Homepage - Kim? Contemporary Art Centre

Exhibition dates: 14 March – 19 April 2026
Curator: Zane Onckule

What remains when we strip ourselves back to an essential core—and can that core ever be stable?

In The Arrows of Concerns, Paula Punkstiņa approaches identity as liminal, wounded, and continually reconstituted. The exhibition unfolds through material and psychological compressions in which the self bends, fractures, dissolves, and reforms. Oscillating between vulnerability, naivety, resistance, playfulness, and detachment, Punkstiņa’s works trace how subjectivity adapts under pressure without vanishing entirely.

At the exhibition center, flexible polyurethane memory foam serves as both structure and metaphor for exposed corporeality. It absorbs impact, yields, and slowly returns to form. Punkstiņa treats it as a model of “essence”: mutable yet retentive, marked by experience but resistant to permanent distortion. Coated, pierced, or coupled with intrusive elements—bamboo arrows, taxidermy fragments, bicycle parts, synthetic hair—the flesh-like material becomes a site of exposure. At times, it is sheathed in a honeyed, porous membrane resembling a second skin, suggesting protection without fully sealing the boundary between inside and out.

The sculptural objects on display operate as prosthetic frameworks for an existential narrative. Fragmented human and animal anatomies—hair, antlers, legs—embody unstable states of being, resonating with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, in which the body oscillates between identification and repulsion. Clinical and industrial references—forms reminiscent of operating tables and components of indeterminate transport mechanisms—introduce an atmosphere of calculated intervention and constrained movement. This sterility stands in stark contrast to the tenderness of the materials they penetrate, support, or encircle. The resulting tension echoes the artist’s own gesture—notes that often accompany her thinking: (..) to dodge the bullet, yet still bear the wound.

The deer recurs as a collective symbol rather than a literal figure. Connoting innocence, youth, and belonging, this Bambi stands in for a once-coherent identity later dismantled. By disassembling the image, Punkstiņa questions permanence and explores thresholds between life and death, presence and erasure. Passing appears not as an end, but as a transformation—redistribution rather than disappearance.

Photographic collages drawn from personal archives and found images extend these concerns into memory. They evoke searching and distortion, asking whether fractured or unwanted recollections can unsettle the self. Individuation begins with a cut. Over time, a second skin accumulates, layered with suppressed affects and disavowed experience. Though pride and self-narration attempt to overwrite them, these traces persist, quietly shaping identity.

In Heideggerian terms, being-in-the-world is inseparable from becoming; existence is engagement, not stasis. Punkstiņa’s practice inhabits this tension between dissolution and reconstruction, foregrounding vulnerability, interdependence, and an uneasy proximity to the object-subject.

Initially conceived as an open experiment, the exhibition marks a shift in material and conceptual approach. Moving beyond earlier work with aluminium plates and UV printing, Punkstiņa embraces processes that translate ideas directly into matter: burned edges, perforations, melted coatings. Translation itself becomes central—between language and material, experience and form, rupture and resonance.

Inflected by the artist’s formative years, The Arrows of Concerns centers on the fluidity of identity—its oscillation between stability and disintegration—and on the intimate calculus of choice, separation, loss, and self-redefinition. The work traces a subject in the midst of becoming, where each rupture recalibrates the terms of coherence. How many times must the “I” be wounded before adaptation hardens from reflex into structure—and when it returns to its seemingly “original” form, what sediments of memory and transformation continue to course through it?

Paula Punkstiņa is a recipient of Kim? Open Call 2026.

Paula Punkstiņa (b. 2001) is a Latvian visual artist. She graduated in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her work emphasises explorations of identity, fragility, and transitional states of disappearance. By combining philosophy with visual metaphors, Punkstiņa’s artistic practice engages with the translation of concepts into material form. Recent projects include a solo exhibition at DOM Gallery, Riga (2024) and a forthcoming duo show with Sara Francola at Art Au Centre, Liège (2026). Recent group exhibitions include the 5th and 6th editions of Black Market by Kim? (2024, 2025), Where Are You Currently? at Paradise, The Hague (2025), RESTART at Prospektas Gallery, Vilnius (2024), and the Limburg Biennale at Marres House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht (2024).

Paula Punkstiņa’s acknowledgements: family, Sara Francola, Tim Ross, Aida Valdés Gómez.

Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Kokmuiža, Media Port

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and exhibition team:
Executive Director: Evita Goze
Program Director: Zane Onckule
Project Manager: Katrīna Jauģiete
Communications Manager: Kristiāna Bērza
Sales Director: Dārta Purvlīce
Mediators: Betija Briede, Linda Šterna, Emīlija Austra Lodiņa, Alise Sedleniece
Technical team: Aldis Bušs, Andris Maračkovskis, Jānis Noviks
Design: Anna Ceipe
English translation: Valts Miķelsons
Latvian proofreading: Ilze Jansone
English proofreading: Will Mawhood

Exhibition dates: 14 March – 19 April 2026
Curator: Paolo Baggi

Nine columns are installed throughout the space. Vertical monoliths composed of enamelled ceramic tiles, they provoke awkwardness as a result of being depositaries of evolving, organic painterly processes and at the same time maintaining a totemic Minimalist-coded fixture, like John McCracken’s polished towers resurfaced after erosion. But maybe they’re closer to Anne Truitt’s boxes, considering how their formal rigidity and phallic verticality paradoxically generate the most organic appearance.

Séverine Heizmann Pozza’s practice draws on various interconnected systems: permaculture, ecology and divination. These shape dynamic structures made up of their own logics of transmission, as many complex sites which are thought of as nodes of overlapping interdependent zones, articulated by a site-responsive painting. The unpredictability and openness of ceramics, whose outcome is only revealed through the thermochemical process of the kiln—painting in the dark— answers those dynamic ecosystems by stating its own elsewhere, an autonomous site of fluxes and exchanges. Firmly closed when the firings take place, the kiln itself looks like a reactor of some sort, enclosing the radiation which effects the material: the surfaces are at times oxidated, due to the effect of a corrosive reaction, or show stronger material transformations through vitrification. Their colours further insist on the narrative of contamination: the luxurious fading palette of guppy blues, muddy browns, deep chartreuse and troubled aquamarine greens contrast with acidic oranges and red’s radiance due to the cadmium’s toxicity. The colors seem to owe their tint to outside processes. Consider the reduction leading to a metallic black, seemingly illuminated from inside, as if it owed its depth to some arcane power. Just as Riga Black Balsam isn’t Picon, it could happen that one black looks like another but doesn’t taste the same.

These displacements give them a feeling of exteriority reinforced at Kim?, appearing both as individuals and as a group, strangely repeating the space’s own pilasters, the structures seem withdrawn, cut off from the world. A separation which is further pushed by the organicity and outwardness of the works, which detach them from modernist sculpture. Consider how they reflect on each other when they’re close. They radiate outwards, absorb and redistribute. Their togetherness and seclusion are akin to the immanence of a rave, where, at the same time, nothing exists outside, and the end is inescapable. Set within this fleeting feeling of furtiveness, Settling at Dawn works as a time of grounding and resurrection. A germinal emergence, or as the first thing one sees after having come through the night.

I’ve been mostly talking about interdependence to understand how this “painting in an expanded field” manoeuvres a new consideration about the site, its complexity and heterogeneity. If an ecological consideration can be useful here, it is for the articulation of present thinking about the interdependence of events and processes in light of external disturbances: the sites we inhabit seem more and more unstable, from increasing shaky geological foundations to the return of full-fledged wars to geographies believed to be fixed. Against an isolating perspective, the various systems the artist calls upon lead to a consideration of the site in its multiplicity, as expanded nodes linked by multiple interdependent processes. By setting up a practice rooted in this contemporary thought, Séverine Heizmann Pozza elaborates a painterly agency which looks at accumulating thought and matter into a series of transformations and mutations, a hybridisation of the medium through contagion of knowledge. The exhibition’s spatiality itself becomes a site of meaning: consider the conjunctions of the structures throughout the space, mapping out a seemingly informative chart, like astral signs, and divination as a tool to reconfigure the given site.

Anne Truitt: “Have a feeling of having seen it all—all phenomena of whatever kind, a feeling of being exhausted with living—a fleeting impression of the ephemeral nature of actuality—as if the actual had ceased to interest me, and the virtual had silently usurped its place in my thought.”

Séverine Heizmann Pozza (b. 1994) is a visual artist and musician based in Geneva. She received her BA in Fine Arts from the HEAD Geneva School of Art and Design in 2018. Her work has recently been shown at personal exhibitions at Milieu, Bern (2024), and Kirchgasse, Steckborn (2021), and at group exhibitions, for instance at Forde, Geneva (2019).

Séverine Heizmann Pozza’s acknowledgements: Paolo Baggi and collaboration partners.

Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Pro Helvetia, Republic and Canton of Geneva, City of Lancy, Embassy of Switzerland in Latvia, Fondation Engelberts, Kokmuiža, Media Port