Everything is blooming at the same time – with this guiding motif, the second Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art will take place this year, and everything will bloom at the same time on Thursday, August 20, at 12.00. As Rebekah Lamarsch-Vadel, curator of the Biennale, emphasizes, this year’s biennial is designed to call for reflection, “that we as humans have a responsibility to find new ways to inhabit this planet.”
Like the first, the second Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art is organized by the Riga Biennale Foundation and is designed to provide a new international platform for foreign and Baltic artists, as well as to promote contemporary art and create artistic interaction. All the set goals are still winding over the 20-hectare area of Andrejsala in an invisible form. This is where 65 individual biennial participants and 9 groups of artists will meet. Almost a third of the participants are from the Baltic States, but almost 60% of the total number of participants are from the Baltic Sea region, including Denmark, Finland, Poland, Germany and other countries, including the overseas countries.
The curator of this year’s biennial is French specialist Rebecca Lamars-Vadel, deputy director of the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation and the current curator of the Palais de Tokyo Center for Contemporary Art in Paris.
The curator points out: “The idea of the Biennale project is to invite us to think about the fact that the world we live in today is in a state of agony. That we as humans have a responsibility to find new ways to inhabit this planet – to create models of solidarity . ”
“Here I am talking about people, plants and animals. I am also thinking of different rhythms of nature – for example, how the seasons change, the weather; all these energies and trajectories that permanently surround us and build the ecosystem in which we live, ”continues Rebecca Lamarsha-Vadela.
“So it’s an idea of renewal that can be achieved by listening to voices we haven’t heard before. Let them enchant us, even hypnotize us. ”
That is why the Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art has chosen Andrejsala as its home – a place that is exactly what the world itself is today, the curator explains.
“On the one hand, it is the old world, which many of us know very well – the industrial, Soviet-style Soviet experience. The other side is the world of the future, but we still need to be able to define it together and then bring it to life. In addition, at the crossroads of these eras.
For me, the choice of Andrejsala was very important, because I understand that it is an important territory for the people of Riga. And also for the people of Latvia and even the Baltics, ”emphasizes Lamarsha-Vadela.
The curator notes that Andrejsala is actually only a ten-minute walk from the center of Riga – she checked it herself, because she heard the opinion that the territory is very far away.
“It’s far from people’s minds, because the neighborhood is mostly deserted and not accessible everywhere. Therefore, I hope that when we open the gates of Andrejsala, both figuratively and literally, people will have the opportunity to rediscover this place and start imagining various additional scenarios about what might happen there in the future, ”explains Lamarsha-Vadela.
Exhibitions are still being actively set up in the hangars located in the territory of Andrejsala and also outside them. American artist Bridget Polka is preparing a performance “Balancing Stones and Scrap”, which will be on view on the opening day of the Biennale this Thursday. The artist balances both bricks, stones and various fragments of building materials to create temporary sculptures, which together contain only the force of fragile balance. This idea also resonates with the instability in today’s world, partly mentioned by the biennial curator Rebecca Lamarsch-Vadela.
Foto: Toms Majors –– Foto: Toms Majors –– Foto: Toms Majors –– Foto: Toms Majors ––
Bridget Polka says: “I arrived in Andrejsala at the end of last August, when I met with the creators of the Biennale and explored the area to understand what materials are, so to speak,” live “here. to work. I was very surprised and fascinated by the variety of these industrial materials, because they tell about the history of Riga and Latvia, about all the difficulties that have permeated your experience over time. Yes, these are rubble, but my goal is to make something beautiful out of them, keeping in mind a certain aspect of the tragedy. It is difficult to explain in words what the result of my work will look like. People only fully understand it when they see it in person. ” Approaching the closing pier of Andrejsala, both the visitors of the Biennale and any passer-by will be stopped for at least a moment by the monumental project “Straumes” by Lithuanian artists Linas Lapelīte and Mantas Petraisis. It consists of about 465 cubic meters of pine logs cargo from the forests of Saldus county. According to the organizers of the Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art, thanks to this event, Andrejsala opens more widely than ever before, and thanks to the multi-part exhibition, designed in collaboration with Estonian architects Laura Linsi and Rolandas Rēma, visitors will have access to previously inaccessible places. –
