The Philosophy of Feasting and Emptiness Text: Ainārs Kamoliņš
Every day I approach a seemingly different table. These small changes that I notice every day are in a way inevitable: the color is affected by light, the distance from it by shape. That is why the “real” table is unknowable. It is not for nothing that Bertrand Russell, writing in his introduction to philosophy, points out: “What we see is constantly changing as we move through space, so that here too our senses give us the truth not about the table as such, but about its appearance.” Similarly, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl tried to understand how we know that a table is the same table. He also observed it from different perspectives and this revealed different shades of color, shapes, and the like. He pointed out that the “real” table is transcendent and constitutes itself in our consciousness thanks to memory. Each moment of observing the table connects with the previous one, memories of the table merge with the present observation. However, the unknowability of the “real” table does not yet distinguish it from other physical objects. One can ask in a Heideggerian vein: what is the table-ness of a table? Heidegger himself liked to recall Eddington’s statement that every table has a double – his childhood table and the “scientifically understood” table. The childhood table is not just a simple surface that can be scientifically described – its material, shape, color. You can see various streaks, prints, or stains on the childhood table. Through it, you can remember the games that were played on it. In short, it can reveal the childhood lifeworld. This is an aspect of the table that cannot be scientifically described. Therefore, when entering a room, the table is not perceived simply as an object, but as something at which you can sit down and work. The table is either convenient or inconvenient for the task I have chosen.
Even now, when I sit down at the table, it temporarily forms my lifeworld. Gamblers, on the other hand, probably don’t see anything at all outside of what’s happening on the roulette or card table at that moment. Of course, the table also has a shady side. Namely, cheating, dirty dealings take place under the table. There you can sometimes find those who have fallen under the table – those who can no longer participate in the table conversations and celebrations.
The table in the world creates certain lines of demarcation. Not everyone is invited to the table. The invitation separates friends from those who are not. However, the table itself creates an even more significant ontological boundary. The human lifeworld is realized at the table, while the animal world is realized in the pen. Of course, the table can also become a pen at any time. Therefore, the boundaries between the table and the pen are not stable and can easily change depending on the situation.
The table also creates a distinction between Western rationalism and Soviet or post-Soviet hopelessness. It is formed by the attitude towards an empty table. Ilya Kabakov points to the Western attitude: “Empty is a table on which nothing has yet been placed, but on which something could be placed; land that has not yet been cultivated, but which could be cultivated.” Emptiness for Western rationalists is an opportunity, a potential for creation and change. For Kabakov, on the other hand, the Soviet emptiness on the table transforms active being into active non-being. Sitting at the table causes Kabakov special stress, powerlessness, apathy and causeless horror. Even if he had set the table, the emptiness would still be present and nothing could fill it. It is not for nothing that tableiness appears in language when we ask about life: how are things? This question, as one might guess, does not always refer to whether the table is actually set.
Sources:
Kabakov Ilya. On Emptiness. – In: On Art. – Chicago UP, 2018. p.36
Rasels Bertrands. Filosofijas problēmas. – Jāņa Rozes apgāds, 2007. 10.lpp.
Husserl Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. – Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983. p. 86-87.
Dzelde Mierkalne (1997) is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in printmaking. Based in Riga, Latvia, she has finished studies in the MA program POST at the Art Academy of Latvia. With great reverence for technique and process, Dzelde aims to overthrow technique-related artistic standards to create something new and find its place in today’s context. While reflecting on the existential fears of “world destruction”, mortality salience, and death anxiety through the lens of today’s post-irony and humour, she likes to play around with the syntheses of drawing and form.
Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation), Riga City Council
When the voice of my neighbours’ rooster rings out in the pitch-black darkness and I have to sink my feet into thick fog slippers when I get out of bed, I open my mouth wide to fill it with three months of sunshine and foreign sweat. Mrs. Pattison, Mr. Zucchini and little Pumpkin – jump, all of you, into the oven’s mouth! Feed my growling belly, lest it wake the wolves, lure the bears, and eat me!
Someone’s love is jumping into their lap – windowsills full of light courgette bodies, cupboards full of round pumpkins. Happy are the people who have country folk! Maybe when the shelves at home are bursting with autumn bounty, when the numbers on the lids of the cake jars in the cellar reach back into the distant past, when the potatoes have sprouted long octopus tentacles and the cabbage barrel is roaring in the corner, bigger than myself, then one can feel the satiety. Still, I have no cellar and an insatiable appetite drives me to stuff my mouth with a pretzel with a pumpkin with a fish with a parrot with a shoe with a dog with a sheepskin coat with the latest electrical appliance. While I stuff my giant mouth into the corner, someone equally hungry shouts with an empty mouth. When they eat, I’ll grill my horns against the wall and scream.
