SURVIVAL KIT 10.1

The largest annual contemporary art festival in the Baltics, Survival Kit, which is organised by Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, will take place in Riga from 23 May till 30 June. The international exhibition and events programme with the participation of 34 artists from Latvia and abroad is curated by Solvita Krese, Inga Lāce and Àngels Miralda.

Building on the first part of its programme, held at the Riga Circus in September 2018, the second part of Survival Kit 10 continues the festival’s investigation of the concept of outlands, questioning the traditional division of geopolitical and cultural space into centre and periphery and shedding light on the complex construction of identity. Personal stories and micro-experiences are the vehicles through which the festival seeks to examine broader societal issues, including the relationships between certain countries and the histories of entire regions. Geography and migration are taken up as core themes in the hope of revealing the complexities embedded within different local communities. The festival allows us to discover outlands as places and situations that, though they may be unknown or strange, at the same time have the potential to be locations from which alternative futures are imagined.

Like every year, an empty building in Riga has been chosen as the venue of the festival, in order to draw attention to the potential of its future development. This time, it is the former Faculty of Physics, Mathematics and Optometry of the University of Latvia, which was built in 1888 and originally served as a German orphanage, and later – as a police academy.