EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap MAY 29 at Hanzas street 22!
29.5.2026 - 12.7.2026
Cammisa Buerhaus, Zenta Dzividzinska, Sophia Giovannitti, Evija Krištopane, Reba Maybury, Elza Sīle ⩙ Aly Milk, Mindy Seu, SAGG Napoli, Sylvie Fleury, Sophie Thun, Sabīne Vernere, and Paula Zvane
Curated by: Zane Onckule
Venue: Kim? off-site future address: Hanzas street 22, Riga
Exhibition dates: May 30 – July 12, 2026
Opening: May 29, 6-10 pm as part of Riga Art Week (RAW)
Opening evening performances: Paula Zvane, Cammisa Buerhaus, Liudmila
May 30 4 pm: performative-lecture Confession Prototype 1 by Sophia Giovannitti
July 3 7:30 pm: performative-lecture The Sexual History of Internet by Mindy Seu as part of Riga Contemporary 2026
EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap stages desire as labor and sex as one of its most regulated, exhausted, and persistently unfinished forms. The title, EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap, draws on the double meaning of “wet work,” referring both to covert operations and to forms of labor that leave a trace. It is these practices and artworks which expand sexual, emotional, and domestic work into modes of maintenance that accumulate, rather than resolve, into meaning. “Over Lap” signals repetition and spill, where actions do not conclude but instead extend across time, overlapping, leaking, and returning.
Throughout EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap, the notion of sexualized labor-work functions as both obligation and survival tactic, operating simultaneously as an aesthetic and a strategy for artistic emancipation. Exhibition participants—figures of intimate, creative labor—working girls, attention operators, and mediators of intimacy, render desire procedural, scheduled, rehearsed, and reproducible. Their body (of work) is maintained, trained, corrected, and optimized, its value measured in stamina—the capacity to sustain a pose, a mood, and a charge.
The exhibition behaves like both a body and a system: disciplined yet responsive, humid and self-aware, and constantly alert to its own exposure. Here, sex operates less as a discrete event than as an atmosphere—a low pressure zone shaping posture, attention, and endurance over extended durations. Desire becomes a climate to inhabit rather than a moment to complete. It detaches from fixed endings, dispersing into works, surfaces, and treatments of space, in waiting, in looking, in the subtle negotiations of proximity and access, where pleasure accumulates precisely by refusing closure.
With new and existing art works, installations, and performances spanning from analogue processes to “digital wetwares”, EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap sustains the infrastructure of desire through exhibition areas associatively shifting between functional sites: bedroom-after hour zone into auditorium, bathroom-wet room into confessional, gym into club into darkroom – all towards a central hall (“aktu zāle”), carrying the double meaning of “akts”, act and nude, finally climaxing in an exhibitionary attempt to center the concept of exposure as both a performance and condition at once.
In the background of societal-environmental collapse and the widespread resurgence of hatred, prejudice, and bigotry—especially where freedom of erotic and artistic expression is concerned—EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap treats, firstly, censorship—the other oldest profession—not as a prohibition but as an intentional gesture, and, secondly, sin as an age old myth born out of the garden of Eden, less as an origin story than as a management problem.
Reframing perspectives from culturally and societally imposed models of embodied authority and inherited hierarchies that privilege certain modes of looking and consumption, the exhibition is an act itself that acknowledges, centers, and supports women as protagonists and house masters in an attempt to set their own rhythm, manage their own environment, and closely guarding and practice exposure on their own terms.
Control over rhythm, gaze, and terms remains provisional, requiring constant realignment. Power circulates as much through measured concession as it does through overt assertion, and those who appear to accommodate often structure the encounter from within, exposing uneven distributions of attention, entitlement, and reward. Refusal becomes a technique, and strategic abstinence suspends completion and holds energy in reserve. In this way, authority and ownership are relational and a practice of attentiveness, pressure, duration, and resistance, while desire remains ambivalent, seductive, and self-actualized, binding pleasure to labor-work in ways that never fully dry.
Please note that the exhibition contains erotic and sexual themes. The exhibition is not recommended for visitors under 18, and minors may enter only with an adult.
Project Director: Evita Goze
Project Management: Jegors Buimisters
Communication: Kristiāna Bērza
Design: Krišs Salmanis
Latvian proofediting: Ilze Jansone
English proofediting: Elizaveta Schneyderman
Festival supporters: Ministry of Culture, Riga City Council, State Culture Capital Foundation
Festival partners: Riga Contemporary 2026, Riga Art Week (RAW)