As if subscribing to the national stereotype of the introverted Latvian, in his recent work Krišs Salmanis offered a nuanced proposal as to how to communicate at a time when mental and physical violence seems to have mutated along with the coronavirus, similarly crossing and closing down borders, cultures, and minds. The exhibition “Construction” documented Salmanis’s attempts and (self-professed) “clumsy failures” at observing and absorbing the place in which he found himself during a three-month residency at the A4 Art Museum in Chengdu, China, in 2019. Against the backdrop of the state-imposed