Open-Air Contemporary Art Exhibition "Border"

On September 12, the open-air contemporary art exhibition "Border" will open at the National Botanical Garden in Salaspils. Set among spore plants and tea roses, Estonian bittercress and elephant-foot yuccas, the exhibition features both works created especially for this site and earlier works by Vika Eksta, Edīte Karlsone (Edith Karlson, Estonia), Agita Maračkovska, Madara Peiseniece, Hanele Zane Putniņa, Augustas Serapinas (Lithuania), and Elīna Vītola - installations, graphics, sculptural objects, photographs, and paintings.

The exhibition "Border" will be on view until November 10, and it is the fourth in the Stone Head exhibition series. It refers to the sculpture "Stone Head" found in the Salaspils area, which can be dated as a depiction of a deity created by ancient Livs in the 11th century. The exhibition makers chose it as a symbol of a long-term project for all the black spots in our knowledge.

The exhibition's border separates reality from myth, function from meaning, the surface from the underground, anonymity from traceability, and preservation from disappearance. Some of these borders protect us, others restrict us, while still others become visible only at the moment they are crossed.

The botanical garden's apparent idyll, where what continues to grow as it wishes is constantly tended, classified, moved, and contained, becomes part of the artworks and marks the boundary between the planned and the unpredictable.

The exhibition artist Vika Eksta works with photography, video, camera-based performance, and audiovisual archives. In her long-term projects, she combines the documentary with the staged, focusing on identity, personal experience, relationships, social roles, and traces of historical memory. In her work, the everyday often turns into an emotionally charged, partly fictional reality.

Edīte Karlsone (Edith Karlson, Estonia) creates sculptural worlds inhabited by people, animals, and strange hybrids. Grotesque, dark humor, and vulnerability in her work are combined with an interest in instincts, fear, mortality, and humanity's place among other living beings. Here, the everyday easily turns into the mythic and the existential.

People, the surrounding environment, and their mutual influence are key points of reference in Agita Maračkovska's work. Using sculpture, installation, and environmental art techniques, she links personal experience with ecological and social processes, often reflecting on fragility, transformation, and human relations with nature.

Madara Peiseniece's practice encompasses painting, installation, and site-specific projects. Her works often grow out of personal memory, a particular place, or an apparently everyday impulse that is transformed into a speculative situation. She is interested in looking, finding, and the experience of the unknown, as well as the boundary between material reality and a narrative created by imagination.

Hanele Zane Putniņa works in graphic techniques, especially large-format linocut, as well as in installation and self-publishing. In her work, motifs from folklore and mythology meet everyday absurdity, humor, and contemporary references, creating a distinctive world between the archaic, the fantastical, and the very concrete present.

Augustas Serapinas (Lithuania) often focuses on places that initially seem insignificant: utility spaces, sheds, yards, worn-out buildings, or objects with their own local history. By relocating, transforming, or reactivating these elements in a new context, he sheds light on social relations, institutional boundaries, and memories preserved in architecture and its remnants.

Elīna Vītola's practice spans painting, installation, and collaborative projects. Her works lie at the intersection of contemporary painting and everyday life, exploring the material, social, and psychological structures that shape human experience. Humor, everyday observation, and speculative narratives often intertwine in them.