diary September 01, 2020

Reservoir Dogs

AFTER FOUR HOURS OF HUFFING MY OWN BREATH under a mask on the bus from Vilnius, stepping out in Latvia’s capital for the second Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Riboca) felt like entering a pre-Covid wonderland: Masks were not seen anywhere, bars were full, and foreign languages spilled out into the streets. The surrealism intensified the next morning, when guests from around the world(!), their brains buzzing from the mimosas on offer, were greeted by Riboca’s founder, director, and, finally, the curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel under Ugo Rondinone’s rainbow-painted plywood poem

print September 2020

Mindaugas Navakas

What do you think of when you hear the word porcelain? Probably something delicate, smooth, and fragile. Mindaugas Navakas wants you to hold onto such associations—but only so that he can break them, crush them with something as heavy as a single-drum roller. The veteran Lithuanian sculptor treats porcelain like any other cheap ready-to-use industrial material. His sculptures are large, bulky, rough-textured, molded in deliberately reductive shapes with visible cracks on their surfaces. He challenges the material itself along with all of our assumptions about it.

Titled “China,” Navakas’s recent

print October 2019

Jonas Mekas

“Now, after I already / Crossed / The shores of death and sadness / Let me / Dream / Utopias”—undated, typewritten on a modest yellowish page, this short poem (in Lithuanian) was one of 129 that were included in the exhibition “Jonas Mekas: let me dream utopias.” The poet/filmmaker himself selected these previously unpublished poems, all in his native language. After Mekas passed away earlier this year, leaving behind an enormous void, the show’s curators—Justė Jonutytė, Kotryna Markevičiūtė, and Yates Norton—had to find a way to stage the exhibition without his input. Rather than mount a

print May 2018

Katja Novitskova

“If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes. Stage 2.” is the first major institutional solo exhibition of Estonian artist Katja Novitskova in her home country. The show takes its title from a conversation between the replicant Roy Batty and designer and engineer Hannibal Chew in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982); machine vision is at the core of its thematic constellation. Originally created for and presented in the compact Estonian pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, the project has become more extensive and breathes more freely in nine spaces of the Kumu Art Museum. Walking

print September 2017

Anu Põder

Estonian sculptor Anu Põder (1947–2013) has been internationally unrecognized for too long. The curator of“Anu Põder: Be Fragile! Be Brave!,” Rebeka Põldsam, attempted to put her on the map and into the broader canon of art history by presenting her outstanding oeuvre next to those of precursors and contemporaries, including Katrin Koskaru, Ursula Mayer, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, and Iza Tarasewicz. Like Szapocznikow, Põder draws upon an artistic strategy of merging representations of fragmented body parts with amorphous masses of various materials: Torsos emerge and sink back into dark

picks April 23, 2017

Ieva Kraule

“If I am the mask then you must be the ‘true’ self hiding behind my insidious body, as for a mask to exist there must be something genuine for it to conceal,” utters Sophie, 2017, an automated mask created by Latvian artist Ieva Kraule to perform her written texts. Schematic, stripped away from any soft tissue that would conceal her hard mechanic body parts, Sophie resembles Maria, the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Although detached from a body, Sophie manages to subvert the relationship between human and machine, between creator and a tool made to merely mediate the artist’s ideas. Machines

print April 2017

Žilvinas Kempinas

Žilvinas Kempinas is a master of motion. His kinetic sculptures made of unwound magnetic tape, the chaotic movement of filmed images, and the motion of the viewer’s body all create intertwined, often immersive, experiences. In his most recent solo exhibition, the New York-based Lithuanian artist presented motion both as a real-time experience and as an imprint of bodily gesture on a surface. By completely covering the numerous windows of the gallery, located in a nineteenth-century building, and blocking some entrances with his earlier pieces (such as White Noise, 2007) or even shifting angles

print November 2016

Inga Meldere

Coloring books for adults have gained surprising popularity in recent years. They promise “relaxation” and “creativity,” and perhaps an escape from the digital hum that has come to dominate modern life in favor of something done by hand. Besides ever-popular floral motifs, the books often incorporate graphically vibrant imagery from mandalas, Japanese woodblock prints, and ancient Egyptian and Greek visual history.

In “House by the Waterfall or Colouring Books for Adults,” Helsinki-based Latvian artist Inga Meldere harnessed this burgeoning hobby both as a method for creating her new paintings

print April 2016

Donna Huanca

A painting needs a body if it is to move freely in space. And if the surface of the painting were the skin of that body, the paint would serve as clothes. Set the body in motion and the painting becomes unfixed, its textures and colors forming fleeting compositions. Painted clothes are stripped of their usual function—they smear or crack, dry up and flake off, and in this way they tell stories about the body they occupy. Such fluid interplays of painting, clothing, and memory abound in POLYSTYRENE’S BRACES, 2016, the surreal installation by Bolivian American artist Donna Huanca, recently

print December 2015

XII Baltic Triennial

Imagine a car after a Ballardian crash. Its internal mechanical guts are turned inside out while its wide interior is flattened into a narrow hole. Its rear becomes its front, and its entry points are blocked, opening new ones on its surface. Now imagine this form as a modernist building. That’s Palace of Re-Invention, 2015, the exhibition space invented by the artist/architect Andreas Angelidakis for the XII Baltic Triennial. Invited by this year’s triennial curator Virginija Januškevičiūte. to reinvent the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Angelidakis transformed the building into a disorienting

print March 2015

Nina Canell

The very first thing one encountered upon entering “Mid-Sentence,” Nina Canell’s recent solo exhibition, was a nail. It was embedded in the gallery wall, but instead of having been hammered in, the nail’s sharp point faced out, toward the viewer. A few more nails loosely hung from its tip, creating a fragile chain. They were held together by a magnetic force—invisible, but powerful—that permeated their little “bodies” with a flow of energy.

The works of the Swedish-born, Berlin-based artist allow the viewer to perceive normally imperceptible dimensions of reality—not only flows of

print November 2014

Merike Estna

Merike Estna’s exhibition “Blue Lagoon” forces the visitor out of the comfortable position of being merely a viewer: One can step on painting, eat it, wear it. Painting spills over to the floor; it takes the form of cakes, cocktails, books, and videos, while the vivacity of light pastel colors and vibrant patterns immerses the visitor in an overall sensory-cultural experience. On entering the expanded space of painting, one finds the hierarchies separating it from the decorative arts and everyday life dissolving. The installation is filled with all sorts of objects. But whatever they are—hats,

Neringa Černiauskaitė