Put a crown of crows on my head, burn me in hot flames – may the harvest be good to the lords, may the hunger depart!
Ieva Kraule-Kūna (1987) was born in Riga. She has MA in Fine Arts from Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. She mostly produces sculptural objects using various materials (ceramics, stone, metal, etc.), accompanying them with short stories, where absurd adventures of fictive characters alternate with cockeyed interpretations of historical facts. In her works, Ieva Kraule-Kūna references fetishism, history, artisanship and aesthetics of the Soviet era while tracing the origins of both personal and collective aesthetic codes. Her most significant solo and duo exhibitions include: “Where My Cards Lay” (2021, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga), “Artist Crisis Center II – Tact Gear” together with Elīna Vītola (2020, P/////AKT, Amsterdam), “Hot Babas” (2019, Latvian National Museum of Art exhibition hall Arsenāls Radošā Darbnīca, Riga), “α: Deceived Deceivers” (2017, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga), “The person you are trying to reach is not available together” with Aidan Koch (2016, Hester, New York), “Qu’est-ce que ça peut faire tout ça together” with Kaspars Groševs (2015, Shanaynay, Paris), “Nobody Dances Like That Anymore” (2014, Gallery 427, Riga), “…if all you told was turned to gold” (2014, Vita Kuben gallery, Umeå), “11 out of 10” (2013, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga). Most significant group exhibitions: Paris Internationale(2015, Paris), XII Baltic Triennial (2015, CAC, Vilnius), “Le fragole del Baltico” (2015, CareOf, Milan), “Lily’s Pool” (2015, Art In General, New York). She is also the recipient of the Kim? Residency Award 2017 and, in 2017, spent three months at the Gasworks residency in London. She is a finalist of the Purvītis Prize 2021. She is a co-founder of Gallery 427 in Riga and co-curated its program from 2014 to 2016, and co-headed LOW gallery from 2020 to 2022.
Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation), Riga City Council
Wished Meself was Dead Hunter Longe 20/06 – 3/08/2024
Wished meself was dead Or better far instead [1] A piece of fossil coral A 21-million-year-old spine
The past inserts a finger into a slit on the skin of the present, and pulls. [2]
My dad died one year and eleven days ago. He had cancer and in the end, when he was really suffering, he decided to do an “assisted death.” Which essentially means he took his own life by consuming a mix of substances that put him to sleep and stopped his heart. He had two sets of twin boys, I have an identical twin and my older half-brothers are identical twins as well. The four of us and our uncle, my dad’s brother, were in the room with him, singing and holding his hands as he died. It was the most transcendental experience I’ve ever had. Time slipped. Either it actually slowed down or my perception of it was totally altered. Thirteen minutes seemed like two hours.
About six months later, one of my brothers attempted suicide. His survival was a miracle and I am monumentally grateful he is alive and well and back in good health. I felt profound empathy, for I too at times, in the depths of anguish, have wished myself were dead. Needless to say, these trying experiences have greatly impacted me. Thoughts of my brother and father have been conflated with my artistic preoccupations. These days, I wonder how heavy emotions resonate on a universal level, beyond human and into the depths of geologic time. I am curious as to how the occasional yet grave desire to be dead might resonate in the fossil record, and how grief might be petrified. Sea foam mixed with grief becomes solid [3]
My dad liked the Dubliners, who did a great rendition of the D. K. Gavan song, “Rocky Road to Dublin,” a line of which I have borrowed for the title of the exhibition. When I was a kid I didn’t care much for the song, now it hits hard. I have begun to let my emotions, along with my twin and my father become active in guiding my artistic practice. And I am making an effort to be more perceptive to the ways in which the dead influence the present and even care for the living. I want to honor them and remember them. To do so, I am “resisting the discipline of mourning and rationality.” [4] I try to recognize rationality as a myth and open myself to signs: when I cut an ammonite in half, I see a zygote splitting; the doubling of all the elements in the show are like twins; finding fossils of ancient sea creatures in the regions around Geneva makes me think of my father who would often say, “the ocean is my church.”
