Survival Kit 15: Festival artists and venues announced
The 15th edition of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s (LCCA) festival Survival Kit, one of its key endeavours and a major annual art event in the Baltics, announces its participating artists. Titled “Measures,” this year’s festival is curated by Jussi Koitela and takes place from 6 September to 6 October 2024.
The exhibition celebrates the different modes and temporalities of knowing by exploring material, cultural and social meaning within Riga’s urban context. It observes and investigates how the ecologies of knowledge that play an integral role in a city’s contemporary life, can help to create imagined narratives that shape the future of communal existence as we know it.
Across new commissions and existing works, participants - both Latvian and international - respond to these various modes of knowing that weave their way into social, political and environmental spheres, as well as into our daily embodied lives. Making unexpected connections, ecologies of knowledge linger and meander through, soil, river, bodies, minds, buildings, infrastructures, and nature-cultures.
Participating artists (*denotes a new commission)
Sajjad Abbas, *Malin Arnell & Mar Fjell, Monia Ben Hamouda, *Linda Boļšakova, Monika Czyżyk & Neil Luck, Jeremy Deller, Renée Green, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Toril Johannessen, *Jaana Laakkonen, *Kristoffer Ørum, Gerda Paliušytė, Yuri Pattison, *Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić, *Luīze Rukšāne, Vidha Saumya, *Līga Spunde, Isabella Solar Villaseca & Lou Mouw, *Laura Soisalon-Soininen, *Shubhangi Singh, Jon Benjamin Tallerås, Luna Lund Jensen, Eero Yli-Vakkuri, Konstantin Zhukov, Aimée Zito Lema.
To take “measure” is a two-fold act: on one hand, it is scientific and quantitative, and on the other, it is a call to action. Presented across a number of nearby sites in Riga’s city centre on both sides of the Daugava river, “Measures” demonstrates how the knowledge of a city emerges from acutely personal experience, but also from communal struggles and values. It considers possible pasts, presents and futures by measuring, investigating and embracing the diverse knowledges embedded within the city of Riga and beyond, and invites audiences to engage with nature-culture environments, daily bodily experiences, and data and truth-making.
Curator Jussi Koitela elaborates, “Following various trajectories in both its physical environment and subject matters, audiences can engage with the exhibition by encountering causalities that connect different temporalities, collapsed distances and bodies across communities and locations, all the while fumbling amid a mesh of truth, alternative histories and situated knowledges.”
For international press enquiries please contact Alexia Menikou: am@alexiamenkou.com
For press inquiries in Latvia please contact Dana Zālīte: dana@lcca.lv
About Jussi Koitela
Jussi Koitela is an independent curator and Director at M-Cult. His curatorial work intertwines art, embodied research methods, urban spatial contexts, collaboration, hospitality, and materiality in various forms of exhibitions and knowledge production. He is currently curator of the Pavilion of Finland at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia together with Yvonne Billmore (20 April - 24 November 2024). Between 2019 to 2023 they also curated “Rehearsing Hospitalities,” Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s public programme.
His selected curatorial work includes: Conflicting Relations at Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York, Editorial Tables: Reciprocal Hospitalities at The Showroom, London, Secured—Politics of Bodies and Space at Vantaa Art Museum Artsi. Performing the Fringe at Konsthall C and Pori Art Museum, Entangling Matter and Meaning/Intra-Structures—Monster of the Seven Lakes at Treignac Projet, Mattering City at SixtyEight Art Institute Copenhagen, City Agents at Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art (EKKM), Tallinn, Skills of Economy Sessions at Finnish Theatre Academy, Baltic Circle Festival and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, and Untitled (two takes on crises)—You Must Make Your Death Public at de Appel Art Centre, Amsterdam.
About Survival Kit
The contemporary art festival Survival Kit, comprising a curated exhibition and an event programme, was initiated in 2009 as a response to the economic crisis affecting Latvia at the time. Each year, the festival’s appointed curator (or curators) carefully selects the themes explored, inviting artists from around the world to offer alternative scenarios of survival. The festival’s mission to critically investigate and reflect on the evolution of contemporary society has made it a key platform for the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art to showcase its commitment to research, creation, and development of contemporary art processes in Latvia and internationally since 1993.
Survival Kit’s choice of venue is an integral part of the festival’s identity, as it inhabits empty buildings in Riga, exploring their potential and possible development strategies that could be used to revitalise them. Despite the often-challenging nature of these spaces, the festival emphasises the importance of accessibility, assisting people with disabilities.
