The 15th edition of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s (LCCA) festival Survival Kit, one of its key endeavours and a major annual art event in the Baltics, announces its participating artists. Titled “Measures,” this year’s festival is curated by Jussi Koitela and takes place from September 6 to October 6, 2024.
The exhibition celebrates the different modes and temporalities of knowing by exploring material, cultural and social meaning within Riga’s urban context. It observes and investigates how the ecologies of knowledge that play an integral role in a city’s contemporary life, can help to create imagined narratives that shape the future of communal existence as we know it.
Across new commissions and existing works, participants—both Latvian and international—respond to these various modes of knowing that weave their way into social, political and environmental spheres, as well as into our daily embodied lives. Making unexpected connections, ecologies of knowledge linger and meander through, soil, river, bodies, minds, buildings, infrastructures, and nature-cultures.
Participating artists (*denotes a new commission):
Sajjad Abbas, *Malin Arnell & Mar Fjell, Monia Ben Hamouda, *Linda Boļšakova, Monika Czyżyk & Neil Luck, Jeremy Deller, Renée Green, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Toril Johannessen, *Jaana Laakkonen, *Kristoffer Ørum, Gerda Paliušytė, Yuri Pattison, *Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić, *Luīze Rukšāne, Vidha Saumya, *Līga Spunde, Isabella Solar Villaseca & Lou Mouw, *Laura Soisalon-Soininen, *Shubhangi Singh, Jon Benjamin Tallerås, Luna Lund Jensen, Eero Yli-Vakkuri, Konstantin Zhukov, Aimée Zito Lema
To take “measure” is a two-fold act: on one hand, it is scientific and quantitative, and on the other, it is a call to action. Presented across a number of nearby sites in Riga’s city centre on both sides of the Daugava river, “Measures” demonstrates how the knowledge of a city emerges from acutely personal experience, but also from communal struggles and values. It considers possible pasts, presents and futures by measuring, investigating and embracing the diverse knowledges embedded within the city of Riga and beyond, and invites audiences to engage with nature-culture environments, daily bodily experiences, and data and truth-making.
Curator Jussi Koitela elaborates, “Following various trajectories in both its physical environment and subject matters, audiences can engage with the exhibition by encountering causalities that connect different temporalities, collapsed distances and bodies across communities and locations, all the while fumbling amid a mesh of truth, alternative histories and situated knowledges.”
Celebrating contemporary art in the Baltics, Survival Kit 15 will open in line with the 15th Baltic Triennial, which this year takes place at the newly renovated CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania. Encouraging professionals and visitors to explore what the region has to offer this Autumn.
