EDEN: Coming of Age  

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre’s annual festival

 

 

Dates: 7 June–3 August 2025

 

Exhibition hours:
Wed–Fri: 14:00–19:00
Sat: 12:00–17:00

 

Participants: Daniel Chew and Michaela Durand (US), GolfClayderman (Aksels Bruks, LV/CH) and Margrieta Griestiņa, LV), Daiga Grantiņa (FR/LV), Ella Kruglyanskaya and Alan Reid (US), Maija Kurševa (LV), Josh Kline (US), Miķelis Mūrnieks (NL/LV), Aura Rosenberg (DE/US), Bootleg Library x Mika Solomon (US/LV), Urban Bar (Charly Blödel (DE/NL) and Edgars Jane (LV/NL))

 

Curators: Alaina Claire Feldman (US) and Zane Onckule (LV)

 

June 6: Opening evening program:

 

• 18:00 doors open
• 19:00 performance by GolfClayderman 
• 20:00 performance by Miho Hatori (US/JP) with participation of Aleksandr Aleksandrov (LV), John Miller (US)
• 21:00-23:00 dj duo Laiva Maikule 

 

June 10 18:00: Lecture We Don’t Need No Education: Curating within and beyond the School by Alaina Claire Feldman (US)

 

June 11 18:00:  A Shade Colder (Tallinn) magazine presentation by Keiu Krikmann, Johanna Ruukholm and Martina Gofman (Jojo & me Studio)

 

August 3  19:00 Finissage: Performance by Jette Loona Hermanis

 

“It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.” –Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons

 

Titled EDEN Coming of Age, this festival and celebration marks the 16th anniversary (“sweet sixteen”) of the venerable arts organisation, which has played a pivotal role in supporting local and international contemporary art in Riga. 

 

Founded in 2009, Kim? has worked with both emerging and renowned artists, theoreticians, curators, philosophers, translators and thinkers, aiming to provide a responsive context to their work and to make critical practices accessible to a wider audience. In this critical moment for the institution, EDEN: Coming of Age asks artists and audiences what it means to transition from youth to adulthood, from amateur to expert, from idealism to realism, and to embrace all the angst that comes with that.

 

Following the inaugural festival, EDEN: New Address, in 2024, this year’s EDEN: Coming of Age returns to the same address at 22 Hanzas Street, the future site of a new, larger venue for Kim?. In this moment of transition for the institution, artists are invited to conceive temporary installations that reference the festival’s theme and are inspired by the history of the building, which once housed several schools, including the Riga Technical College of Economics, the Riga Technical College of Food Industry Mechanics and Technology, and Riga Business College. The school is often the site of regulation and professionalisation of personhood where very early on the classroom acts as a fortification of ideals. 

 

This history of education and knowledge accumulation as it relates to who gets to teach and what gets taught play a formative role in these artistic interventions. Here, artists toy with the notion of an undercommons, a refuge where one is skeptical of the ivory tower but works within it to radically create new lenses of conviviality. They do this through building relationships with people willing to participate in the creation of new social relations and appropriating and satirizing the overdetermined hyper-professionalisation and late-capitalist market demands. EDEN: Coming of Age’s playful programme supports interdisciplinary artworks, collaborative performances, and public programmes guiding the way towards a future adulthood that breaks moulds rather than casting them. 

 

EDEN: Coming of Age gathers together a group of international and inter-generational artists who work in a wide range of media. The festival includes both new commissions and existing work that has never been shown in Riga. The exhibition is accompanied with a rich series of public programmes, and expansive festival opening and closing events with performances, DJ sets, and live concerts. 

 

Nestled inside the exhibition’s venue, the Bootleg Library displays unauthorised versions of books, zines, and YouTube links selected by artists and other invited contributors that highly influenced their own coming-of-age. The festival is also the site for the Summer School of the Interior Design Department at Art Academy of Latvia, resulting in a built intervention of an Urban Bar activating EDEN’s inner courtyard-garden as a social space.

 

 

Project Director: Evita Goze

Project managment: Katrīna Jauģiete

Communication: Žanete Liekīte

Design: Krišs Salmanis

Display solution: Studio SIJA Arhitekti (Artūrs Tols, Kristiāna Erta)

Technical team: Aldis Bušs, Andris Maračkovskis, Romāns Medvedevs, Jānis Noviks, VPT grupa

Volunteer Coordinator: Beatrise Šulte

Mediators: Linda Bogdanoviča, Betija Briede, Anete Medniece, Beatrise Šulte

 

 

 

Supporters: Ministry of Culture, State Culture Capital Foundation, Baltic-American Freedom Foundation, Neputns, Valmiermuiža