INTERMEZZO: Allowing Space for Friction
Evita Vasiljeva, If there is something heavy, there should be something light (2023). Concrete, iron, and painted bench. Exhibition view: INTERMEZZO, Kunsthal 44Møen, Askeby, Denmark (18 June–10 September 2023). In collaboration with Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Elena Kononova.
First cancelled in 2022 in response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the third Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA3), was scheduled to reopen on 10 August 2023. But with the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the biennial team was again forced to suspend the exhibition, reflecting that what is being provided 'may simply be inappropriate or unwanted in these challenging times'.
The main contention has been RIBOCA's prior funding from Russian fishing entrepreneur Gennady Mirgorodsky, the father of founder Agniya Mirgorodskaya, who is also of Lithuanian descent. This was ceased in March 2022, with the primary source now coming through the US-based private charity Just a Moment, which was founded by Mirgorodskaya and her husband Robert William Pokora, an American businessman.
Amidst these changes, RIBOCA has continued to work with its network to reconfigure possible approaches to the biennial exhibition. Across the Baltic Sea on the small, verdant Danish island of Møn, a concise exhibition organised by René Block offers a bridge to the initial 2022 presentation, which he had curated. Titled INTERMEZZO, it brings together 13 artists, some of whom were due to present works in Riga, such as Nanna Abell, Evita Vasiljeva, and the Danish collective SUPERFLEX.
Block had invited SUPERFLEX to curate the latest iteration of RIBOCA3, which had, since 2022, been re-formatted to unfold over the course of two years, with the gradual unveiling of works by 25 female artists placed across Riga.
While on pause, INTERMEZZO, on view at the contemporary art centre 44Møen (18 June–10 September 2023), offers insight into some of the conceptual threads running through RIBOCA3's past and future iterations.
Surrounded by gently undulating fields in the quiet countryside, the exhibition is split between three buildings, two of which—Kunsthal 44Møen and TonArt 44Møen—surround a central courtyard, containing eight works spread between them by artists including Evelīna Deičmane, Māris Subačs, and Ingrid Furre.
The third, located behind 44Møen's main exhibition space and called Pavilion 44Møen, comprises Maaria Wirkkala's A chapel for something else (2023), with surrounding outdoor space presenting works by Evita Vasiljeva, Meriç Algün, and Bjørn Nørgaard.
Filling the entirety of TonArt 44Møen, Deičmane's installation sleep on the edge of the sea dune (2023) consists of stones collected from Møn's seashore spread across the floor. Throughout the space, some of the collected stones appear to rise into the air, with holes in their interiors attached to string and hung from the ceiling.
Experiencing Deičmane's installation involves walking across the stones as they squeak and groan on impact, with those hanging very gently, almost imperceptibly moving with the wind. Across INTERMEZZO, such interplays between light and heavy materials offer an exhibition that is materially and conceptually rich.
Evita Vasiljeva's sculpture aptly titled If there is something heavy, there should be something light (2023) beautifully reflects this interplay. Placed in a field in front of the centre, a blue park bench resembling those found across parks in Denmark is raised above three concrete blocks. The artist describes using concrete to provide grounding to the more poetic, reflective space that a park bench might offer.
Operating in a continuum requires a strategy that has as much to do with dreaming as with the practicalities of responding to everyday realities...
Depending on one's proximity to the sculpture, the horizon line rises or descends from view as it cuts across U-shaped incisions in the concrete. Meanwhile, metal rods reach upwards from the concrete, linking to her experience growing up in Latvia after the fall of the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic, and the building work that was halted in the process.
Near Vasiljeva's sculpture, The Container Academy (2023) by Bjørn Nørgaard is a deep blue shipping container reconfigured as a place for 'conversations, deliberations, and performative lectures' through which speakers have been requested to outline their ideas in chalk on a blackboard that lines one side of the container's interior.
As Nørgaard explained during a panel discussion he moderated on 18 June 2023 with participating artists Mehtap Baydu, Evita Vasiljeva, Evelīna Deičmane, RIBOCA's founding directors and executive director, as well as Bjørnstjerne Christiansen of SUPERFLEX, the use of chalk is a deliberate attempt to delay time 'from thinking to writing to speaking with one tenth of a second'—enough time to 'hesitate and think'.
Friction—like that of chalk meeting porcelain enamel—was another key topic of the 18 June discussion, with Christiansen underscoring it as necessary for the genesis of 'new ideas that then need to be caught by someone else for others to take place.'
The spark from such friction can allow concept to meet form, as Mehtap Baydu describes of her performative works that are generally slow in conception as she decides on appropriate materials. Presented in a small room in the central exhibition space, a series of eight photographs and a video document Atem (breath), a performance that took place during the 4th Berlin Autumn Salon in 2019.
Between 4 and 8 pm, Baydu stood inside a 15-cubic-metre room visible to the street through one window, blowing into a balloon of the exact size and shape of the room. Over the course of four hours, Baydu eventually became breathless as the balloon filled the space, pressing her body to one side.
Using breath—the invisible force of all life—Baydu's video demonstrates the breaking point that is inevitable after energy is sustained in a single direction for a long period of time.
Wirkkala's specially fabricated A chapel for something else reflects on the human impulse to constantly grasp beyond the realm of knowing. Within the space, a wooden post is propped in a corner, a black pile of burnt wood turned to powder beneath it.
A small cigar box is presented on the left-hand wall, the bodies of two Apollo butterflies pinned within it; a fragility that extends to the glass ladder at the very front wall.
Propped on piles of books gilded in gold from Indigenous Sami land in northern Scandinavia, the ladder is fragmented at one side. An overhead light shines down upon it, rendering the shadow of the transparent ladder visible.
As Wirkkala underlines in a video of some of the artists introducing their work located in the reception area of the exhibition, the shadow is stronger than the form itself, signalling, perhaps, the power of unseen and unconscious forces in human impulses.
Dodge's untitled installation in the main gallery expresses the material output of these forces. Reflecting the 'collateral effects of living', disparate yet carefully chosen elements are strewn across the floor, resembling the after-effects of a strong gale in a city street.
Strewn paper, batteries, and mints are among objects that crunch underfoot and present unexpected compositions upon close inspection. In the configuration at the time of my visit, a white powder had collected along one side of the exhibition space, mirroring the cold, hard winter snapshots of Boris Mikhailov's sequence of 55 C-prints, 'At Dusk' (1993).
Shot in 1993 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, a target of Russia's shelling in its current advance on Ukrainian territory, Mikhailov's photographs portray a moment of total collapse in the wake of the Soviet Empire's dissolution. Taken at hip-height and presented below eye-line in the space, viewers must stoop to look into their hand-tinted blue-grey frames that capture figures at standstill in food queues or collapsed in the street.
Further visualising the passing from one state to another is Samara Sallam's sculpture Qaf Runddel (2023) made from glass blown by Møn artist Per-René Larsen, featured in a separate, solo presentation in Kunsthal 44Møen's PS44 building and tying in fluidly with other works on view in INTERMEZZO. In the darkened old smithy, bubbles of glass mounted on black board glisten upon entrance.
Sallam's sculpture, a semi-abstract creature, is split by a wall, which cuts through one's line of vision as it is observed straight on. Its title references Sufi mythology through Mount Qaf, known as the 'farthest point of the earth', while Runddel, roundabout in Danish, grounds spiritual realms within the continuum of everyday life.
As INTERMEZZO reveals of RIBOCA's broader approach, despite its cancelled biennial, operating in a continuum requires a strategy that has as much to do with dreaming as with the practicalities of responding to everyday realities and circumstances. —[O]
