The exhibition ‘EDEN: Coming of Age’ will be on view from the 7th of June to the 3rd of August, 2025, at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre (Hanzas 22, Riga). The official opening takes place on the 6th of June.
Exhibition participants: Daniel Chew and Michaela Durand (US), GolfClayderman(Aksels Bruks (LV/CH) and Margrieta Griestiņa (LV)), Daiga Grantiņa (FR/LV), Ella Kruglyanskaya and Alan Reid (US), Maija Kurševa (LV), Josh Kline (US), Miķelis Mūrnieks (NL/LV), Aura Rosenberg (DE/US)
Opening performances on 6 June: Miho Hatori (US/JP), GolfClayderman and others
Lecture on June 10: We Don’t Need No Education: Curating within and beyond the School by Alaina Claire Feldman (US)
Finnisage performance on 1 August: Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas (LT), Jette Loona Hermanis (EE/LV), and Gloria Viktoria Regotz (CH)
Festival curators: Alaina Claire Feldman (US) and Zane Onckule (LV)
Courtyard/Garden Intervention: Students of the Interior Design Department of Art Academy of Latvia, led by Charly Blödel (DE/NL) and Edgars Jane (LV/NL) as part of Interior Design Summer School 2025
Festival team:
Festival director: Evita Goze
Communication: Žanete Liekīte
Project management: Katrīna Jauģiete
Festival design: Krišs Salmanis
EDEN: Coming of Age
Kim? Contemporary Art Centre is proud to announce the theme, participants and curators of the second Kim? Contemporary Art Festival. Titled Eden: Coming of Age, the festival and celebration marks the 16th anniversary (“sweet sixteen”) of the venerable arts organisation, which has played a pivotal role in supporting local and international contemporary art in Riga.
Founded in 2009, Kim? has worked with both emerging and renowned artists, theoreticians, curators, philosophers, translators and thinkers, aiming to provide a responsive context to their work and to make critical practices accessible to a wider audience. In this pivotal moment for the institution, EDEN: Coming of Age asks artists and audiences what it means to transition from youth to adulthood, from amateur to expert, from idealism to realism, and to embrace all the angst that comes with that.
Following the inaugural festival, New Address: EDEN, in 2024, the upcoming EDEN: Coming of Age returns to the same address at 22 Hanzas Street, the future site of a new, larger venue for Kim?. In this moment of transition for the institution, artists are invited to propose temporary installations that reference the festival’s theme and are inspired by the history of the building, which once housed several schools, including the Riga Technical College of Economics, the Riga Technical College of Food Industry Mechanics and Technology, and Riga Business College.
This history of education and knowledge accumulation as it relates to who gets to teach and what gets taught will play a formative role in these artistic interventions. Critical pedagogy and a rethinking of rigid fields of knowledge will be redefined through the lens of conviviality – through building relationships with people willing to participate in the creation of new social relations. In an era overdetermined by hyper-professionalisation and late-capitalist market demands, the festival’s playful programme supports interdisciplinary artworks, collaborative performances, and public programmes guiding the way towards a future adulthood that breaks moulds rather than casting them.
EDEN: Coming of Age gathers together a group of international and inter-generational artists who work in a wide range of media. The festival includes both new commissions and existing work that has never been shown in Riga. The exhibition will be accompanied with a rich series of public programmes including artist talks and expansive festival opening and closing events with performances, DJ sets, and live concerts.
Nestled inside the exhibition’s venue, the “Bootleg Library” will display unauthorised versions of books, zines, and YouTube links selected by artists and other festival participants that highly influenced their own coming-of-age. The festival will also be the site for the Summer School of the Interior Design Department at Art Academy of Latvia, resulting in a built intervention of an urban bar/stage activating Eden’s inner courtyard-garden as a social space.
At the same time as this year’s festival, the venue will also host the first Kim? Summer Residency recipients on the upper floor.
EDEN: Coming of Age is co-curated by Alaina Claire Feldman, chief curator of the University of California Irvine Langson Institute and Museum of California Art and Kim? programme director and curator Zane Onckule.
Full festival programme and further information about the exhibition to follow.
Supporters:
Ministry of Culture, State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Baltic-American Freedom Foundation, Absolut, Valmiermuiža
Media Support:
Arterritory, Echo Gone Wrong, Radio SWH
