Survival Kit has always been a critical voice to examine and reflect on the development of contemporary society, offering alternative survival scenarios and promoting dialogue on current challenges. This year’s edition, coinciding with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s 25th anniversary, reflects on the fluidity and heterodoxy of nationalism and identity.
RIGA – Entitled House of See-More (Simurga Nam in Latvian language) 2025 edition of Survival Kit is curated by duo Slavs and Tatars and Michał Grzegorzek and is a vivid testament to the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s unwavering commitment to pushing the boundaries of art and building bridges between different cultures and ideas, promoting the development of contemporary art in Latvia, offering artists freedom of creative expression and strengthening Latvia’s place on the international art map. Since its inception in 2009 as a response to the economic crisis in Latvia, the festival has become an important platform where the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art reflects its involvement in the research, creation and development of contemporary art processes both in Latvia and internationally.
This year, Survival Kit takes place in the transformed creative city of Grīziņdārzs, at 9 Zemitāna Street, in Riga. This is a historic change, as for the first time in the festival’s existence, it renounces to abandoned or forgotten industrial landscapes, for a modern, renovated complex that once served as the home of the Riga Knitting Factory; this choice want to stress the vivid metaphor for the city’s continuous development and its ability to adapt, transforming seemingly “non-places” into dynamic urban centers pulsating with creativity and ideas. Nestled between the railway station, major transport hubs, and industrial buildings, Grīziņdārzs area is being revitalised, transforming a once “placeless” place into a dynamic urban node, and now serves as a meaningful stop in Survival Kit’s ongoing process of mapping the city through creativity.
Grīziņdārzs represents a new chapter for Survival Kit. This complex, which has now been developed into a creative city, was created to become an inspiring home for companies that value employee well-being and a creative working environment, as well as a new gathering place for cultural and entertainment events.
Survival Kit 16 takes place from August 30 to September 28, 2025, and is organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, the Riga City Council, the Embassy of the Italian Republic in Riga, together with other agencies and institutions.
“We are ever more clearly aware of the movements of the world’s tectonic plates and, with them, shifts in its power structures and hierarchies. Relations between centres and peripheries, or ‘borders’, are changing precisely because it is sometimes from the border that events in the centre are more plainly seen and understood”
The Concept
As Solvita Krese, Founder and Creative Director of the Festival, declares, “We are ever more clearly aware of the movements of the world’s tectonic plates and, with them, shifts in its power structures and hierarchies. Relations between centres and peripheries, or ‘borders’, are changing precisely because it is sometimes from the border that events in the centre are more plainly seen and understood”. The Survival Kit 16 exhibition Simurga nams/House of See-More gathers 23 artists, performers, and thinkers from different corners of the world.
The curators have dug into the roots of ancient Indo-European culture, from Greece to the Persian Empire, in particular Aristophanes’ The Birds, Faruddin Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, and the Latvian cycle of songs The Birds Wedding; in these works, winged creatures often come together, overcoming their respective limits as individuals, to achieve something larger than themselves. For Survival Kit 16, Slavs and Tatars and Michał Grzegorzek see in Simurgh a resolutely transnational creature as a device – another means of defining a region extending from China to northern Ukraine, and “equally interested in the ecstatic as the electorally eligible”.
In The Conference of the Birds, Iranian Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar wrote of a band of pilgrim birds in search of the simurgh (a pun on the Persian expression for “thirty birds” – si morgh), or the king of the birds; but when a group of thirty birds finally reach the dwelling place of the simurgh, all they find is a lake in which they see their own reflection. On the other hand, Aristophanes’s play revolves around Pisthetaerus, an Athenian who convinces the birds to create a great city in the sky, and thus regain their status as the original gods. Pisthetaerus eventually transforms into a bird-like god himself and replaces Zeus as the king of the gods.
Linking these traditions to the contemporary age, Grzegorzek and Slavs and Tatars write: “Where the eagle projects empire and nationalism, a lazy form of toxic masculinity, Simurgh is literally flaming, and non-binary, sometimes gendered as a woman, and of the next world, not this one. Epiphany often requires one to die before one dies: The legend offers House of See-More as an equal reflection and antidote to the blurred boundaries between the generative and the extractive, the analytical and the affective, the singular and the multiple”.
The conceptual core of this year’s Survival Kit is a collaboration between the European-based curatorial collective Slavs and Tatars and Michał Grzegorzek – an exhibition entitled House of See-More. At its centre is the mythical, flaming and magnificent bird Simurg, which in Eurasian cultures symbolises liberation in both a metaphysical and political sense. Through the image of Simurg, the curators invite viewers to reflect on issues of belonging, boundaries and collective identity at a time when geopolitical and cultural divides are becoming ever deeper and more painful.
Slavs and Tatars, an internationally renowned art collective founded in 2006, is known for its unique approach to controversial social issues. Their creative practice is deeply rooted in the Eurasian region – the territories between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China, often focusing on the historically marginalised and oppressed territories of Russian and Soviet imperialism. The collective is able to combine pop culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral history, contemporary myths, and academic research, creating works that are both exciting and thought-provoking.
