[spectre] FIELDS exhibition - welcome to Riga 2014!

[Rasa Smite]

Dear Spectres,

Please see below the first 'official' information 
on the FIELDS - large scale exhibition that will 
feature about 40 very interesting artworks. The 
event is specially produced for Riga 2014, 
European Capital of Culture - so you all are all 
very welcome to Riga this year, and particularly 
for the FIELDS opening - on May 15, 2014!

hope some of you to see in Riga this summer - the 
exhibition will be open till August 3, 2014

kind regards
Rasa

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Welcome to Riga - the  European Capital of Culture 2014!

FIELDS exhibition
Arsenals Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art
May 15  - August 3, 2014

Fields - patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations.

The changing role of art in society is one where 
it does not just create a new aesthetics but gets 
involved in patterns of social, scientific, and 
technological transformations. Fields, jointly 
curated by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Armin 
Medosch, presents an inquiry into patterns of 
renewal and transition. The curators asked which 
expanded fields of artistic practice offer new 
ideas for overcoming the crisis of the present 
and developing new models of a more sustainable 
and imaginative way of life.

In preparation for the Fields exhibition, a 
widespread survey was undertaken, that did not 
just look at art in the narrow sense but all 
kinds of creative practices that bring together 
new thinking, scientific knowledge, aesthetics, 
technologies and social practices. A year in 
advance, a public call was launched that was met 
by over 200 proposals. The curators of Fields 
could draw on international networks such as 
RIXC's Renewable Network and the European 
collaborations Techno-Ecologies and Soft-Control. 
The artist-in-residency series Fieldwork on 
measurement ship Eleonore, Linz 2013, aimed at 
creating ideas and projects for Fields. Workshops 
and panels at Transmediale 2013 - Berlin, 
Pixelache 2013 - Helsinki, and the Media Art 
Histories conference Renew - Riga, October 2013 
were used to discuss work and taxonomies for 
Fields.

From the 200 proposals received through the 
public call, the curators have chosen 40 works 
from all over the world, but with a special focus 
on Central, Eastern and Northern Europe. Fields 
will be  exhibited between May 15th and August 
3rd 2014, at the Arsenals exhibition space of 
Latvian National Arts Museum, the largest and 
most important exhibition space for contemporary 
art in Riga, as a part of Riga - European Culture 
Capital 2014. The exhibition will be accompanied 
by public lectures, Renewable Futures conference 
as well as artist performances and concerts. A 
catalogue will be produced, which will consist of 
a special issue of the Acoustic Space peer 
reviewed academic journal, jointly issued by 
Liepaja's University Art Research Lab and RIXC.

Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are artists and 
founding directors of RIXC, an art institution in 
Riga, Latvia, whose Art + Communication festival 
has become one of the most important festivals of 
this kind in Europe and worldwide. Armin Medosch 
is a curator, writer and artist based in Vienna, 
Austria. The Fields exhibition is a follow-up 
project to Waves 2006, which was also shown at 
Arsenals in Riga, co-curated by Smite, Smits and 
Medosch.

The curators selected works that are considered 
to be contextual seedbeds for social change. The 
changing role of art in society is one where it 
does not just create a new aesthetics but gets 
involved in patterns of social, scientific, and 
technological transformations.

Fields presents a lively landscape of art that 
challenges existing viewpoints and deconstructs 
social issues, but also proposes positive visions 
for the future. A premise behind this project was 
from the very start that no single field and 
associated label can do justice any more to the 
diversity of contemporary art practices. 
Typically, today, the most interesting practices 
are transdisciplinary and transformative - they 
rely on new combinations of existing 
fields-as-in-disciplines, combining the artistic 
with the social and the natural, the scientific 
and the emotional, the sensible with the actual.

