Language: From Practice to Action is the first event in a series of seasonal alternative education activities under the title The Season of Learning, developed to foster critical thinking and discussion about the field of contemporary art and the processes and politics surrounding it in the Baltics and beyond.

Taking the form of a symposium and a set of workshops, the event will focus on language in its broadest sense: as a means of communication that can either bridge communities and individual interactions or bring conversation to a deadlock, a tool to exercise power over the marginalized but also an instrument for possible emancipation of communities or locations.

Specific patterns of language and approaches of communication tend to repeat whenever the so-called ‘local’ art scenes meet with the ‘international’ art world. Such interactions, although certainly welcomed and even desired, nevertheless demand a closer investigation of their means and ways. Traditionally, Western institutional structures with their discursive ideologies exercise certain languages of power towards supposedly inferior groups.

What is this language, and how does it appear in the field of contemporary art? How visible or invisible is it, and what kind of consequences does this visibility or lack thereof entail? Where does responsibility lie: that of the curator, of the institution, of the local art community itself? How can we craft a healthy, mutual conversation based on equality among the involved parties? How can we look at these questions in Riga, in the Baltics, and beyond? How can we imagine possible alternative scenarios from communication to action?

— How to recover from particular language that is established by institutional structures and/or neoliberal ideologies? How can we seek for a new, fresh, relevant language? And relevant for whom, both locally and internationally?

— How can we be active and responsive towards the formats that are problematic? How can we bring local activism into a picture?

— How much is the local art scene involved with others, and how much it is represented, taken into account, considered, and helped by others? By whom in particular?


Ieva Astahovska, iLiana Fokianaki, Santa Hirša, Victoria Ivanova, Katia Krupennikova, Anne Szefer Karlsen, Kristel Raesaar, Margaret Tali.


Language of Censorship
Katia Krupennikova and Santa Hirša
Venue: Art Academy of Latvia
Date: September 28

Flow: Art and Finance
Victoria Ivanova and Kristel Raesaar
Venue: Kim? Contemporary Art Centre
Date: September 29 - 30

How to do things with words under neoliberalism
Ieva Astahovska and Margaret Tali
Venue: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art
Date: September 29 - 30

Fantasy Practices
Anne Szefer Karlsen
Venue: 427 Gallery
Date: September 28

Public events

Presentations of participants and moderated discussion
Venue: Kaņepes Culture Centre
Date: September 28

Talk by iLiana Fokianaki
Venue: Kaņepes Culture Centre
Date: September 30

for workshops by September 21