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Cheese is time, time is money, money is monopoly

Artists: Mohamed Bourouissa, Stef Kamaris, Marie Vedel

Organized by SIGNAL – Center for Contemporary Art (Malmö)

Opening on March 15, 6-9 p.m.

To live costs money. For some, the market is ready to turn a business idea from dream to reality. For others, the door is only open to parallel activities based on the same business model—supply and demand. The difference is spelled exclusion. Exclusion from the market, from society, from the right to an equal life.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s video La valeur du produit (The value of the product) is a kind of crash course in business administration. The entrepreneurial strategy of selling a product at the right price and maintaining the balance between supply and demand is common to all commercial activities. The same objective, the same vocabulary, just a different product—the sale of “organic” goods to bring in “wheat” (French slang for money).

Cheese is time, time is money, money is monopoly. Stef Kamaris’ sculptural objects and material experiments could not express it better. They are dripping with excess, like extra-everything materialized. PacMen made from cheese (Emmental and Babybel), cakes made from Danablu, slot machines, and credit rocks—a constant quest for the desire of consumption. The logic of free market democratization is skewed, and monopoly is the injustice of the economic system to win the game.

Marie Vedel’s pigmented wax tongues, The Singer’s Tongue, reach up from the ground and seem to sing out their grief, desire, and lost love. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice embodies lovers, but the crooning Orpheus fails to rescue his beloved from the underworld. His desire takes over, and at the same moment, he loses her forever. Her name, Eurydice, means the profound justice.

Individual success is measured in money. To the tune of “Foetus” by Booba, one of the key figures in French hip-hop, euro coins are produced en masse by La Monnaie de Paris (Paris Mint). In Mohamed Bourouissa’s version, the coins are embossed with the rapper’s portrait. The raw lyrics of society are monetized, and the profit circle is complete. 

Mohamed Bourouissa (1978, Blida, Algeria) lives and works in Paris, France.

Stef Kamaris (1977, Heraklion, Greece) lives and works in Athens, Greece. 

Marie Vedel (1990, Copenhagen, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen and Sønderho, Denmark. 

SIGNAL – Center for Contemporary Art (1998) is an independent art space in Malmö, Sweden.

Curators: Elena Tzotzi and Carl Lindh, Co-directors of SIGNAL

Graphic design: Valters Kalsers

Lighting designer: Romāns Medvedevs

Translations: Valts Miķelsons

Program Director: Zane Onckule

Executive Director: Evita Goze

Project Assistant: Katrīna Jaugiete

Communication: Austra Stupele

Supported by:

Ministry of Culture, State Culture Capital Foundation, Danish Arts Foundation, Absolut, Valmiermuižas alus.

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From March 16 to May 19, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, in collaboration with VV Foundation, presents the largest solo show of artist Miķelis Mūrnieks to date.

Opening on March 15, 6-9 p.m.

Since the start of the century, our attention has been directed to the need to be more fluid — it is preached that in times of dynamic change, it will become a valuable tool for managing everyday life. With the capitalist work rhythm dictating the tempo of everyday life, a hypnotic state can be reached that is as though gazing at the ceaseless flow of water. The sculpting of this formless substance is the primary material common denominator for the works created for the exhibition. Drawn in a whirlpool of the mass of various rules, consumer illusions, and systems, the viewer is invited to explore the environment in which the artist untangles deeply personal yet, at the same time, socially descriptive experiences that are hidden behind a dreamy yet fragile shroud.

The threads of contradiction and incomprehension are reflected not only in the world of ideas but also in the manifestly visible — surprising variety of states of water. Fictional events and uncomfortable truths will serve as an invitation to catch the waves of self- and other reflections. In the socially critical spirit characteristic of Mūrnieks’ work, this series will also investigate and reconsider the shortcuts of perception automated by consciousness.

Last summer, Miķelis Mūrnieks earned a master’s degree at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam with the work Fountain. This work will serve as the nucleus of the exhibition, which will be elaborated with a new series of sculptural novels and extensive scenography.

Miķelis Mūrnieks (1995) lives and works in Amsterdam. Since 2017, he has participated in group exhibitions and has held two personal exhibitions in Riga at Look! Gallery and culture space Tur. His recent exhibitions include Sculpture Quadrennial Miracles of Democracy with the work Aurora and group exhibition Synthesis. Study of the Truth Through Movement, Progress and Divergence; MABOCA festival; duo exhibition Security Patterns at LOW gallery. In his work, the young artist refers to the ready-made, creating objects and installations from familiar materials and forms. A social criticism fitting to contemporary culture has become one of Mūrnieks’ primary means of expression, imbued with an ironic and socio-analytical character.

Curator: Elīza Elizabete Ramza

Flowers: Evija Krištopane

3D print: Matīss Balodis, Armands Freibergs

Mechanical solutions: Māris Mūrnieks

Graphic design: Valters Kalsers

Lighting designer: Romāns Medvedevs

Translations: Valts Miķelsons

Program Director: Zane Onckule

Executive Director: Evita Goze

Project Assistant: Katrīna Jaugiete

Communication: Austra Stupele

Supported by:

Ministry of Culture, State Culture Capital Foundation, LODE, Wood Point, Akvedukts, Absolut, Valmiermuižas alus. 

