Kim? Contemporary Art Center is pleased to announce: the recipient of the Kim? Residency Award 2024 is artist Jānis Dzirnieks. Starting this September, Jānis Dzirnieks will spend two months at ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) residency in New York City. Jānis Dzirnieks is the fifth Latvian artist to receive a residency opportunity in NYC through the Kim? and ISCP collaboration.
The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) is a leading nonprofit, residency-based contemporary art institution for emerging to mid-career artists and curators from around the world. Founded in 1994, ISCP has hosted over 1,300 artists and curators from more than 55 countries. Jānis Dzirnieks will be one of 35 residents selected to present his work to internationally renowned curators and art professionals during study visits. This opportunity will foster the exchange of ideas, enhance international recognition of his practice, and facilitate the creation of new professional contacts.
During the residency, the artist will continue to develop his practice, which explores themes of technological efficiency and environmental degradation, highlighting society’s relentless pursuit of optimization. By transforming industrial waste into thought-provoking installations, Dzirnieks’ work reflects on the ecological and social consequences of constant progress, encouraging us to reconsider our relationship with technology and nature. During this period, the artist will also engage in new creative experiments inspired by his experiences in the metropolis.
The Residency Award, established in 2015, aims to promote the development, professional growth, and international recognition of Latvian artists. It provides a promising Latvian artist with the opportunity to participate in a residency program at one of Kim?’s partner organizations abroad. Previous winners of the Residency Award include Daria Melnikova, who attended KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2015); Ieva Epnere, ISCP residency, New York (2016); Ieva Kraule, Gasworks residency, London (2017); Diāna Tamane, Artport Tel Aviv residency (2018); Maija Kurševa, ISCP residency, New York (2019); Krišs Salmanis, ISCP residency, New York (2021); Elza Sīle, ISCP residency, New York (2022); and Līga Spunde, ISCP residency, New York (2023).
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:
Opening: 20 September 2024
20 September–17 November 2024
Curator: Zane Onckule
Kim? Contemporary Art Centre’s autumn season exhibition programme opens with a special collaboration: a spatial installation by Inga Meldere and Luīze Nežberte, encompassing newly created works by both artists, as well as works never previously exhibited in Latvia. The exhibition space includes several series of works: sculptures, installations, drawings and paintings which study and reflect regional, social and culture-historical details. These series of works establish a dialogue between the practices of two artists from different generations, which reflect the rebirth of narrative in visual art, an ethically grounded approach to matter and respect towards the heritage of the past.
When beginning to prepare the exhibition, Meldere and Nežberte researched the architectural heritage, which follows from the work of Latvian architect and ethnographer, founder of the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia, Pauls Kundziņš (1888–1983). Kundziņš’s unique contribution consisted of studying and preserving for future generations important architectural elements, such as the so-called “sun-shaped” (“sauļotās”) columns in Latvian wooden architecture from the 18th century, which are noteworthy as historically significant formal exercises, and which furthermore open the way towards a search for parallels, comparisons and context with “idea fields” on a register similar to those seen, for example, in modernist artist Constantin Brancusi’s (1876–1957) Endless Column.
In her individual practice, Meldere is preoccupied with abstracted and poetic painterly investigations – “hand exercises” – based on what she has observed as part of her daily routine, read, or noticed on her smartphone. References to what has been experienced are interpreted visually: paraphrased and approximated in fragmentary oil-on-paper sketches of seemingly recognisable objects or creatures. Printed on canvas and articulated in spatial installations, these references conjure up a variety of surreal situations. Employing interdisciplinary, innovatory and speculative approaches borrowed from her education in painting conservation and contemporary art, Meldere delves into tracing transience, and into questions touching on social history, authenticity and microhistories.
Meanwhile, Nežberte, in her series of works included in the exhibition, takes up the conceptual thread related to forms of vernacular architecture by making sculptures. These are column-like vertical structures assembled from modular elements, their forms borrowed from the sketches Kundziņš developed for the bandstand of the 1926 Song Festival, as well as from stylised replicas of the columns from the first state-protected cultural monument in Latvia – the Community House of the Congregation of Moravian Brethren in Gaide. By organically integrating object, image-making and text, a series of metal sculptures made specially for this exhibition uncover Nežberte’s fascination with the techniques of collecting, quoting and collage. These formal experiments with objet trouvé and the dissipation of authorship through creative appropriation are further transposed in the zine accompanying the exhibition, which brings together inspirational and research references in visual and textual form, as well as a specially created literary passage by poet Raimonds Ķirķis.
Further developing collaborative practices, the questioning of authorship and the authority of the solitary artist figure, part of the exhibition is a collective collaboration – a spatial sand installation, or “pigment room”, the making of which involved the artists Ieva Putniņa and Elīna Vītola. The artists use methods to extract Lake pigments from local plants such as meadowsweet, yarrow, cow wheat, blueberry, sea-buckthorn and birch, and to place them on a white sand “canvas”, thus broadening the imaginative potential of painting and showing the resources of Latvian and Baltic flora.
As an artistically sensitive and tonally rich presentation, Meldere and Nežberte’s Sunpoles also touches on aspects of ecological, economic and social sustainability. Reflecting on the potential announced by Symbiocene, or reflections on humanity from outside the anthropocentric consciousness, the exhibition highlights the necessity to resolve the issues raised by chaos and constant change with the aim of replanting (in ourselves) understanding towards the interrelationship between humanity and nature.
Acknowledgements: Zuzāns Collection, Riežupe Sand Caves, Terēze Juškus, Reina Semule.
Supporters: Ministry of Culture, State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Embassy of Finland in Riga, Valmiermuiža.
Artist Biographies
Inga Meldere (b. 1979, Kuldīga) lives and works in Helsinki. She studied at the University of Latvia, the Art Academy of Latvia and The University of the Arts in Helsinki, as well as attending the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Her recent exhibitions include the personal exhibition Brethwork, Pech, Vienna (2024); Blootooth (Sister N) Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn (2022); the group exhibition Don’t Cry! Feminist Perspectives in Latvian Art, LNMA (2023); and Archaeologists of Memory: Vitols Contemporary Art Collection at the KUMU museum of contemporary art in Tallinn (2022) and the international Helsinki Biennial: The Same Sea in Vallisaari (2021). She is involved in running different workshops related to the methods of natural colour pigment extraction.
Luīze Nežberte (b. 1998, Riga, Latvia) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Currently she is studying visual arts at the University of Fine Arts Vienna. Most recent exhibition: the personal exhibition Clump Spirit at 427 Gallery (Riga, 2023); duo and group exhibitions: Come As You Are, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2024); A simultaneity of stories-so-far, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, (Vienna, 2024); Fibbing, Fabulation, Feigning, House of Spouse (Vienna, 2023); Vienna Seduction, SPOILER (Berlin, 2023); art in public space: How Much Can a Boat Carry (Salzkammergut, 2024). Since 2023, she has been co-curating the exhibition program at Pech in Vienna, Austria.
With the participation of artists: Ieva Putniņa, Elīna Vītola
Text of the accompanying zine: Raimonds Ķirķis
Project management: Evita Goze
Project assistant: Katrīna Jauģiete
Communication: Žanete Liekīte
Technical team: Andris Maračkovskis, Guntis Jasotis
Graphic design: Stefans Pavlovskis
Proofreading LV: Ilze Jansone
Translation ENG: Valts Miķelsons, Lauris Veips
Proofreading ENG: Will Mawhood
Exhibition mediators: Marta Andersone, Beatrise Šulte, Marija Viņķele