Shadi Habib Allah
The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art announces the location and artists for Survival Kit 16: House of See-More, curated by Slavs and Tatars and Michał Grzegorzek. This year, the festival takes place in Creative City Grīziņdārzs, the former Riga Knitting Factory, located in an area that was once a remote, historic workers’ district but has since been reimagined as Riga’s new urban quarter.
Taking Simurgh – the mythical bird found across Eurasia – as a departure point, the annual international contemporary art festival in Riga will address the critical state of transnationalism via the flamboyance of the flaming bird, an understanding of liberation as both metaphysical and political.
From Aristophanes’ The Birds to Faruddin Attar’s The Conference of the Birds to the Latvian cycle of songs The Birds Wedding, winged creatures often come together, overcoming their respective limits as individuals, to achieve something larger than themselves.
For Survival Kit 16, Slavs and Tatars and Michał Grzegorzek see in Simurgh a resolutely transnational creature as device – another means of defining a region extending from China to northern Ukraine, and “equally interested in the ecstatic as the electorally eligible.”
Grzegorzek and Slavs and Tatars elaborate: “Where the eagle projects empire and nationalism, a lazy form of toxic masculinity, Simurgh is literally flaming, and non-binary, sometimes gendered as a woman, and of the next world, not this one. Epiphany often requires one to die before one dies: The legend offers House of See-More as an equal reflection and antidote to the blurred boundaries between the generative and the extractive, the analytical and the affective, the singular and the multiple.”