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?
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
– 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).
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 34thsentence 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!
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
Baojiaxiang and SwS – WIWMAVGAIWLDSAATCWA What If We Made A Video Game And It Was Like Dark Souls And All The Characters Were, Part 1 4:29, 2020
This work has been commissioned and produced by KONTEJNER and in collaboration with Sonic Acts, as part of Re-Imagine Europe project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Anni Puolakka – Oestrus 8:27, 2020
Oestrus was made as part of Puolakka’s solo exhibition at Polansky gallery, curated by Christina Gigliotti and on until 21 March 2020. Maya Bendavid – Popccorn Ceiling Maiden 2:27, 2018 Dave Greber – YouCantRiptheSkinOffofaSnake III 3:03, 2020 Simon Kounovsky – epoch_acts 1:12, 2020 Theodore Darst – Ripple 4:52, 2020 Valentýna Janů – Is Your Blue the Same As Mine? 11:40, 2018 Jaakko Pallasvuo – Blink 182 Barcelona 6:41, 2020 Ville Kallio – Venmo Combat 5:05, 2019 Jon Rafman – A Man Digging 8:20, 2013 Deirdre Sargent – Tigers in Toyland 10:51, 2018 Clifford Sage – Reincarnational Disorder ‘RED OUT’ 8:40, 2013
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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