This year’s contemporary art festival Survival Kit 14 will feature two exhibitions – the festival’s central exhibition Long-distance Friendships, curated by Inga Lāce and Alicia Knock, and the final exhibition of the inspiring project The Artist is Present. A parallel educational program will accompany the festival.

12 September: Seniors’ afternoon: “Memory Market”

Seniors’ afternoon offers to explore the contemporary art festival Survival Kit 14 at a leisurely pace with the head of the education programme Kristīne Ercika, ask questions of interest to yourself and delve into the contemporary art scene in Latvia and around the world. In the afternoon, we will look at the artworks together with the participants and discuss our experiences and opinions over a cup of tea.

17 September: “Ghost Lace Drawing Workshop” and Excursion for Children

In this workshop, we will draw ghost lace with artist Anna Malicka, inspired by her work in the exhibition, and think about different alternative models of friendship.

Anna Malicka is a multimedia artist working mainly with textiles, drawings on paper and audiovisual content. Her work is often inspired by abstraction, various handicrafts, everyday aesthetics and ideas of assemblages, which she uses to construct fragments of imaginary space. Anna Malicka is part of kuš! comics – an international comics publishing house based in Riga, but, as with ghosts, sometimes people are unsure of its existence.

24 September: Workshop “Sticker Stories” and Excursion for Children

Sticker-making workshop for children with the artist Inga Erdmane. Let’s create unique stickers together, which can then be glued on the cover of a phone, the cover, or inside pages of a notebook, pencil cases, or any other material.

Inga Erdmane graduated from the Department of Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and studied psychology in Riga. She is interested in society, humanity in general, and their interaction with the individual. Inga’s main point of reference is documenting events and interpreting the documentary narrative in installations. Inga says that “photography has taken me to places I would never have gone otherwise and introduced me to wonderful people. It never ceases to amaze me, to keep me experimenting and looking for new ways to express myself visually and to explore the relationship between society and the individual.”