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Kim? White Night 2026 Programme 

Kim? Contemporary Art Center is pleased to invite you to a specially curated programme by artist Krista Vindberga-Auzniece, as part of the contemporary culture forum “White Night 2026.” The event takes place in Kim?’s exhibition space and the adjoining courtyard (Sporta iela 2, k-1) from September 5 at 12:00 to September 6 at 02:00. Free admission. 

To register for the workshop, please email annaticha19@gmail.com by September 4. Participation is free of charge; confirmation and further instructions will be sent upon registration. 

Programme: 

12:00–02:00 View Krista Vindberga-Auzniece’s solo exhibition “Circles Are Better Than Lines (oda pieskārienam)” and the public installation “O, DZIEDI MANI” (O, Sing to Me), created especially for White Night. Guided tours with exhibition mediators are available upon request. 

16:00–18:00 Krista Vindberga-Auzniece’s workshop 

Led by the artist, this charcoal drawing and archival photo collage workshop is devoted to exploring personal, family, or found visual archives, sketching, and transferring them onto canvas. Participants will explore how to arrange and layer found stories and retell them by redrawing, retouching, and reimagining. 

19:00 and 21:00 Soprano Liene Kinča performs “Liebestod,” the third-act composition from Richard Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde.” 

24:00 At the event’s culmination, at midnight on September 5, visitors are invited to take a piece of the blooming garden installation home with them, taking on further care of the flowers as a personal continuation of the work, allowing the installation to live on beyond its close. 

Krista Vindberga-Auzniece on the event’s central object, the public installation: 

“O, DZIEDI MANI” (O, Sing to Me) brings together strict geometric form with living, fragile, and transient matter. In Kim?’s courtyard, a square of white chrysanthemums becomes a temporary garden in the city center. Here, minimalist clarity meets the baroque abundance of flowers, while the fixed form is subjected to time, weather, care, and decay. 

Above the flowers, sung words from Richard Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde” transform the courtyard into an emotionally charged space. The opera’s passionate language is conveyed through technical and mechanical devices, creating tension between the living and the artificial, the intimate and the monumental, the individual voice and cultural memory. The subtitle machines become a kind of operatic karaoke mechanism, allowing visitors not only to watch, but also to step into a character’s place, reading, singing, or silently following the text. In this way, the opera is lifted out of its usual space of representation and becomes more accessible, dissolving the distance between monumental cultural heritage and individual experience. 

Krista Vindberga-Auzniece (b. 1989) is a visual artist working across a range of media and scales, from small-format, carefully crafted drawings to large-scale scenographic solutions for theater and opera productions. She holds a BA from the Painting Department of the Art Academy of Latvia and an MA in Visual Communication. 

Liene Kinča studied singing under Margarita Gruzdeva, graduating from the Latvian Academy of Music in 2006 in Sergejs Martinovs’s class. She has further developed her vocal skills with Irēna Milkevičute, Ingrīda Kaizerfelde, David Jones, and others. Liene Kinča currently continues refining her vocal skills with Kirsten Schöttl-Dreier. 

Event team:

Executive director: Evita Goze

Programme director: Zane Onckule

Communications manager: Kristiāna Bērza

Project manager: Katrīna Jauģiete

Mediators: Betija Briede, Poļina Gasparoviča, Emīlija Austra Lodiņa, Anna Annemarija Samsone, Alise Sedleniece, Marlēna Sniega

Installation technical team: Romāns Medvedevs, Oskars Plataiskalns, Olivers Tarvids

Design: Anna Ceipe

Opera text translation Proofreading: Signe Viška 

The event is realized with co-funding from the Riga City Council, as well as support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, the State Culture Capital Foundation, and Altum. 

Photography/filming will take place during the event, and the resulting materials may be used for Kim?’s communications and marketing purposes. 

For more information on all “White Night” events: www.baltanakts.lv, facebook.com/Baltanakts 

Krista Vindberga-Auzniece
Circles Are Better Than Lines (oda pieskārienam)
solo exhibition 

Opening: August 26, 6-9 p.m.

