Category: Uncategorized

Snakes and Ladders
Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel
27/08–18/10/2025

For Snakes and Ladders – his first solo exhibition in Latvia – the French-Moroccan artist Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel presents a site-specific floor installation alongside a series of drawings on paper.

In his practice, Bouzoubaa-Grivel departs from drawing as his primary medium, creating works on paper as well as sculptural pieces that translate drawings into three-dimensional forms. With Snakes and Ladders, he explores how the medium can be expanded into space. His distinctive style replicates digitally generated imagery while being realised through a slow, manual process. Space and volume become central principles of image creation, unfolding as a play between flatness and three-dimensionality.

Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel’s process could be described as oddly monastic, devoting twelve to sixteen hours a day to the production of these drawings. Wearing blue plastic gloves – a membrane protecting paper from hands that produce excess moisture – he surgically applies line after line after line after line with a marker. These lines trace the forms of drafting tools: standardised instruments used for technical drawings, but here designed and fabricated by the artist himself. The artist becomes the embodiment of mechanical (re)production, himself a machine, a human-printer, generating reproducible forms. Following self-imposed restrictions and rules, the artist pushes the limits of both medium and physical ability to the point where the ordinary, utilitarian function of drawing dissolves. The process, sustained through relentless repetition, unfolds as a specific form of excess.

At the same time, the excess of image production that characterises contemporary life – so visually saturated – is precisely what Bouzoubaa-Grivel’s drawings bring into focus. They stage the slowness of manual work against the immediacy of digital production, and the imperfect, variable detail of hand-drawing against the flawless regularity of on-screen forms. Like simulacra of digital aesthetics, the drawings emerge from a process of moving back and forth between digital and analogue.

The compositions play with optic perception through a visual effect known as moiré, first encountered in crystals under the microscope and later recognised in digital screens, where dense arrangements of lines trick the eye into perceiving movement within static compositions. Moiré alludes to wave forms and invisible processes, taking on pseudoscientific and psychedelic qualities that gesture toward worlds beyond perception. In Bouzoubaa-Grivel’s drawings, the effect often becomes more pronounced when viewed through a digital screen, making the works somewhat resistant to photographic reproduction.

His interest in abstraction draws on a wide range of sources: a background in graphic design and typography, a fascination with topographic and architectural drawings, abstract comics, and North African traditions such as Amazigh tapestry, zellige, and marquetry. In culturally Muslim image traditions, abstraction often takes precedence over figuration, seeking connection to the divine through shape, form, and visual density. In Bouzoubaa-Grivel’s work, this sense of saturation links his drawings to his Moroccan heritage while also situating them within Western abstract and post-digital art traditions.

The exhibition at 427 features two series of drawings: Pinball Superscore and Stimultanéités – a portmanteau of the French words stimulation and simultanéité. Across Bouzoubaa-Grivel’s practice, titles sustain a parallel, collective thread, as they are often created in collaboration with French poet Mia Trabalon. What distinguishes the drawings in Snakes and Ladders from the rest of the artist’s oeuvre is their scale and use of colour. Produced in a format that corresponds to a single working day, these drawings capture a more defined mental space while further interrogating ideas of speed, labour and production. The artist’s typically monochrome palette shifts to red and blue, recalling anaglyph stereoscopy – a method of producing the illusion of three-dimensional depth by layering two slightly displaced images in contrasting colours, most often red and cyan. 

The floor installation extends the exploration of the manipulation and disintegration of the visual field. Carved into wooden panels, its drawing is based on a grid structure angled to both challenge and accentuate the architectural features of the exhibition space. The result alludes to vertigo – the sensation of spinning or instability, in which the body or surroundings seem to move while remaining still. Unlike the works on paper, where line emerges through the addition of ink, here it is produced by subtraction – carving into the surface, leaving behind traces of absence. The white-painted panels take on an almost ceramic quality, their incised lines varying in depth, at times revealing the wooden floor that lies underneath. While much of the composition adheres to the grid, certain parts transgress its order, breaking away into irregular rhythms. Named after a famous board game, the exhibition Snakes and Ladders situates the viewer in a field of shifting perception. Lines and grids dissolve into patterns that resist fixation, drawing the body into a play of movement, balance and disorientation.

– Anna Laganovska

Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel (b. 1992) is a French-Moroccan artist working between France and Morocco.

He studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His practice explores the tension between digital and manual image-making, translating visual elements from the digital realm into hand-drawn forms that blur the lines between print and gesture, abstraction and illusion.

He has exhibited in numerous group shows at institutions including the Fondation Pernod Ricard, Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research (Paris), La Panacée – MOCO (Montpellier), Fiminco Foundation (Romainville), Wallonia-Brussels Center (Paris), Komplot (Brussels), and the TGCC Foundation (Casablanca).

He has participated in international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Villa Belleville (Paris), the Boghossian Foundation at Villa Empain (Brussels), Jester (Genk, Belgium), and the Montresso Art Foundation (Marrakech).

His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Drawing Prize from the Hugot Foundation – Collège de France (2019), the Takesada Matsutani Prize (2020), and the Mustaqbal Prize (2024).

Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation), La Fondation des Artistes, Kim?, Auss

Pinball superscore (2), 2025
Drawing, permanent marker on paper 21 x 29,7 cm

Photo: Ansis Starks

Nu labi
Dirty Romantics
1 – 9/08/2025

DR: “Nu labi” is often used as a compromise solution – as a way to keep the peace, avoid conflict and not step out of your comfort zone. It is consent without conviction, reconciliation without struggle, and this tonal grayness embodies the spirit of the works in the exhibition. Like “Nu labi”, these works are also in an intermediate state – between excitement and fatigue, between naivety and criticism.
KG: Nu labi… But! Do you think that cats “understand what we say better than we understand them. Understand everything they want to understand,” borrowing a fragment from “Ulysses” from “Theory of Bloom” published by Tiqqun and republished by “Bolderāja”. Do cats recognize tonal grayness, taking into account the peculiarities of their vision? By the way, I am color blind.
DR: You mean a foam cat? Yes, of course. Look into its eyes. When I was a cat, I had perfect vision. I don’t remember anything about whiskers. I’m sleeping next to Bloom and Katya. How did you know you were color blind?
(excerpt from the exhibition text)

Dirty Romantics
One day in the Carpathian Mountains, Sunny Bumbulītis, also known as Enfant Terrible, met Rubber Hedgehog. The two called themselves the Dirty Romantics. Rubber Hedgehog likes to squeeze cakes and sniff interesting things. Sunny Bumbulītis likes to ride a penny board. The Dirty Romantics love to experiment, have fun, and discover the world together. This artistic duo draws inspiration from mistakes.

Kateryna Berlova (b. 1986, Dnipro) is a Ukrainian artist currently based in Berlin. Berlova received her post-graduate degree from Jan Van Eyck Academy in 2023. Her work delves into themes of repetition and trauma, which she perceives as manifestations of time or its visible traces. Berlova employs video to document repetitive, monotonous, or obsessive actions that often embody failure. Drawing from her personal experiences, she transcends the individual to explore universal ideas. Fascinated by failures, she examines how these elements challenge cinematic conventions and expand their possibilities. Berlova frequently engages methods of heightened perception, exploring the world through smell, sound, and touch. Her practice spans multiple mediums, including video, sound, painting, installation, and site-specific art.

Ivars Grāvlejs (b. 1979, Riga) is a Latvian artist and associate professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FAVU) in Brno. He studied photography at FAMU (the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), and later earned a doctorate at AVU (the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague). During his studies, he transitioned from documentary photography to a conceptual approach, which led to the project Early Works. This project was published by MACK and included in the exhibition Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern in London. After his studies, Grāvlejs carried out the subversive project My Newspaper, in which, while working as a photojournalist for one of the largest newspapers in the Czech Republic, he secretly manipulated reportage photographs before they were published. His work Unknown Latvian Photography, which fictitiously describes the creative output of non-existent Latvian photographers in the context of the 20th century, is part of the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga.

Support: VKKF, FaVU, Auss

Photos: Līva Priedīte

Beware of dogs gifts, presents
Kristers Krūms, Horhe Solorzano, Sofija Frančeska Putniņa and Sims Birznieks
22/03 – 17/05/2025

Beware of dogs gifts, presents

The gift is given by the gift giver

get Gift give gifted got

ai dundur-dundur-dun-dun-dot-dot-dot

now, higher

i want

i want to give

i want to give you something

i have a full bottle of snails

i have an ache belly full

to Estev you should give

i want to give you

Show of love

from door to door

no philosophy of joy in giving

there is no giving

there is no gifting

only gestures

gesture of giving gestures

for today I am dressed in gestures

today I am wearing my blue cap

and (time)I gave you my blue cap

when there is so much sun

disguised as the next spring’s gift

a mask gift

art disguised gifts

never open a gift from my…

face to your face;

wait

let me give you a signal

spits badly on the ground

(beware of dogs who bring gifts)

i want to give you a wall

wall painting walls

work, hard, work

i want you to paint it black darkness

what’s going on

i remember, i gave you a branch

the main one, you know, it flourishes

the swollen branch

the fruit of labour

i want silence

are you for the sun or the darkness

silence

and the wings smile

i want noise

for the fruit gives

the root receives

and i will bite them both

text by Afonso Theias

Support: VKKF, Auss

Photos: Līva Priedīte

ESX
Gints Gabrāns
7 – 15/03/2025

Gallery 427 will be occupied for a week by an exhibition whose game rules are governed by an algorithm, transporting visitors’ portraits to a supernatural, digital hallucinatory realm inhabited by transmutant beings among slime mold sculptures and other generated flora in an artificial intelligence-imagined forest. The artificial neural network generates in real time transformations of the viewer’s individual appearance into a representative of another intersex trans species – a being from another world whose origins disappear, with the algorithm using computer vision to choose how to transform the viewer’s features without their participation or the ability to control what to do in an emotional puppet show.

