Festival EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap

EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap stages desire as labor and sex as one of its most regulated, exhausted, and persistently unfinished forms. The title, EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap, draws on the double meaning of “wet work,” referring both to covert operations and to forms of labor that leave a trace. It is these practices and artworks which expand sexual, emotional, and domestic work into modes of maintenance that accumulate, rather than resolve, into meaning. “Over Lap” signals repetition and spill, where actions do not conclude but instead extend across time, overlapping, leaking, and returning.  

With new and existing art works, installations, and performances spanning from analogue processes to “digital wetwares”, EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap sustains the infrastructure of desire through exhibition areas associatively shifting between functional sites: bedroom-after hour zone into auditorium, bathroom-wet room into confessional, gym into club into  darkroom - all towards a central hall (“aktu zāle”), carrying the double meaning of “akts”, act and nude, finally climaxing in an exhibitionary attempt to center the concept of exposure as both a performance and condition at once.  

Opening: May 29, 6-10 pm as part of Riga Art Week (RAW)
Opening evening performances: Paula Zvane, Cammisa Buerhaus, Liudmila
May 30 4 pm: performative-lecture Confession Prototype 1 by Sophia Giovannitti

Artists: Kamisa Bjurhausa (Cammisa Buerhaus), Zenta Dzividzinska, Sofija Džovanniti (Sophia Giovannitti),  Evija Krištopane, Reba Meiberija (Reba Maybury), Elza Sīle ⩙ Aly Milk, Mindija Su (Mindy Seu), SAGG Napoli, Silvija Flerī (Sylvie Fleury), Sofija Tūna (Sophie Thun), Sabīne Vernere un Paula Zvane

Kuratore: Zane Onckule

N.B.Festival contains erotic and sexual themes. The exhibition is not recommended for visitors under 18, and minors may enter only with an adult!

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About art centre

Kim? is an art centre devoted to ideas, gestures, textures and interventions that shift from “a well-trained chameleon face” (Zane Onckule) to a cadavre exquis, from “a polygon, a laboratory, a lighthouse” (Jānis Borgs) to a hybrid organism. Founded in 2009, Kim? has actively contributed to the art discourse both in Latvia and on a global scale with extensive exhibition programming, as well as international collaborations, discussions, publications, talks and performances. Over the years, Kim? has worked with both emerging and renowned artists, theoreticians, curators, philosophers, translators and thinkers of other spheres, aiming to provide a responsive context to their work and to make critical practices accessible to a wider audience.  

Kim? with its name being a question itself (“kas ir māksla?” – what is art?) inhabits an ongoing series of questions – what it means to be a cultural agent today and to contribute to the vast landscape of contemporary art, how to show and talk about art, thinking about how art functions in differing contexts of local and global economies, traditions, cultures and subcultures, between the disappearance and reappearance of identities.  

With over 200 exhibitions under its belt, Kim? continues to probe, to question, and to show.  
(Kaspars Groševs, 2019)