipšic
18/09 – 25/10.2014
Voice~over reads a theory of metaphor in a composition about this particular problem of aesthetics. If we watched more at beautiful things our eyes would turn more beautiful – reads the voice. But if beauty is the object of love, and love has three steps until we reach the very giving and abstract loving, how to experience beauty not embodied in anything physical or spiritual? Metaphors make us see one thing as another. A successful metaphor evokes an image which we otherwise haven’t seen before – it provokes to realize something for the first time. The composition about a metaphor sailing in the sea of stories.
Monika Lipšic lives and works in Vilnius. Her last projects were exhibition curated in Saint-Petersburg “What thinks me” (2014), Agency’s show curated at CAC, Vilnius – “Agency. Scripted by characters” (2014), group performance “Karaoke Police. A Game of Opposites” (2013-2014), residency Joy & Mirror. “Actions on the island in Sardinia”, exhibition film “Exhibition on Stage. God from the Machine” (2013), exhibition “The Collector”, CAC, Vilnius and others.
Support: State Culture Capital Foundation, VKN, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Malduguns, Veto Vīni
Photos: Rauls Pauls
Like Nature But Not
Vivienne Griffin
20/08 – 13/09/2014
How can one recoup yet remember the infinite beauty of nature? Returning home diffused dusk is rolling around the floor, the sun-tan fades in the cool light of the refrigerator, the impressions are shifted from their source and positioned in a new context between the damp walls.
A glacier is like a river caught in the shutter of camera. Click. Except that it’s in real time, a slow moving thing, melting shifting screaming down the fucking mountains, chunks falling off into the river and on to the sea.
Vivienne Griffin lives and works in London. She studied in Hunter College, New York (MFA 2009). Griffin works with various media, including text, drawing, performance and sculpture. She often collaborates with Irish artist Cian McConn and has participated in many group shows. Her previous solo show “The Me Song For Now Here” (2013) took place at Bureau Inc. gallery, New York.
Photos: Rauls Pauls
Buster Friendly Format 4-2-7
Gaile Pranckunaite
1/08 – 15/08/2014
The TV set boomed; descending the great empty apartment building’s dust-stricken stairs to the level below, John Isidore made out now the familiar voice of Buster Friendly, burbling happily to his system-wide vast audience.
Buster Friendly was a radio programme created by Gaile Pranckunaite. It was inspired by a fictional TV/radio celebrity from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. During the weekly programme various audio books and poetry readings would be mixed with looping ambient sounds. The sessions were held down at the radio Rietveld basement, at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), broadcasted through the online radio website.
Buster Friendly continues to look for new ways of being audible. This time, for 427, buster’s preparing 3 numeric mixtapes, exploring the fourth, the second and the seventh signs of the zodiac. Next door you may also discover bits of the ninth sign, in video format.
Gaile Pranckunaite ir a graphic designer based in Vilnius.
Support: State Culture Capital Foundation, VKN, Veto Vīni
Photos: Rauls Pauls
Nobody Dances Like That Anymore
Ieva Kraule
05/06 – 19/06/2014
Severin can dance. He’s dancing foxtrot and cha-cha-cha – under his polished shoes covered with grooves created by nimble steps. The moment when the sole touches the varnished floor an unexpected, yet predictable creak dies away in the hustle of the steps and the overall noise turns into an awkward silence; nobody dances like that anymore.
The exhibition took place over the course of seven evenings in June – the 5th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 17th, 18th and 19th, from 6 to 8pm.
Photos: Rauls Pauls
Fermentation
Īrisa Erbse
19/11 – 18/12/2015
Gamma ray
The kernel
Meadow
Saison
Running dune
Arctic sunstone
Sloth (the sinner series)
Schwarz
Īrisa Erbse (1990) works with painting and writes poetry. She has graduated Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Lives and works in Cologne. Her previous exhibitions include “Milling” at Choice space in Cologne (2013), “Lautering” at Distribution Lorry gallery in London (2014).
Photos: Līga Spunde
Breakout. The Lost Knight
Raids Kalniņš
1/10 – 13/11/2015
…Old house
are not those places
graves move
a lot of graves
heavy steps
no sun
life is fading
damp…
damp everywhere
I SEE LIGHT!
FOREFATHERS ARE COMING!
Raids Kalniņš studied wood-sculpting at Liepāja Art Higschool and graduated from Liepāja Institute of Pedagogy. Previous exhibitions have taken place at Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, RIXC Center for New Media Culture, Riga, and Liepāja museum. Selected group shows: “Negatnieki” at Latvian National Museum of Art Exhibition hall “Arsenāls” (2012), “Kvarķirņiks” (2010) and other projects.
