Contemporary art exhibition marks the opening of Presidency’s cultural programme in USA

The cultural programme of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union will open in the United States of America with a project of Latvian contemporary art, Lily’s Pool.

At the official reception on 21 January, the exhibition will be opened by Latvia’s Ambassador to the USA, Andris Razāns, and the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Latvia to the UN, Jānis Mažeiks.

The public opening of the exhibition will take place on Thursday 22 January at the Art in General gallery in New York with a special performance by the artists.

The group exhibition has been developed as a collective version of current art processes. The participants in the exhibition are Kaspars Groševs, Ieva Kraule, Kristīne Kursiša, Darja Meļņikova, Miks Mitrēvics, Evita Vasiļjeva, Armands Zelās. They are up-and-coming Latvian artists, united by their country of origin, educational background and their reflections about the environment and their own possibilities within it.

Lily’s Pool attempts to capture the presence of subtle, tangible, and poetic phenomena within a mediated post-Internet, “post-natural  culture. The participating artists utilise the varied mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, textile, and performance to grapple with the personal and historical memory of materials in a contemporary society engrossed in the fleeting structure of the digital. The works in the exhibition create environments that are at once palpable and uncanny, examining how the physical and social body is affected by accelerated temporalities and the sensations of high-speed browsing and sharing in daily life. An essential part of the exhibition is its Utopian element.

The exhibition is organised by kim? Contemporary Art Centre in collaboration with Art in General as part of the International Collaborations Programme.

Lily’s Pool will be on display until 21 February.

The exhibition is part of the cultural programme of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the EU. The main values of this programme are contemporaneity, uniqueness and excellence, and it consists of almost 200 events worldwide.

The Presidency’s cultural programme in the USA features several concerts by the RIX Piano Quartet, Latvian National Choir and Māris Briežkalns Quintet, an exhibition by the Latvian artist Visvaldis Ziediņš and Latvian literature readings.