Exhibitions

I hope this email finds you well

Vilnius, 12.10.2024 - 27.10.2024 | InTheCloset gallery (Hangar space)

Participants: Sofie Lucia Maria Carlson, Aistė Gaidilionytė, Danute Līva, Diana Mikane, Katariin Mudist, Gustavs Grasis, Valtteri Alanen, Eglė Šimėnaitė, Kamilė Vasiliauskaitė, Mattias Malk, and Paula Veidenbauma, toursdetours (Bárbara Acevedo Strange, Moritz Appich, Paula Buškevica)

Exhibition production: gel office and Baltic Lines collaborative effort

Graphic design: Paula Buškevica

Partners: Būkčia Kombučia, CAC Reading Room, FOLD, ISSP Gallery, InTheCloset, VARES Architecture Residency

Financial support: Nordic Culture Point, Cultural Endowment of Estonia

Documentation: Gustavs Grasis

The exhibition title – I hope this email finds you well – refers to metaphoric corridors our group has been walking this year. While researching the Rail Baltica project, and reading about its potential to create new economic ‘arteries’, ‘meeting points’, and ‘axis’, the Baltic Lines participants found themselves already operating within the Baltic-Nordic economic corridor that the railway project is materialising. While observing the dramaturgy of the implementing bodies of Rail Baltica, we have arrived at a point of departure where all of us – a small research project, offices of train-for-the-future, a hangar-in-waiting, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and beyond – meet in a shared balancing act of trying to do something together. To connect and be friends. And can we even afford not to be friends? Or at least perform a friendship?

For a long time, Rail Baltica has been an abstract idea. Although it traces back to 2001 when the Baltic transport ministers agreed to collaborate on a common mobility line, the opening of the new railway connecting Tallinn and Warsaw now seems to be delayed until after 2030. Rail Baltica’s success relies on a shared vision across the Baltic states, but the moments of cooperation often get derailed by differing national agendas creating tension. Baiba Rubesa, the former CEO of Rail Baltica, has called it ‘the saddest example of mismanagement in public sector governance.’

The works presented at I hope this email finds you well were developed through the Baltic Lines’s year-long journey of referencing happenings around the railway construction in-process while activating the discourse around the megaproject as a semiotic device. As a more suitable alternative for the umbrella term ‘artistic research’, we have developed the vocabulary of ‘spin-offing’ as a more precise term for our practice on the outskirts of academia. This expanded vocabulary emphasises the approach that looks at the megaproject as a symbolic element that reflects space-time compressions within the shared Baltic economic corridor. It intertwines with various temporalities and exists through narratives that can easily shift away from the physical reality of the railway itself, much like the train represents a departure from the uncomfortable Soviet past.

Wish Upon a Shooting Star

Athens, 26.11.2024 - 05.01.2025 | Living Room

Artist(s): gel office (Paula Veidenbauma & Diāna Mikāne)

Photo credits: Frank Holbein

Supported by Culture Moves Europe

Wish Upon a Shooting Star derives from situated city megaproject showrooms. Coming from Riga, another periphery of the European Union, and sharing the same time zone with Athens, the artist duo gel office fabricates an upcoming gentrified poodle invasion in the middle of mixed-use urban development potentialities. While still existing through rendered nightmares without windows, these outlines simulate an archipelago of sleek urban presences, connected through the imaginary of abstraction. Entering the regeneration genre of fictional spaces, gel office sets up implicit frictions. It is the same place with gasping promises, whether it’s Athens, Dubai, or Riga – the Dubai of Europe. Is there a way out?

Departing from René Boer’s text Smooth City, which critiques the evolution of urban development towards what he describes as ‘smoothness’ – a trend marked by polished, predictable, and homogenous urban spaces – the artists reinterpret this expression as an action. In this instance, Living Room becomes a portal of the uncanny date, hiding under the hope and promise of a shooting star. The sculptural assemblage constructs a hostile scenography of intertwined object ontologies. In the space, the artists are working with smoothly embedded forms and features, and are looking for ways how to redirect, dislocate, and mould them into a cosmos, where rendered realities meet in folds and glitches, inviting curves and cuts that set a blind date for both, perfect project image, and ghosts and monsters it might be hiding.