Acknowledgements:

BMT Workshop, Imants Pankars

In 2023, four art institutions around the Baltic Sea came together to activate a dialogue and explore different ways of approaching climate change beyond the conventional image. The garden as a concept serves as a common vantage point for the discussions. What happens if we view gardens as ecosystems with their own agency, beyond the human gaze?

The concept of garden

The way we give meaning to our environment often seems obvious, but we tend not to take into consideration the tacit assumptions and discourses that shape our understanding of the world. The garden, as an example, might appear to us mainly as a space producing pleasure for us humans. But the garden could also act as a living metaphor for symbiotic growth and coexistence. A garden displays and communicates how one organism cannot exist without affecting another. Having a garden requires taking care not only of what serves our own needs, but of the whole fragile ecosystem and the different beings that maintain the balance in the space. Yet, gardens have often been treated as a mere form of decoration, and a symbol of human power dominance over nature. Isn’t that rather identical to the human relationship with the environment? What purposes do gardens serve and what identity do they hold beyond human needs, considering the climate crisis? The relationship between humans and gardens has been an ancient, evolutionary, and synergetic one from which we can draw a lot of knowledge.

A Nordic-Baltic network of art institutions

This Nordic-Baltic network explores curatorial and other approaches available to art institutions in the context of climate change, pollution, and threats towards biodiversity, as well as what the necessary transitions might mean for us as public spaces or for art and society at large. We believe that curated spaces can play a key role in developing insights, awareness, and know-how that extends beyond the conventional mediatizations of climate change.

This network has received project support from the Nordic Culture Point

The purpose of the project is to create and establish a network of art institutions around the Baltic Sea, for sharing experiences and producing new knowledge on the concept of garden and curatorial methods in times of climate change. The network aims to utilize the art sector’s leadership to advance awareness of the means to combat the climate crisis, build stronger democratic institutions and tackle other sustainability goals.

Partners

The project is a collaboration between CAC Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, KAI in Tallinn, Kim? in Riga, and Färgfabriken in Stockholm. It has received support from the Nordic-Baltic mobility program for culture at the Nordic Culture Point.

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Kim? Contemporary Art Centre is pleased to announce the launch of Riga Technoculture Research Unit’s (RTRU) Season 2 Betweenness:

www.rtru.org

Participants: 

Uģis Albiņš (Riga)

Aleksandra Samulenkova (Harlem)

Dietmar Koering (Cologne)

Ignas Krunglevicius (Oslo)

Daria Popolitova (Tallinn)

Sebastian Muehl (Berlin)

Marc Ries (Vienna)

Eva Sommeregger (Vienna)

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (Rome)

Anastasia Sosunova (Vilnius)

Norman Orro & Joonas Timmi (Tallinn)

Iliāna Veinberga (Riga)

Curated by Elizaveta Shneyderman and Zane Onckule.

RTRU (Riga Technoculture Research Unit) is committed to the expanding universe of technical images in contemporary art practice. Our central premise is that art and emerging media don’t pre-exist culture but instead emerge from it. The feedback loop between media and its reception, between technics and culture, suggests a transductive relationship: bodies, images, technologies, and aesthetic modes merge in relation to and co-determine one another. It is only through engagements with and mediations of contemporary culture that we can effectively investigate and observe the technoculture that augments and shapes our world. We value and hope to display artwork and writing that is invested in the sub-perceptual effects that result from the contemporary regime of images.

By revealing novel ways art and technology affect one another, RTRU critiques the contemporary framing of emerging media/technology as entirely aligned with an economy of representation and pushes back against the notion that born-digital art, NFTs, and Web 3.0 are de-facto emancipatory technologies. We situate emerging media in recognizable pre-histories rather than as the unique products of contemporary transformations.

By invitation only, RTRU commissions and gathers materials from culture workers — artists, curators, and writers — that present multifaceted engagement with current theoretical trends while also questioning the hegemony of techno-positivist paradigms. RTRU is looking for something in present modes of visualization that are functions or signs of things to come — evidence of the ways we are starting to see ourselves more dynamically. Furthermore, RTRU emphasizes a focus on the particular localities of Riga, Latvia, and the Baltics, as well as the historical and cultural perspectives immanent to them.

Published on a seasonal basis, RTRU takes on a different theme that guides the work commissioned for each iteration. At RTRU, rigorous, thought-provoking, and decidedly niche content manifests as an educational depository. Though the site’s name denotes a possible connection to an existing technical university, it is more likely to occupy an informal, elective, and “passive” pedagogical model.

RTRU’s look-body is created, designed, and programmed by Becca Abbe. Not only does it reveal the inner workings of its indexically designed, web-based framework, but through its grid-based guiding structure, it further activates the thematic arc conducted by our contributors, giving us a chance to peer “from behind.”

Supported by: