It was not just a poetic sensibility at play in the naming of show: An Archive of Stones, to be periodically activated, speculated upon, damaged and finally gilded with fiction—it is quite literally what it states it is. Curated by Chris Sharp, the project ran at Riga’s kim? Contemporary Art Centre from August 14 to September 27, 2015. Sharp invited ten artists, art critics, curators and philosophers—including Laura Prikule, Maija Rudovska and Kaspars Groševs—to guide the exhibition.
The project, whose aim was to “address the use and significance of stones in contemporary art”, was neither exhibition nor lecture, having chosen instead to set itself up as “an ad-hoc, ever changing ritual based on the reading of stones”, archiving the works of over 70 artists, including legends like Cy Twombly as well as emerging artists like Olga Balema.
Meanwhile, kim? ran a simultaneous solo show by artist Ieva Epnere, titled A No-Man’s Land, An Everyman’s Land. It was comprised of Epnere’s memories from “her journey to the ‘end of the world’” and created as a kind of memory or memorial to her time in the solitude of self-exile. It acts as a “souvenir of the desire for something unknown, the dictates of nature, and the circles of human psychology”. Using two tent-like structures —one is comprised of four pyramidians, the other a symbolic “inward-facing” tent —Epnere shares the story of “the fascinating, the symbolic and the sad in the wordless silence”. **
Exhibition photos, top right.
