A fascination with the new world is the main focus of the film that documents the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art RIBOCA2. The Russian premiere of the film at Garage Screen summer cinema will be followed by a Q&A s with the film’s director Dāvis Sīmanis and RIBOCA2 artists.
The 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, titled and suddenly it all blossoms, was due to open in May 2020 and feature works by over seventy artists from across the world. Two months before the opening, Latvia closed its borders and banned all big events due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition was moved to summer, and a documentation of it was produced to overcome the closed national borders. The warehouses of the main location—the Andrejsala port familiar to the visitors of the first biennial—became a film set, and the project’s curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel a screenwriter and co-director with the acclaimed Latvian filmmaker Dāvis Sīmanis (The Mover).
In a way, the biennial that explored the end of the old reality gained a lot from the change of format, which enabled it to address the fascination with the new world with more affect. Split into several sections, such as On Relationships (the formation of new alliances and the maintenance of the old ones) and On Otherness (rediscovering histories), the film is a sort of an avant-garde variety show or a collection of sketches—a documentation of performances and installations with Lamarche-Vadel’s poetic voiceover. Choir singing in the port is followed by drone footage shot over Riga; the videos featured in the exhibition are seamlessly integrated into the film. Works include pieces by several artists familiar to Garage visitors: one of them is a rainbow sculpture by Ugo Rondinone, who had a solo exhibition at Garage in 2016. The central event of the program is a performance by the queer saxophonist Bendik Giske in an enormous industrial space.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
and suddenly it all blossoms
Directors: Dāvis Sīmanis, Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel
Latvia, 2021. 80 min. 12+