Support: State Culture Capital Foundation, VKN, Veto Vīni
Photos: Līga Spunde
Agonisers
Gili Tal
6/08 – 28/08/2015
In his ‘Critique of Everyday Life’, Henry Lefebvre writes of:
‘Intense instants – it is as if they are seeking to shatter the everydayness trapped in generalized exchange. On the one hand, they affix the chain of equivalents to lived experience and daily life. On the other, they detach and shatter it. In the ´micro´, conflicts between these elements and the chains of equivalence are continually arising. Yet the ´macro’, the pressure of the market and exchange, is forever limiting these conflicts and restoring order. At certain periods, people have looked to these moments to transform existence. ‘ [1]
As media and political powers increase in centralisation and control everything around them dilapidates in near perfect reciprocity. At the same time, the reality of this experience is continually subdued by the promise of immediate or virtual presence elsewhere or by identification with a different period in time. The vital elsewhere seems most effective as possibility, as image idea, as a moment of frisson.
There is a cyclical relationship between the material world and its romanticisation that often works on a tragic / euphoric order. Even the most tired iteration of say, Americana (as seemingly mythical signifier of a period ending with the break up of the Breton Woods agreement in the early 1970s and the consequent slide to neoliberalism) is still affective in giving rise to an imagination of urban living that alters in turn the appearance of Poplar, 2015.
In literature the figure of the flâneur embodies one way of achieving transformation. The flâneur wanders round the city floating from salon to café, amusing himself and making discoveries, experiencing the city as if it were the substance of a dream. Since love is the conquest of discontinuity between individuals, there is an erotic dimension to this “losing oneself” in the crowd, or in the city. In a varying light, Marx also referred to this when he stated in the Grundrisse that Capital must “strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e., to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market”, and it seems true that for at least three decades now the invocation of the flaneur, as agent, has led not so much to timeless experiential drift (nevermind the production of revolutionary spaces) as to what is euphemistically named regeneration.
[1] Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 3, trans. Gregory Elliot (London/New York: Verso, 1991), p. 57.
Gili Tal (b. 1983) lives in London. Her recent solo and two-person shows include “Agonisers” at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn (2015), Life Gallery, London, with Lena Tutunjian (2015), “Panoramic Views of the City” at Sandy Brown, Berlin (2014), “Immobilien” at Muda Mura Muri, Zurich (2014), and “Real Pain for Real People” at Lima Zulu, London (2013). She has recently participated in group shows at Kunstverein Munich, Mathew, Berlin and New York, Vilma Gold, London, and Sandy Brown, Berlin.
Photos: Kristiāna Marija Sproģe
Princess PomPom in the Villa of Falling Flowers
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
18/06 – 1/07/2015*
Princess PomPom in the Villa of Falling Flowers presents itself as a dramatic exhaustion to the 427 gallery space. The narrative of the classic piece of Japanese Literature Genji Monogatari – The Tale of Prince Genji is being introduced as an environment study who’s protagonists are all equally degenderized and presented as an oversized scroll painting.
At the windows of the room cloudy character studies made of string hang from the ceiling. Gallery visitors are invited to enter the story through texture and not through text.
In collaboration with Kim? Contemporary Art Centre as a part of the project „Slash”.
The exhibition “Slash: In Between the Normative and the Fantasy” (curator: Kaspars Vanags) is the first time a public art institution in Latvia is turning towards “slashes” among contemporary art expression. More than 20 years had to pass since the decriminalization of homosexuality for such an exhibition, influenced by the digitalisation of personal life, to be possible – borrowing from the open-source mentality. The other, here, isn’t juxtaposed to the norm as something locked in the solitude of an individual strangeness or an impossible taboo, but as an awareness of an essentially recognizable, reachable, and modifiable aspect of personal identity.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy (1984, New York) lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. He completed the Rijksakademie international artist residency in Amsterdam in 2010 and his undergraduate degree at The Cooper Union School of Art, New York in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Port”, Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles; “Lutz-Kinoy’s Loose Bodies”, Elaine – Museum für Gegenwarts Kunst, Basel (2013); “Matthew’s Secret”, Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam (2013); “Werk is Free / Be Free! May Day”, Outpost, Norwich, UK (2013); and “KERAMIKOS” – a touring exhibition with Natsuko Uchino at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Elaine Museum für Ge- genwarts Kunst, Basel and Villa Romana Florence (2012-2013). He has staged performances at the Kunsthalle Baden- Baden; Nomas Foundation, Rome; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the New Museum, New York. His videos have been screened at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Berlinale Film Festival; New Museum, New York; and White Chapel Gallery, London.
Support: State Culture Capital Foundation, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, VKN, Mozaīka, Valmiermuižas alus
*The exhibition was abruptly close because 427 gallery suddenly were kicked out of the space
Photos: Ansis Starks
