“The Little Bird Must be Caught,” this year’s Survival Kit 13 festival, put a spotlight on the urgent question of how neoliberal politics birth new authoritarian forms. Survival Kit is an ambitious, international-facing annual exhibition staged by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. This year, the invited curator, iLiana Fokianaki, framed the show with the term “authoritarian statism,” borrowed from Greek-French political theorist Nicos Poulantzas. Planned in the shadow of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the exhibition faced the challenge of talking about the relationship between art and politics—a