Riga’s skin, like that of most cities, bears the marks of its past. The wood of its nineteenth-century houses has swelled and shrunk through seasons; the faces of gargoyles hanging from the pillars and cornices of its twentieth-century Art Nouveau buildings are chipped into bewilderment. Flowers and weeds burst through cracks in the polished concrete and asphalt of modern infrastructures.

The first edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More,” evokes the waves of time that form history and proposes that our present is out of sync