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Kim? Open Call 2025 Winner is Paula Punkstiņa

12.9.2025 - 30.9.2025

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre is pleased to announce the results of the Kim? Open Call 2025. Out of 45 submitted projects, this year’s laureate is artist Paula Punkstiņa. Her exhibition will take place in the spring of 2026 at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Sporta iela 2.

Punkstiņa’s project Liminal Compressions explores the fluidity of identity and processes of continuous reconstruction through photographic materials and texts imprinted onto flexible polyurethane foam (memory foam) sculptures. The works are supplemented with elements of taxidermy, bamboo arrows, and synthetic hair, while the central material—foam—becomes a metaphor for an essence that always adapts and yet returns to its original form.

Kim? Program Director Zane Onckule notes: “Emerging artist Paula Punkstiņa’s first solo exhibition at the institution is a sequential continuation of her previous projects, unfolding into new directions. In her work, Punkstiņa addresses themes such as identity, constructed belief systems, and personal ideologies. By merging reality with metaphorical imagination, she translates her conceptual ideas into tangible material forms—assemblages of objects and installations.

Symptomatic of the artist’s youth, various existential themes of being, together with the acquisition of ever-new experiences, mark her interest in reflecting on the fluidity of selfhood, its oscillations between persistence and impermanence, as well as the choices made and the building of future plans. Employing the seemingly innocent figure of the deer, which appears in her work visually and associatively, Punkstiņa unfolds reflections on naivety, belonging, and language, conceptualising them through the prism of collective identity.”

Press image: Paula Punkstiņa, 2025

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.

The Kim? Open Call initiative was launched in 2016 with the aim of recognising and supporting promising artists and curators, providing the best possible conditions for the realisation of their creative projects. Previous laureates include Anna Malicka, Annemarija Gulbe, Ieva Jakuša and Gundega Strauberga, Karlīna Mežecka, Sabīne Šnē, Jānis Krauklis, Toms Harjo and Jānis Dzirnieks, as well as curators Anna Laganovska, Žanete Liekīte and Laura Brokāne.