Fields opens up the contemporary field for a free 
and associative play of radical taxonomies, 
remixing and recombining existing categories, 
thereby carrying out important boundary work that 
gives a new shape to the contact zones between 
art, science, technology and social engagement in 
the 21st century.
While the final list of artists may still change, 
we would like to present some examples for the 
radical diversity of approaches:
	The relationship with nature plays a 
major role in this exhibition, often in 
combination with ideas from the open culture that 
emerged on the net, about sharing resources and 
tackling social issues through participatory and 
social mechanisms.
	In some cases, such as Leave it in the 
Ground by Oliver Ressler (2013), or 
Seedsunderground  (2013-14) by Shu Lea Cheang, 
the work carries a clear and direct political 
message, concerning issues such as renewable 
energy, sustainability or the fight for the 
diversity of agricultural seeds and plants.
	Other work, less overtly political, opens 
our senses and minds to new ways of seeing the 
world, referring to what French philosopher 
Jaques Ranci?re calls the 'distribution of the 
sensible'. Lisa Jevbratt shows how different 
reality is if we imagine to look at the world 
with animal eyes. The Belgian collective Okno 
combines rooftop gardening and beehives to create 
new maps of the distribution of plant life in 
cities. Erich Berger measures changes in the 
magnetic field of the Earth. Manu Luksch offers a 
free ride on a water taxi in exchange for a 
conversation with Kayak Libre.
	The human body itself becomes seen as a 
node in a complex network of force-fields, where 
nature, genetic science and political and 
economical topics intersect. The Latvian artist 
Gints Gabrans proposes to modify our bodies so 
that, with the help of new enzymes, we can eat 
grass and tree branches. Hu.M.C.C.- Human 
Molecular Colonization Capacity project by Maja 
Smrekar, Slovenia, uses an enzyme from the 
artist's body to create a yoghurt. Hans Scheirl's 
paintings and installation Transgenic (TM) breaks 
through barriers between 2D and 3D, 
simultaneously opening up new ways of artistic 
and bodily trans-gression. 
	The intersection of social and visual 
fields is the topic of works by Austrian video 
artist Annja Krautgasser's Prelude (2010) and 
media artist Hannah Haslaati, Finland, who uses 
principles known from Gestalt psychology to make 
group dynamics visible.
The intersection of the globalised economy with 
digital technologies, financial markets 
exploitative labour practices and culture and 
concerns of local communities and indigenous 
people are addressed in works such as Histoire 
Économique (2013) by British artist Hayley 
Newman, Working Life (2013) by Danish artist 
collective Superflex and Eccentric Archive 
(2012-14) by Ines Doujak and John Barker.
	The relevations by Edward Snowden about 
global surveillance activities of the USA through 
its PRISM program has made evident how important 
the invisible world of data flows and data bases 
is. Data fields, battlefields and the war on 
terror mark the background for works such as 
Endless War (2012-14) by British-Japanese artist 
couple YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko 
Yokokoji), and We should take nothing for 
granted! - on the building of an alert and 
knowledgeable citizenry by Slovenian artist  
Marko Peljhan and Project Atol. 
	The relationship between matter and 
information, as suggested by cybernetics pioneer 
Norbert Wiener, is the topic of the Earth 
Computer (2014)  Martin Howse and Ghostradio 
(2014) by Pamela Neuwirth, Markus Decker and 
Franx Xaver.
	Artists such as Martins Ratniks' 
installlation with 27 CRT TV screens, and French 
artist Cecile Babiole's sound installation are 
engaging with the  raw energy of electrical and 
electro-magnetic fields, continuing work started 
with the Waves project in 2006.
	Relationships between electrical and 
biological fields inform the work of Latvian 
sound artist Voldemars Johansons, who, in 
collaboration with RIXC's own project Biotricity 
(bacteria battery) has made music from electrical 
signal fluctuations that are generated by living 
micro-organisms.

These are some key topics and examples of up to 
40 works that will be shown at Fields.

http://fields.rixc.lv

Support: The Fields exhibition is supported by 
Riga 2014 and Riga City Council, Latvian State 
Cultural Capital Foundation, Latvian Ministry of 
Culture, Austrian Ministry of Culture, French 
Cultural Institute, Nordic Culture Point.

Contact: For further questions please write to: fields at rixc.lv

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