Jussi Koitela is curating Survival Kit 15
The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) announced Jussi Koitela as curator of the 15th edition of its annual contemporary art festival, one of its key endeavours and a major art event in the Baltics. Survival Kit takes place from 6th September to 5th October 2024.
Titled ‘Measures’, the forthcoming edition celebrates the different modes and temporalities of knowing, by exploring material, cultural and social meaning within Riga’s urban context. Participants - both Latvian and international - will present new commissions alongside existing works that respond to these various modes of knowing. To take ‘measure’ is a two-fold act: on one hand it is scientific and quantitative, and on the other, it is a call to action. The exhibition invites us to engage with nature-culture environments, daily bodily experiences and struggles, and data and truth-making. It considers possible pasts, presents and futures by measuring, investigating and embracing diverse epistemologies embedded within the city of Riga and beyond.
Koitela elaborates on the coming exhibition: “Riga is teeming with bodies of knowledge. They lurk on streets, in alleys, homes, communities, and memories. Knowledges seamlessly influence our world, weaving their way into social and political spheres, as well as our daily lives through unexpected causalities and connections that linger and meander through soil, river, bodies, minds, buildings, infrastructures, and nature-cultures. While their impact is sometimes visibly evident, ways of knowing often operate in the distance, rendering themself invisible yet actively shaping the lives of both human and more-than-human inhabitants of the city. By bringing together different situated knowledges and knowing bodies, it is possible to collapse the dominant geographical, epistemological and temporal distances in the urban public environment.”
Presented across nearby vacant sites in the centre of Riga and on the river Daugava, ‘Measures’ delves into how these ecologies of knowledge play an integral role in a city’s contemporary life. In the exhibition, echoes of knowing that span from deep time to recent history, help to create imagined narratives that might shape the future of communal existence as we know it.
Participants and locations of Survival Kit 15 will be announced in early Summer 2024.
About Jussi Koitela
Jussi Koitela is an independent curator and Head of Programme at Frame Contemporary Art Finland. His curatorial work intertwines art, embodied research methods, urban spatial contexts, collaboration, hospitality, and materiality in various forms of exhibitions and knowledge production.
He is currently curator of the Pavilion of Finland at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia together with Yvonne Billmore (20 April–24 November 2024). Between 2019 to 2023 they also curated ‘Rehearsing Hospitalities’, Frame’s public programme.
His selected curatorial work includes: Conflicting Relations at Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York, Editorial Tables: Reciprocal Hospitalities at The Showroom, London, Secured - Politics of Bodies and Space at Arsi Vantaa Art Museum, Vantaa. Performing the Fringe at Konsthall C and Pori Art Museum, Entangling Matter and Meaning/Intra-Structures - Monster of the Seven Lakes at Treignac Projet, Mattering City at SixtyEight Art Institute Copenhagen, City Agents at Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art (EKKM), Tallinn, Skills of Economy Sessions at Finnish Theatre Academy, Baltic Circle Festival and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, and You Must Make Your Death Public at de Appel Art Centre, Amsterdam.
About Survival Kit
The contemporary art festival Survival Kit, comprised of a curated exhibition and an event programme, was initiated in 2009 as a response to the economic crisis affecting Latvia at the time. Each year, the festival's appointed curator (or curators) carefully selects the themes explored, inviting artists from around the world to offer alternative scenarios of survival. The festival's mission to critically investigate and reflect on the evolution of contemporary society has made it a key platform for the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) to showcase its commitment to research, creation, and development of contemporary art processes in Latvia and internationally since 1993.
Survival Kit's choice of venue is an integral part of the festival's identity, as it inhabits empty buildings in Riga, exploring their potential and possible development strategies that could be used to revitalize them. Despite the often-challenging nature of these spaces, the festival emphasizes the importance of accessibility, assisting people with disabilities.
Celebrating contemporary art in the Baltics, Survival Kit 15 will open in line with the 15th Baltic Triennial, which this year takes place at the newly renovated CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania. Encouraging professionals and visitors to explore what the region has to offer this Autumn.
Title image: Jussi Koitela (Riga, 2023). Curator of Survival Kit 15. Photo by Andrejs Strokins
