Artūrs Virtmanis. Psychopomp: A Beginner's Guide to the Afterworld

The ecological crisis, war, pandemic and inequality have become part of normality. Dystopian end-of-the-world scenarios increasingly turn into our reality. Left on its own, each system over time tends towards chaos: heat energy dissipates, biological organisms die, societies collapse. Is there anyone who could lead us into this new reality – a guide that could prepare us for change?

The exhibition Psychopomp: A Beginner’s Guide to the Afterworld lets the visitor experience catastrophe as a spectacle where the gloomy and the melancholy merges with the dreamlike and the ecstatic. Space and environment as the artistic object and a performative occasion, which functions similarly to the mechanism of Greek tragedy described by Nietzsche, allows the eyewitness experience invented events as truly real and at the same time enjoy them aesthetically as though looking from aside. With his presence, the visitor becomes part of the installation. The project does not draw attention to any specific natural, environmental, technological or socio-political cataclysm, but rather the idea and presence of catastrophe as such. The exhibition is complemented by a programme of performative interventions aimed to activate the spatial installation.

Publicity image for the Artūrs Virtmanis’ solo exhibition Psychopomp: A Beginner’s Guide to the Afterworld. 2023.
Publicity image for the Artūrs Virtmanis’ solo exhibition Psychopomp: A Beginner’s Guide to the Afterworld. 2023.

About the artist

Artūrs Virtmanis (1971) studied at the Department of Sculpture of the Art Academy of Latvia, has experimented with cinema, so-called paper architecture, processual art, performance, sculpture, painting, and graphic art. He has taken part in countless exhibitions and projects related to stage design in the USA, Latvia, Estonia, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Italy, France, Great Britain, China, and the United Arab Emirates. In Latvia, author’s works have been nominated for the Purvītis Prize, Public Broadcasting of Latvia’s annual award 1kg of Culture. Artist has received the Baltais Zvirbulis [White Sparrow] annual award of the Riga City Council’s Education, Culture and Sports Department.

Working with subjects such as entropy, melancholia, messianism and utopia, Artūrs Virtmanis creates fragile large-format installations that bring together charcoal drawings with multimedia spatial elements. His installations are characterised by philosophical poeticism as well as intense visual and metaphoric saturation.