The work, Wave Offering, consists of an audio recording of waves made at the coast near Kalngale, which is being sent through LED lights making them flicker with the frequency of the sound. Two small solar panels placed into this light are plugged into portable speakers, converting the scintillating light back into sound. Light and sound are mediums—in the sense of an artistic medium, but also in the sense of a person or thing between two worlds, through whom the spirits of the dead are alleged to be able to contact the living. Since the advent of electricity, people have perceived messages through it from spirits or ghosts. It seems vulnerable to paranormal activity, a medium through which a less visible world beyond might occasionally make itself known. When talking about mediums in her book Our Grateful Dead, Vinciane Despret says, “they perform presentification, both in the sense of moving the past into the present and of making a presence.” [5] For me, fossils do this work too, while flickering lights bring about the feeling of a “presence,” or at least the potential presence of a presence. I’m using this synesthetic audio-visual medium to offer the sound of waves on a calm baltic sea back to my father, and back to the ancient marine life whose remains inhabit the exhibition.
Incredibly long distances of time fascinate me, probably because they are so hard to fathom. I am talking about spans of hundreds of millions of years. On the surface of the Earth, much rests from distant bygone eras which give hints to the elapse of eons, yet in order to grasp them we must rely on our imagination. It seems that time, existence and reality are matters of the imagination. Imagining the geologic and paleontologic past has forced me to question what we often refer to as “the arrow of time,” the sense that time moves unidirectionally. My questioning comes from a recognition of how the past is ever present, how entities and beings of the past still affect the present. In this way, certain objects and things seem to transcend time, existing both in the past, present and future. My work basically tries to embody this collapsed sense of time, perhaps even suggesting that our human perception of the past is somehow an alteration of it, to a degree which we might say we affect the past.
In her book Our Grateful Dead, Vinciane Despret cites Souriau on the notion of “instauration,” which is somehow to create but also to renew, to create from what already exists. “The artist, he [Souriau] says, is never the sole creator; he is ‘the instaurator of a work that comes to him but that, without him, would never proceed toward existence.'” She explains: “The work seeking existence calls on the painter, poet, or sculptor, and these have to devote themselves to bringing the work to its full completion, so it can be accomplished as a work.” [6] This feeling that the artwork has some agency of its own, that it comes from outside the artist, really resonates with my practice. For Despret, instauration also illustrates a methodology by which the dead play an active role in the lives of the living. Writer and filmmaker JF Martel notes a quite literal example: “our very language, the words we use to communicate with one another, are the relics of the dead.” [7] Consider that the petroleum remains of algae and plankton become packaging, clothes, and fuel; the calcium carbonate marine fossils of shells, bones and coral are the key ingredients of concrete; they are ancient yet integral to modernity.
For me, fossils are like gifts from the past. They inspire me. I “instaurate” with them. Once I hold them in my hands and look at them, they begin to give me ideas about how they might be incorporated into a work or installation. They are active in my practice and in becoming an artwork. Only once encountering two 21-million-year-old fossil whale vertebrae, could I have an idea of what to do with them. In the show, they are like twins in time and eyes of the past slipping into now.
I am interested in facilitating spaces or experiences in which the perception of time might be slightly altered. This effect is achieved through unusual combinations of materials and technologies—things both extremely old and rather new. One morning a few months ago, I woke up thinking of LSD, I must have dreamt of it. It occurred to me that this would be an unexpected material to combine with fossils. But I was unsure. Then a few days later, I came across an audio recording of my father describing his purchase of Owsley Stanley acid on blotter paper in 1969 and the epic trip that ensued. I took this as a sign, which led me to investigate the classic art that adorned LSD blotter paper, a “medium” of another dimension.[8]
On the work Afterlife Navigator (for Brian), the blotter tabs are adorned with the eye of Horace. I probably wouldn’t have included this iconography had I not looked up its history. In Egyptian mythology, Horace lost his eye in a battle with Set, which he then managed to get back and then give to his deceased father, Osiris, to help sustain him in the afterlife. These LSD blotter tabs are affixed directly to some of the fossils. Like this, the counterculture from which I am a descendent is put directly in relation with ancient remains, thus constituting an actual temporal slip. I am interested in facilitating spaces or experiences in which the perception of time might be slightly altered—offering refuge from the clock-face world of capitalist modernity and segmented time. Exiting rationality a bit, sensing a time slip, the past is more likely to move into the present. Despret says: “modifications of consciousness open consciousness to another level of reality.” For me, this seems to link back to the necessity of imagination in understanding deep time and in opening up to signs and messages from the past and from the dead.