Mining the data oil of imagined present-day values, the algorithm drowns the portraits in a sea of ​​generated functions that surge between the winds of societal development and the movements that have formed within them. By manipulating the AI ​​input prompts, the artist generates his own unique trans-community, which lives in a fantastic, mountainous, uncivilized forest, where what a person identifies with is changed, without the individual having control over the miraculous transformations, giving in to the identities created by the algorithm and resolving the relationship between man and art with algorithmic systems and artificial neural networks.

– Kaspars Groševs

Music by TV Maskava and Platons Buravickis

Programmer: Ansis Spruģevics

Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation), PXB

Photos: Līva Priedīte

Pedagogical Games 1. Agents and Boundaries
Viktor Timofeev
12/01 – 17/02/2024

“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”
Bernard Suits from his 1978 book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia.

Over the last several years, I’ve been teaching experimental computer games classes to both art and non art students at a few universities. On a weekly basis, we play, discuss and make games using some basic programming. My focus is similar to any studio class, encouraging students to let loose with the medium and in the process express themselves and whatever is on their mind. The games we make tend to be simple yet unexpectedly existential – first person cameras that roam blocky, geometric landscapes collecting pointless items, opening an infinite amount of doors and interacting with faceless characters. Time and time again, I have found myself moved by students’ games that are able to address topics such as trouble at home or personal anxiety using deceptively simple means. But the most memorable experience from these classes has been watching students present – and play – their own games in front of the class. If their games are introspective mirrors, playing through them is a way of inhabiting and cathartically owning them (at least this is what some of the students have told me). Needless to say, these classes have left an impression on me.

The Bernard Suits quote listed above is something we discuss early on. Being able to temporarily construct and inhabit a space where you have absolute agency, however constrained, can be incredibly empowering in a world that often feels outside of our control. This is generally my own personal relationship to artmaking (as a personal hobby, not necessarily as a public career). I first started making art as a way to cope with issues surrounding my health. Then it became my home as I moved to new countries. And recently, as I’ve spent a lot of my time teaching, I have found it in my curriculum. For example, when introducing a new tool such as text, I share a mini-game that I built using only that tool. My games are usually something very simple, or absurdly impossible, in order to demonstrate a possible extremity. This was the start of my “pedagogical games”, and also how this exhibition began.

Agents and Boundaries, the current exhibition at 427, evolved to encompass several overlapping themes. The first comes from one of my mini-games, which covered navigation for AI “bots” and collision detection between objects. The name of that week’s class was literally agents and boundaries. I decided it was odd enough to take out of context and stage an exhibition around. So I expanded the game to take place in a virtual version of the 427 gallery, and included a few more levels. The “goal” is to avoid contact with everyone surrounding you while traversing several labyrinths. In the exhibition, the game is presented on a computer terminal that is mirrored to a projector, recreating the classroom dynamic including the awkward, uneven lighting. It can be interpreted as negotiating between invisible constructs, such as social relationships and societal norms.

Growing up in Riga speaking both Latvian and Russian languages, my Latvian language was halted when me and my family immigrated to America. Once my grandfather, who always encouraged my Latvian identity, passed away, so too did my closest link to the language. When I made my way back to Riga as an adult, I found myself wanting to blend in. Only recently have I accepted that this will never be the case and that my fractured identities are commonplace and something I can embrace. This mixing of languages inspired my ongoing work that is a mutating alphabet. The version made for this exhibition takes the first four letters of the Roman alphabet and systematically scrambles them indefinitely. Sometimes new letter-like formations are created; other times, the chimeric foreign characters are pure nonsense.

The gallery radiator is extended to surround the perimeter of the space, creating an illusion of a cradle-like enclosure for the visitor, shrinking them to the size of a child. This effect is compounded by the room-sized projector screen and oversized mural of a window. Taken together with the classroom aesthetics, this play with scale is intended to flip the pedagogical environment – “adults” are the children here, left to play with its unfamiliar logic.

• Viktor Timofeev

Viktor Timofeev (b. 1984, Riga) is an artist based in New York. Timofeev’s multidisciplinary practice is informed by personal experiences, speculative imaginings and everything in between. Working across generative software, video, painting, installation and sound, Timofeev combines these mediums to create semi-fictional environments. He received his MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and his BFA at Hunter College in New York. He hosts monthly events that include screenings, performances and sensory deprivation listening sessions at No Moon, an event space in Brooklyn he co-founded in 2018.

Recent solo exhibitions include DOG at Interstate Projects, New York (2021); God Objects at Futura/Karlin Studios, Prague (2020); Stairway to Melon at kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga (2017); and S.T.A.T.E. at Drawing Room, London (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Shallow Springs at Kohta Kunsthalle, Helsinki (2023); Digital Intimacy at the National Gallery Prague (2021), 14th Baltic Triennial at CAC, Vilnius (2021); Unexpected Encounters at the Latvian National Museum of Art (2019); A Barbarian In Paris at Fondation Ricard, Paris (2018); and Somewhere In Between at Bozar, Brussels (2018).

Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation)

Photos: Līga Spunde