Gallery Late – Filips Smits's solo exhibition "LET'S GET SUN-KISSED"

Here we are in 2026, at the peak of a solar maximum, standing at a crossroads: we can either surrender to darkness, or we can pause for a moment, ground ourselves, take a deep breath, and, with our eyes turned to the sky, absorb the uplifting energy of light - an energy capable of recharging every cell of the body.

Does the “achievement society’s”  mantra - “Yes, I can” - extend to resting from the productivity-driven rhythm of daily life? How do we live with the lingering imprints of the Soviet legacy? To what extent has burnout become normalized?

This first major solo exhibition by Filips Šmits brings together photographs from the series Let’s get sun-kissed, created over the past five years, including documentation of the happening collectively experienced last summer. Shot on analogue film, the works satirically portrays contemporary society while revealing an existential longing for a more meaningful everyday life. Šmits employs utopia not as a means of rejecting or escaping unpleasant reality, but rather as a call to action - an invitation to transform our automated habits.

Utopia scholar Gregory Claeys asks whether we are capable of using the concept of utopia more constructively in addressing the crises of our time - the alienation produced by modernization and the disappearance of the idea of the commune.  Unlike classical utopian visions, the photographs in Let’s get sun-kissed - as befits the age of individualism - turn our attention toward changing our own daily lives rather than immediately reorganizing all of society. Joan of Arc, the cold-defying Tibetan monks, the French Situationists, the crocodile dandies - the transformation of reality begins within the frequencies we each tune ourselves to.

Parallels with the ideas of the French Situationists can be observed throughout Šmits’ practice. The exhibition is conceived as an antithesis to the philosopher and Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov’s claim that “we are bored with the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun.”  Rituals that nourish both body and spirit can be part of our daily urban existence - welcome to the Temple of the Sun.

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