Jumana Manna & Sille Storihle, ‘The Goodness Regime’, video, 2013
On Friday, March 14th, 6 pm Riga Art Space (3 Kungu Street, Riga) opens an international exhibition Re: visited by the LCCA, questioning the current role of art biennials. Solvita Krese, the event’s curator and director of the LCCA, has selected art works by various international artists recently represented at the most significant art biennials and shows abroad, such as Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, the Venice Biennial, the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, the Istanbul Biennial and others.
Art history today is being written by exhibitions, which have become an important medium through which contemporary art is articulated and positioned. One of the exhibition formats that have actively spread worldwide over the last decades is the biennale. Next to its semantic meaning, which indicates an event that takes place every other year, the word also describes an internationally visible, large-scale art mega-show akin to the founder of the tradition, the Venice Biennale.
How to approach the advance of the relatively new phenomenon of the biennale? As an element of the entertainment or tourist industry that feeds the consumer society’s demand for culture festivalisation, a new Disneyland which deforms the logical development of art processes? Or, on the contrary, can biennales become platforms for creating experimental exhibitions and provide an alternative to museums, thus allowing more flexible development of art processes and providing immediate response to the latest tendencies and events?
The curator explains the concept of show: ‘Re: visited is not an attempt to create a puzzle or a mosaic, a kind of an anthology of biennials or an overview of the latest art events. The exhibition is a subjective view that tends to zoom in on otherness reflected in various forms of knowledge. Different experiences rooted in a multiplicity of cultures and social textures may create tension between affiliation and non-affiliation, between inclusion and exclusion or extrusion.’
Participating artists: Umida Akhmedova (UZ), Kristīne Alksne (LV) & Emmanuel Pidré (AR/DE), Paweł Althamer (PL), Petra Brauer (SE) & Marius Dybwad Brandrud (SE), Meschac Gaba (BJ/NL), Igor Grubić (HR), Rana Hamadeh (LB/NL), Jumaadi (ID/AU), Eva Kotátková (CZ), Nicolas Kozakis & Raoul Vaneigem (BE), Ann Lislegaard (NO/DK), Jumana Manna (USA/DE) & Sille Storihle (NO), Antonio Vega Macotela (MX), Mark Manders (NL/BE), Paulo Nazareth (BR), Selma and Sofiane Ouissi (TN/FR), Konstanze Schmitt (DE) and Corin Sworn (UK).
