“We live in a world of agony,” begins the keynote address through Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, chief curator of the current edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA2). Lamarche-Vadel speaks in a disused port warehouse in front of an audience sitting in consciously litious sand chairs; his words, and his resonance in the gigantic area (far from filling under the familiar precept of social estrangement), speak of the context of RIBOCA2, a biennial that is positioned in the middle of a pandemic.
The biennial, which was originally scheduled to open in May and would last five months, was originally conceived with the curatorial theme of “reencanto”. The aim of reflecting on the prospect of an imminent cataclysm and the desire to reconsider our position in the world: to create a space for choice of voices and visions. A re-evaluation of our position and values – and indeed the question of who can participate in a fresh art biennial – was promptly echoed in the diversity of RIBOCA2 “participants”, a term that purported to recognize that all those who paint in the biennial identify as artists. These come with Dr. Vija Enia, an herbal expert, who bombed the site with medicinal plants, and Erika ‘Aya’ Eiffel, a competitive archer and founder of the objectophysial organization Objectum-Sexuality Internationale, which presents several of her “partners”, and added a long Japanese bow and bridge model. As Lamarche-Vadel points out in his opening speech, the concept of expanding the barriers of art dates back to Marcel Duchamp. The question may be asked: how radical can adopting a centuries-old artistic strategy be or simply looking to the future? The real check of RIBOCA2’s commitment to openness and adaptability, in many ways, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.
With Covid-19, a concept has come true: the expected forward-looking collapse had occurred, and with it the end of this specific world. Biennale Executive Director Anastasia Blokhina describes how, after postponing RIBOCA2 arrangements in March, the team learned that this “should take place this year.” Instead of putting it off in the face of something resembling normality, the occasion would be given (albeit with a much shorter duration of 3 weeks) in the new reality, with the name of the biennial, ” and suddenly everything blooms ”, asking a question: can you simply rise from the precariousness and uncertainty of that time?
The exhibition – whose main is the vast commercial port of Andrejsala, part desert, described by Lamarche-Vadel as “between ruin and renewal” – braggedly dismisses absence and adaptation as central themes. In DER HINTERGRUND SEI ICH, TIERE IM EIGENEN ANDEREN ZUSAMMENHANG MIT ARCHITEKTUR (‘the background is me, animals in their own context with architecture’) through Heinz Frank, who died less than a week after the opening of RIBOCA2, photocopies update the original architectural drawings from the 1970s to the early 90s. The only included object of the installation of Dominika Olszowy Yawn of a Sleepy Heart (2020) is a single stained glass window, the rest being presented at the Raster Gallery in Warsaw, where Olszowy lives. And 3 teams of the 4 pedestals in Oliver Beer’s Simply Rights / Unatained Goals (2019-2020), intended to bring items belonging to women from the artist’s family, are empty.
Other adaptations play intelligently in the original RIBOCA2 project to create an area for visions and voices of choice by introducing participation in netpaintings in their artistic concepts. Due to the impossibility of transporting from Switzerland the life of Ugo Rondinone’s neon paintings (2019), a new edition made in pine through local artists in Riga, while the Pawe-Althamer Designers’ Congress (2020), a white-walled room which members of the public intended to create their own drawings and paintings at the opening of the Array exhibition is completed instead through online contributions. In the exhibition guide, unrealized drawings of each of the paintings are not omitted, but are simply blocked. This is indicative of what the captivating artist Anastasia Sosunova, whose contribution is made up of a series of sculptural interventions in an abandoned paintball box, describes me as ” accepting the empty areas of the exhibition that were created through those obstacles and cancellations, and without seeking to fill them.’
In practical terms, the delight of the biennial for visitors is, of course, marked by the pandemic. After being greeted through a hand-disinfection station, visitors will notice symptoms that encourage social distance and disinfectant bottles around the space, especially for paints that require the use of headphones. Part of the public program co-organized through Sofia Lemos, which includes master classes and lectures, has been brought online, while a collaboration with the local restaurant Casa Nostra, designed to explore the concept of ”kindness”, had to move away from an original plan for visitors to sit at long community tables. With RIBOCA2 only open during the final weeks of its planned release, the assignment will now place its longevity as a film directed through D-dvis Samanis, with the exhibition as an elaborate movie stage. “The film adds to the total exposure and may give it a new scope,” says the attractive artist Augustas Serapinas (whose original proposal for the biennial, which referred to the reconstruction of snowmen, had to be repainted for an explanation of why, in addition to Covid: the lack of snow in one of the never-recorded Latvian winters). “This is a rare reaction to those unusual moments.”
The determination and ingenuity of the RIBOCA2 team in the face of a pandemic is typical of general technique in a dynamic urban art scene with wonderful aspirations. Serapinas and Sosunova highlight the offer of artistic spaces and occasions in the Latvian capital, adding Kim.The Center for Contemporary Art and the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, as well as the Baltic Triennial, the Survival Kit and the Csis Art Festival.Zuzeum, home to zuzans’ family circle collection, the world’s largest personal collection of Latvian art, comprising more than 20,000 pieces – is about to premiere an ambitious 21st century foreign art exhibition.”People can’t cross borders right now, so we invite them to realize the global through foreign art in Latvia,” explains Zuzuem’s curator Ieva Zub-rte.
Serapinas, a local in neighboring Lithuania, believes that RIBOCA has given a “boost to the local art scene and artists from the Baltic region in general”; the reinvention of the biennial will provide an equally valuable education on what it means to “pivot” (one of the main slogans of this pandemic) as an artistic institution.
The moment of Riga’s International Biennial of Contemporary Art, “and everything blooms”, runs from August 20 to September 13.
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