Gžegožeks, whose experience working with performance art, queer culture and feminist ideas harmoniously resonates with and complements the fiery and changing nature of Simurgh, which is part of the festival’s concept. He has been one of the curators of performing arts at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art and is a co-founder of the Kem School. His knowledge will add additional layers to the exhibition, offering visitors a different view of art as social commentary.
“Through the image of Simurg, the curators invite viewers to reflect on issues of belonging, boundaries and collective identity at a time when geopolitical and cultural divides are becoming ever deeper and more painful.”
Feminism and Queer Question
Breaking boundaries can be a physical or a metaphorical action. In the latter case, social and gender challenges offer a dynamic “playground”; in the contemporary age, female artists are probably the most engaged in trying to build the change society needs. Survival Kit 16 displays some examples of this ongoing scene.
WC Ride is part of Ola Vasiljeva’s ongoing series in which her drawings are transposed into large-scale steel frames – structures that behave less like sculptures and more like animated outlines, casting exaggerated shadows that extend the work’s reach beyond its material boundaries. Drawing from the visual logic of satirical illustration, the composition stages a procession of ambiguous figures locked in a power exchange: dominant yet submissive. They ride – or are perhaps ridden by – a hybrid shoe-chariot, a vehicle both comical and ceremonial. While the work maintains a deliberate evasiveness, the scene depicted gestures playfully toward the themes of non-binary identity, theatricality, and the futility of taxonomies.
Filipka Rutkowska is a gender-liminal performance artist and art historian whose works transform previously worn garments into sensuous, symbolic objects. Once integral to everyday life and performance, these clothes have relinquished their practical functions to become vessels of bodily memory, intimacy, and queer embodiment. Rather than suggesting contradiction, the combination of garments associated with sexual expression and elements linked to authority and social performance speaks to the simultaneity of queer existence, as desire and dominance are seen to coexist within a single visual language.
Through fluid articulations that traverse femininity and masculinity, they propose a mode of existence beyond imposed norms – mobilising theatricality and subversive strategies for social navigation. These works articulate a queer performative philosophy rooted in fabric, spray, charcoal, and flesh. They construct a space in which identity need not be coherent but is affectively and politically charged. Through ritual, transformation, and rupture, they unfold as both elegy and manifesto – for embodied resistance, and for the utopian possibilities of queer becoming.
Moreover, Luīze Nežberte’s columns (Receptacle, bin totem, 2025) embody woman as an institution – a symbol of stability and endurance in a war-torn world where the ground beneath our feet is becoming increasingly unstable. Her work is a powerful commentary on resilience and hope in an era full of unrest and change. Sheet metal painted in black and white, mimicking the symmetry, balance, and proportion of Greek architecture, the black creating depth, the object itself an illusion, a facade. Looking at images from Soviet Latvia, the bin is a silent protagonist in many public spaces, standing sentinel in busy stations and quiet courtyards – its authoritarian yet oddly democratic geometric simplicity signalling grand ideals while serving the human wish to discard waste. The trash bin is an inadvertent time capsule, its formal dignity masking the tensions between aspiration and utility, and the monumental and the everyday.
Political and Oriental Roots
The exhibition also develops a more political, poetic and metaphorical approach, for example, with artist and filmmaker Palestinian, Jerusalem-born Shadi Habib Allah’s work In-stock, 2018, a series of hardened sheets of shrink wrap, of the sort that cover the cases of most grocery merchandise, from canned food to sodas. These hollow forms become solid yet ghostly reminders of the supplies once restocked weekly at the corner stores in Florida. These stores mostly exist in neighbourhoods previously considered to be food deserts. Their sustainability was compromised when real estate developments and mega supermarkets pushed into the once-forgotten areas where they are located. With the arrival of stricter welfare policies, which predominantly affect residents of these neighbourhoods, their rarely sold stock came to stand in for a system of co-dependency, one in which fictional groceries are exchanged for cash. The community found a workaround – a way to maintain the bare minimum while also supporting a corner store that has long been a social space, a place to gather in the area.
Looking at China, Kexin Hao’s Revolution is a dinner party is a hand puppet performance reimagining Mao Zedong’s phrase used as the title of the artwork as an invitation to reflect on food, pests, and kinship. In the afterlife realm of “Pest Heaven”, a sparrow and a rat debate class and colonial violence. These figures are drawn from Mao’s “Smash Sparrows Campaign” and the “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre”. A silverfish deity interrupts, revealing they are one body: the sparrow as the world’s mouth, feeding on seeds; the rat as the gut, digesting the city’s waste. She guides them to a dinner party and claims that revolution is an act of eating in which boundaries between self and other dissolve and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay.
In the end, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur’s Falcon, made of beeswax, reflects a state of alertness and transition. Its form draws from traditional symbols of watchfulness and solitude, often associated with open landscapes and long journeys. The material – sensitive and impermanent – emphasises the fragility of an identity shaped by movement. Neither fully grounded nor in flight, the falcon becomes a figure of migration: observing, waiting, adapting. It speaks to the quiet strength needed to remain present while everything around is shifting.
Survival Kit 16
August 30 – September 28, 2025
Riga, Latvia
