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 experience by employing materials left from previous exhibitions that he had found in storage at CAC.

The unhinged experience of the exhibition space embodied the promise of the triennial itself: to dismantle conventional understandings of art under the motto “What is an artwork today can be something else entirely tomorrow,” a thought Januškevičiūte. picked up from an interview she’d read with the artist David Bernstein. The majority of the projects, therefore, took one or more steps away from the field of art, and merged with science, ritual, pedagogy, and microbiology, in one case even employing Kickstarter crowd-funding resources. Art here shifted from a paradigm of representation to a paradigm of doing. It was open to being used and misused and to using others, and called for a direct, transformative, and practical, rather than merely reflective, engagement with the environment.

Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies, 2015—a project by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas—transformed one of the CAC exhibition spaces into a fully functional experimental laboratory exploring the possibilities of mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus. The idea was to use the colonizing character of the mycelium to alter other materials, producing a novel hybrid object, a “mycomorph,” thus preparing us for future interspecies ecologies in which we might grow rather than build structures.

The entire exhibition itself could be seen as a piece of mycelium—a concealed networked system, connecting disparate objects, transforming them, and growing unexpected structures of ideas. The interweaving of drawing, ritual, and pedagogy could be taken as one example of such assemblages. Bianka Rolando’s drawings attempted to invoke effects of healing rituals, while in Learning Not to Learn, 2015, the Oceans Academy of Arts filled a blackboard with rebus-like drawings to present alternative “irrational” pedagogical models. This bottom-up, empirical approach to teaching connects with a project to reinvent identities by following materials and their resources rather than ideological claims: Version of the Baltic pavilion, which will represent the Baltic states in the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, aims to track down what has united the Baltic states through an investigation of building materials, infrastructures, and flows of resources. Similarly, an event series curated by Margarida Mendes and Jennifer Teets, “The World in Which We Occur,” invited triennial visitors to join discussions with scientists, artists, and researchers about the intertwined relationship between microorganisms, climate change, and politics.

The XII Baltic Triennial has grown like one of the mycomorphs in Psychotropic House: Having sprouted with a few pilot events in 2014, it has not stopped thriving, and will travel in different forms to Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Kraków, Poland, and kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Latvia, next year.

—Neringa Černiauskaitė