Contemporary Art Exhibition Showroom 6: Matilde

The 17th of August was the first day of the Rīga town festival 2007, to which Andrejsala added its own highlight: the international exhibition of contemporary and experimental art Showroom 6: Matilde, with 20 foreign contributors representing Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany. Curator Linards Kulless admits that Rīga loves – or prefers? – events that emphasise music or partying, which contrasts with the fact that S6:M has fulfilled his vision about a contemporary art exhibition that is large-scale, high-quality and sold out in terms of attendance. What's important is that the displayed artwork was created by interacting with and becoming inspired by the various moods of Andrejsala, its buildings, outdoor space and objects, which then resulted in a completely new and different experience of the processes of modern art, at least for some of the visitors.

Arriving at Showroom 6: Matilde in the South End of Andrejsala you couldn't help but notice that the very buildings and structural and natural objects were not just means of exhibiting but had become an essential part of the artworks. For example, Solvej Dufour Andersen, member of Planet22 (Geneva, Switzerland), had literally hung her sound performance I love you in a local tree: every 20 seconds there was a mumbling sound as the speakers played back the amorous statement in no less than 68 languages, simultaneously. Her collaborators and compatriots Peter Stoffel and Rolf Graf had picked a 9-metre tree trunk decorated with carvings and attached it to the wall of the old Gatehouse, which already sported a tacky-looking portrait of an ambulance vehicle executed during some earlier art experiments. Painted in black, the beam appeared ostentatiously unfunctional, however it also did add a new quality, something like a wrinkle of wisdom to the forehead of the old shed. The disused building became a work in progress, every author adding a new element to it. The structure stays forever unfinished, improvable, extendable, destroyable... and again improvable.

Admittedly, the message of the artworks remained undecipherable for some of the viewers, and informal comments at the unveiling event revealed a degree of scepticism regarding the artistic merit. It seemed that the art circles of Latvia had been conceptually unacquainted to – and many perhaps missed altogether – the piece created by the Swiss artist group Showroom and placed behind the South End's Garages. According to Kulless, the author spent four days meditating on site, and the result was another tree-trunk as if growing out of a pool, a little rock adorned with three stripes, a glass and, finally, a T-shirt hung on a string. "Funny indeed. It reminds me of the feng shui ideas for laying out your house: the flow of energy from one object to another. You may of course say that it's nothing, that there are just wooden planks soaking in a pool; but you cannot get the real feel of it just at the unveiling of the exhibition: there's a solitary meditation, empathising and merging with the local space. At any another location, it wouldn't be the same piece of art. Things like these usually do not take place in Latvia," explains the curator.

The Auto exhibition space, based in Vienna, Austria, had brought its photos, various drawings and installations to the Orbīta of Andrejsala. It showed a conceptual approach to exhibiting that explored interrelations and visual links between the exhibits and created a feeling of presence of art that's alive; art that's been made by strictly following the architectural characteristics of the location; art in which the four steps to reach the artwork are as impressive as the artwork itself. The underlying concept also delved into a broad and nuanced range of topics, spanning mythology, religion, sexuality and identity. Kulless, who is also an artist, adds that the exhibition was a good example of the European trends in art: "Latvian artists mostly paint, direct videos and make stills, while drawing is relatively unpopular. Here, we could see that drawing shouldn't be understood solely in the classical sense. These drawings are completely different from what is taught at our academy of art: there's no drawing in the classical, 'photographical' manner."

Andrejsala's Barn sported its first-ever artistic exhibit: an installation titled Crash? consisting of a USSR-made Lada car. In fact, its author Gerald Grestenberger had been quite innovative because the fictionally crashed car was also the only entrance to the exhibition hall. One might also interpret the composition as a crash, or convergence, of different cultural spaces.

Perhaps the most ironic moment came at the closing day of the exhibition: some of the exhibits were simply taken to the local garbage bins. Observing this from a more traditional viewpoint would make you scratch your forehead in doubt the artistic merit, however it may also paradoxically enrich the exhibitors' concepts of the interplay between the artwork and the exhibiting environment. Linards Kulless's interpretation is that "these creations will, of course, not become a part of a museum's collection. New ones will be created if necessary, generating more and more fun. It resembles life's reality: you use a beautiful item for a certain period of time, and then another beautiful item replaces it."

The visiting artists that we met at the opening said that it was great fun to be working in Andrejsala: as opposed to various conventional museums, the locality had a very individual appeal; the environment was very unusual and disparate; each artist was offered a different working environment. A unifying motif of the exhibition was the experimentation with form and with the relationships of the creations, as well as an invitation for unfixed interpretation. Fabio Pirovino, an artist from the Amberg & Marti grouping of artists (Zurich, Switzerland), had this to say: "I've no idea what my artwork depicts. I do not intend to understand it because then it would be meaningless to create it. My work wants to be a form. Yes, I believe it does."