Exhibition of RIXC Art and Science Festival 2019

From 6 July to 22 September 2019, RIXC Art and Science Festival will feature the UN/GREEN international contemporary media art exhibition which will take place in the Great Hall of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1).

The RIXC Art and Science Festival 2019 aims at complicating the pervasively employed notion of ‘green’ by providing a cross- disciplinary platform for the discussions and artistic interventions exploring one of the most paradoxical and broadest topics of our times. Green will be analyzed as a color, biological phenomenon, medium, symbol of certain lifestyle, semantic construction, and ideology.

‘Green’, usually associated with the ‘natural’ and often employed to recoup for what humans have lost, is addressed here as the most anthropocentric of all colours, in its inherent ambiguity between alleged naturalness and artificiality. We, as the human species, symbolically re-contextualize techno-scientific tools and their related metaphors to offset what we feel we are losing in the times labeled the Anthropocene. Are we in control of ‘green’? Despite its numerous positive connotations, ‘green’ incrementally serves the uncritical desire of fetishistic and techno-romantic naturalization in order to hyper-compensate for material systemic bio- and necro-politics, consisting of the increasing technical manipulation and exploitation of living systems, ecologies, and the biosphere at large.

Opening of the international contemporary media art exhibition UN/GREEN at the Latvian National Museum of Art will be the key event in the RIXC Festival 2019 programme, which will be complemented with performances and artistic interventions. Curators of the project Jens Hauser (Germany / France), Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits (RIXC, Latvia) have chosen 20 works by Latvian and  foreign artists.

Guest curator of UN/GREEN exhibition Jens Hauser is media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. For many years, ‘green’ has been relevant subject for his research. Hauser’s OUVERT project systematizes findings acquired from variety of scientific disciplines aiming to develop new ways to speak about ecological questions an alternative to currently common superficial understanding and language of ‘green’. Exhibition OUVERT will be created in France as a thematic follow-up to UN/GREEN exhibition in Riga.

American artist and professor Adam Brown will participate with a performance Shadows from the Walls of Death in the exhibition opening on 5 July. Adam Brown in his performance will recreate a color invented in 18th century – ‘Paris green’ – arsenic laden synthetic green pigment. ‘Paris green’ was widely used not only in painting but also in production of textile wallpapers although its toxic properties were only publicly discussed by the end of 19th century. The paradoxical and controversial use of poisonous green pigment reflects the yearning of humanity to bring back greenness in urban life which was lost in the Industrial Revolution.

As part of the festival, an international art and science conference Open Fields 2019: Un/Green – Naturally Artificial Intelligences will take place in Riga on 5 and 6 July with aim to ‘un-green greenness’, ‘Eco-systematically’ reconnect ‘post-human postures’, discover and unpack ‘Naturally Artificial Intelligences’. The Open Fields RIXC Festival conference gathers more than 100 international independent artists and academic researchers from 60 universities and 30 countries annually.

EXHIBITION ARTISTS:

Florent di Bartolo (FR), Rebekah Blesing (US), Karine Bonneval (FR), Adam W. Brown (US), Bureau d´études (FR), Santa France (LV), HeHe (FR / DE / UK), Robert Hengeveld (CA), Iodine Dynamics (NL / FR / US / UK), Voldemārs Johansons (LV), Eva-Maria López (DE / FR), Francisco López (ES), AnneMarie Maes (BE), Agnes Meyer-Brandis (DE), Joana Moll (ES / DE), Quimera Rosa (ES / AR / FR), Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (DE), Taavi Suisalu (EE), Rihards Vītols (LV)

EXHIBITION and FESTIVAL ARE ORGANIZED BY:

RIXC Center for New Media Culture

SUPPORT:

State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, European Commission’s framework programme Creative Europe in relation with EMAP –  European Media Art Platform and Risk Change projects, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, Riga City Council, LG Electronics Latvia, Reverie TG, OU/ERT, Estonian National Culture Foundation, Outset Estonia Contemporary Art Fund, Goethe- Institut Riga, SIA Gardens, Art Research Laboratory (MPLab) of the Liepaja University, Latvian National Museum of Art, Art Academy of Latvia, Erica Synths, the Canada Council for the Arts, ArtsNL – Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, Grif.lv, U.S. Embassy in Latvia