The other day in the cemetery near my studio looking intently at the paths left by some critter on a gravestone underneath a yew tree, I thought, “we are the dead.” Yet, despite my confronting death, it remains the ultimate radical mystery wavering out in the void.
References [1] Lines borrowed from the 19th-century song “Rocky Road to Dublin” by the poet D. K. Gavan. [2] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974 [3] Lisa Robertson, Magenta Soul Whip, 2005 [4] Vinciane Despret, Our Grateful Dead, 2021, pg.70 [5] Ibid. pg.107 [6] Ibid. pg.8 [7] Weird Studies podcast, Jan 18, 2023, episode #138, at 1:05 min. [8] Erik Davis, Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, 2024 [9] Vinciane Despret, Our Grateful Dead, 2021, pg.62
Hunter Longe is originally from California (b. 1985) and currently lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and a Master of Fine Arts from Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Recent group and solo exhibitions have been at Centre d’art de Neuchâtel (2024); Soft Opening, London (2024); Kunsthaus Langenthal (2023), Last Tango, Zurich (2023); Sonnenstube, Lugano (2023); Espace 3353, Geneva (2023); Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2022); Krone Couronne, Biel/Bienne (2022); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2021); Musée Cantonal de Géologie, Lausanne (2019); NoMoon, New York (2019); Et al. Gallery, San Francisco (2018); LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina (2017); Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2017). In 2021, a book of his writing and drawings entitled DreamOre was published by Coda Press and he was a winner of the Swiss Art Awards.
Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation), Riga City Council, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia
427 Collection 0.0.1.0.0., 3/8, Bora Akinciturk, Ēriks Apaļais, Armands Benders, Māris Bišofs, Kaspars Brambergs, Frank Boyd, Anna Ceipe, Jānis Dzirnieks, Īrisa Erbse, Ricardo van Eyk, F5, Vincenzo Ferlita, Gints Gabrāns, GolfClayderman, Inese Groševa, Kaspars Groševs, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Philip Hinge, Katrīna Ieva, Atis Izands, Mirak Jamal, Labais Dāma, Raids Kalniņš, Lev Kazachenko, Venyamin Kazachenko, kormak, Ieva Kraule-Kūna, Austra Ķimele, Albin Looström, Cian McConn, Daria Melnikova, OAOA, Luīze Nežberte, Dāvis Ozols, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Carl Palm, Ieva Putniņa, Rūdis Romanoss, Gints Rudzītis, Matīss Runtulis, Līva Rutmane, Shady Ladies, Līga Spunde, Roberts Svizenecs, Rūdolfs Štamers, Viktor Timofeev, Marta Trektere, Evita Vasiljeva, Ola Vasiljeva, Elīna Vītola, Tore Wallert, Bogna Wisniewska, Amanda Ziemele 25/04 – 8/06/2024
Like any living space, the gallery’s office gradually sprouted with abandoned, forgotten, misdelivered, bartered works of art that have grown into the 427 Collection that will mark the 10th anniversary of the space. Consisting of sketches, drawings, paintings, video and sound works, sculptures and objects, photographs, and other mediums, the collection presents itself as an ever-shifting organism with possible continuations and mutations. The collection aims to explore what it means to exhibit a number of artworks that often appear in the collection in a rather processual and spontaneous manner.
Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation), Riga City Council
* a place where everything is made of linoleum, and where you think in linoleum.
about 23m2 2.5 – 3 mm thick linoleum crust inhabited by linoshavings
Originally formed from seismic chisel movements and colour eruptions. Eventually, it became inhabited by linoshavings, which evolved from chisel-cut beings. It is a place where the chisel doesn’t know how to stop, like the atmosphere enveloping the surface of a linoshavingsland, at times revealing the images of a creature in the linotectonic relief.
Paper does not exist in the linocut, it does not burden this place with its fragility and weakness, with its restrictive size and its unwillingness to accept the inescapable burden of the gravity of the planet “earth” and the laws of physics. Linolejija is a firm place.
Zane Putnina lives and works in Riga. Hanele’s prints are based on mythological images from folklore and legends, which she often recreates in large-scale linocut technique. Her large-scale compositions of images alternate with modest absurdities of everyday situations, which she calls “bregellies”. Hanele is interested in historical printmaking techniques and everything related to them. She continues her explorations into the world of linocut, taking as large a chisel as possible and trying to find a treasure among the shards of linoleum. She is rapidly approaching her first carved hectare of linoleum.
Support: VKKF (State Culture Capital Foundation), Riga City Council
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).
