I’m somewhere between Vilnius and Riga, maybe Ukmergė, pulled over in a parking lot, waiting to hear back from the press person. They’re busy, I’m in mid-air. I reached out to one of the artists in the show to get an answer, and a curator, who’s on holiday but still replies. I’m not sure if I’ll still make it in time to see Survival Kit 16. And if I don’t, all the planning, the babysitter, the rescheduling of family life, the petrol poured into the tank, the tyre pressure checked, will have been for nothing. So why go? Really. Why go? Because a thing that’s happened 16 times, that insists on existing, is worth showing up for, not just for the art, but for the people putting it on. In our current landscape, that’s no small feat.
‘We’re searching for processes and methodologies of decolonisation that will let us step out of the “post-Soviet” shadow, which is still a heavy burden,’ LCCA’s director, Solvita Krese, writes in her opening to the exhibition booklet.
It’s a sentiment that echoes across many exhibitions in the region, a kind of necessary preface. The legacy of the Soviet occupation remains close, only a generation removed, and its imprint continues to shape the cultural and political discourse in the here and now. For the younger generation of artists and curators, these histories are inescapable. Yet as these frameworks become more common, they also risk becoming formulaic, less a site of disruption, and more an expected entry point. Krese is right of course, and for many working within this context, none of this is news. It only reads as a revelation to those of us arriving from elsewhere (me). Still, when the curatorial framework is defined by inherited trauma, even with the aim of unlearning it, it risks reinforcing the very structures it seeks to dismantle. For example, the term post-Soviet (itself a colonial residue) defines nations in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus by what they were subjected to, and not by what they are. And with Russia’s present-day war machine reviving the rhetoric of ‘historical spheres of influence’, this shadow extends beyond history into present geopolitical realities.
Against this backdrop, the exhibition ‘House of See-More’, curated by Michał Grzegorzek, together with the artist duo Slavs and Tatars, sets the stage for a biennial committed to moving beyond reductive labels rooted in Cold War and imperial frameworks or rigid national identities, that continue to constrain self-definition and cultural understanding in the region. What sets this exhibition apart from other recent shows tackling similar themes is its deliberate inclusion of Islam and other often-overlooked influences as formative to Eastern Europe’s cultural and historical fabric, challenging more dominant narratives that have long marginalised these contributions. Central to this approach is the lens of the Simurgh, a mystical, shape-shifting bird found across the vast Eurasian landscape, symbolising unity in multiplicity. By inviting artists to engage with the Simurgh myth, the exhibition embraces flamboyance, plurality and fluidity, as strategies of thinking beyond boxes and squares, countering both identity reductionism, and the pressures of geopolitical tension. Instead, the curators propose focusing on shared affinities, such as rituals, languages, landscapes and traditions, that transcend these imposed borders. The exhibition isn’t so much about our differences as it is about the common ground we stand on.
It begins in the old water well, or rather before in the courtyard, where a sound piece by Demetrio Castellucci pulls at you like gravity, and simultaneously, in the right direction. For ‘House of See-More’, the artist created a series of new mixes structured to accompany the rhythm of the day throughout Survival Kit. Conceived as montages of wide-ranging and distant sounds, sourced from various sound archives, they disorient our auditory perception. At times atmospheric, at times dissonant, they offer not just background noise but a sonic counterpoint to the space they echo in. A step closer, at the threshold, Malina Suliman’s work greets you with scent-fragrances. Cinnamon, cumin and cardamom embrace you at the entrance. Her work Afghan Women Wishes spans several large fabric panels painted with phrases and symbols reflecting the harsh realities of life under the Taliban, drawing attention to the escalating violence against women since 2021. Spices, some of the few things Afghan women can still get their hands on, become both symbol and material. Alongside, Edit Karlson’s candles illuminate the well, a steady presence that contrasts the hurt above with a grounded warmth.
The rest of the exhibition takes you across the plaza and up a flight of stairs. Here, the layout of the exhibition across several rooms flips to tidy, even elegant: a clarity that I felt somehow worked against the exhibition’s stated ambitions. The structure creates corners, bluntly put, one for queer art, one for fun sculptures, another for diasporic memory. Rather than generating pollination, the arrangement flattens difference into thematic zones. What I lacked was dissonance, for sensibilities to clash, contradict and surprise. For example, I wanted Jurga Ivanauskaitė’s historical paintings of androgynous beings to hang beside a standout for me, Filipka Rutkowska’s series of reversible garments, clothes reminiscent of the 1990s, with outer shells that flip in a second to conceal or reveal a hidden lushness.
That said, many works resonate powerfully on their own terms.
In the first wing of the show, for instance, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s devastating work You Shouldn’t Have Seen This (2024) was displayed. This is a work that should not have been made, the artists acknowledge this themselves, and yet it exists: a slow, silent portrait of Ukrainian children orphaned by the war, illegally taken over the border to Russia, and now returned to their homeland. Their stillness evokes Warhol’s Sleepers, but the stakes are more brutal, historical. It should not be art. And the feeling of melancholy and despair stays with you long after watching it, intrusively. Just before that, Luīze Nežberte’s piece nods formally to Posenenske’s legacy of structural critique. The references to public space are clear, but the work seems content to echo rather than challenge. There’s a certain reconfigured flatness that annoys me, but at least that is a feeling too, and it certainly does not leave me untouched, much like the impractical bins it is composed of. In contrast, the work by Shadi Habib Allah, who managed to carve out space with such minimal gestures in a language uniquely his own, stood out easily. The same goes for Revolution Is a Dinner Party by Kexin Hao, a hand puppet performance through which the artist has reimaged Mao’s phrase through a surreal afterlife debate between a sparrow and a rat, symbols of state-led extermination campaigns, interrupted by a silverfish deity that shows that their argument over class and colonial violence are not so different from each other, but parts of the same body.
Despite the hopeful premise of the Simurgh myth, and the playfulness of some works, like Hao’s puppet theatre or Ola Vasiljeva’s historically layered new neon Bush Legs, there is a lot of hurt in this show, just as, well, there is in the world right now. ‘House of See-More’ does not try to simplify the narrative complexity, neither historical layers or current ones. Maybe that’s what Survival Kit ‘House of See-More’ really alludes to here: not allowing us to quickly move on, but encouraging the stubborn act of lingering, staying present. Of standing upright in a world that keeps trying to flatten you. Of simply, showing up.
The kits are all right, well,
maybe.
Sergey Shabohin, Reliquary XX–XXI, 2009–ongoing. Version 6: Bird Conclave, 2025. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Kexin Hao, Revolution Is a Dinner Party, 2025. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, Relativity of Simultaneity, 2023. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, A Corpse Made of Dust in the Future, 2024. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Exhibition view. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Exhibition view. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Marje Taska, Mythological landscapes, 1985–1987 and 2017–ongoing. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Marje Taska, Mythological landscapes, 1985–1987 and 2017–ongoing. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Edith Karlson, Can’t See, 2023. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Slavs and Tatars, Stilettos ‘C’, 2025. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Shadi Habib Allah, In Stock, 2018. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Oksana Shachko, Untitled (Miraculous Catch of Fish), 2016 and Untitled (Saint Lucas), 2016. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, You Shouldn’t Have to See This, 2024. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Filipka Rutkowska. Exhibition view. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Karol Radziszewski, Mon chéri Soviétique, 2021. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Slavs and Tatars, Stilettos ‘C’, 2025. Survival Kit 16: House of See-More. Photo: Kaspars Teilāns, courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