Exhibition dates: August 27–October 18, 2026
Venue: Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Sporta 2, Riga
Curator: Zane Onckule 

I don’t remember any of it, and yet I still seem to have memories of it.
Krista Vindberga-Auzniece 

The body remembers through touch. The new drawings made especially for Krista Vindberga-Auzniece’s solo exhibition emerge through repetition, silence, and concentration, with one movement slowly following the next until time accumulates in the surface. Charcoal crumbles, slips from the control of the hand, and is worked into the carefully prepared canvas; each subsequent touch retains the trace of the one before, turning duration into a material quality of the image. 

Vindberga-Auzniece’s particular sensitivity, a heightened sense of presence akin to falling in love or some other intoxicating state, meets images from a time that belonged to others. Old family albums become starting points for prolonged looking, where a smile, a hand on a shoulder, a dance step, a fold of fabric or flowers held with ceremonial seriousness acquire a new kind of attention, bringing peripheral details into focus. 

The contours of these drawings on canvas and paper grew out of this meditative rhythm, in which movement becomes a form of contemplation. The artist’s hand is at once an instrument, a measuring device, and a bearer of memory. The drawing takes on sculptural contours, its surface holding the pressure of the palm, the imprints of fingers and movements causing persistent friction, pushed to the point of drawing blood, leaving the artist’s body legible within the image. 

The photographic source material comes from the artist’s personal archive: faded black-and-white and sepia images of lives past. Enlarged, sometimes hundreds of times, these images shift in weight and meaning as the scale redistributes attention. The miniature acquires mass and a musculature of meaning; the passing moment gains permanence, while an unfamiliar gesture or posture becomes strangely recognisable. 

Images fixed long before the artist’s birth enter a field in which personal and collective memory overlap. Retrospective looking – individual, capricious and selective – becomes entangled with a broader field of memory, where the past returns through body language: a gesture, a posture, a hand, a way of holding oneself before the camera. 

A nostalgic and melancholic vibration emerges from the awareness that every photograph has already captured something lost. Looking and drawing allow that moment to acquire meaning once again, with the instant of the photograph becoming the duration of the drawing. Material is worked into the surface, touch follows touch, and the drawing is layered, tended to, fed, and strengthened until the form of a story begins to bloom. 

In Circles Are Better Than Lines, a shift of a single degree from the upper edge of the frame introduces a slight refusal of alignment, a deliberate accident levitating within the otherwise anonymous white field. Across two dozen drawings, these disturbances draw the viewer into a labyrinth of proximity and distance, where perception takes shape through approach, withdrawal, and return. 

A line moves forward, accepting a beginning and an end, while a circle arranges and rearranges the breath and rhythm of the line, folding its movement back into itself. The circle gives the line another temporality, based on recurrence. Are circles better than lines then? As angular and static propositions, they both work.  

Krista Vindberga-Auzniece (b. 1989) is a visual artist working across a range of media and scales, from small-format drawings to large-scale scenographic works for theatre and opera. She holds a BA in painting from the Art Academy of Latvia and an MA in visual communication. Her work has been presented in solo, duo, and group exhibitions in Latvia and internationally, including at the Latvian National Museum of Art and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Alma Gallery in Riga, and Kogo Gallery in Tartu. In 2019, she received an award at the Prague Quadrennial. She has also received the Spēlmaņu nakts Theatre Award and the Latvian National Theatre Award for scenography. She has been nominated for the Purvītis Prize three times, in 2015, 2021, and 2023. Her work is held in the collection of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Latvian National Museum of Art, and private collections in Latvia and abroad. 

Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, the State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Altum, KRASO, Kokmuiža, and Media Port. 

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and exhibition team:      

Executive Director: Evita Goze   
Programme Director: Zane Onckule   
Communications Manager: Kristiāna Bērza   
Project manager: Katrīna Jauģiete
Mediators: Betija Briede, Poļina Gasparoviča, Emīlija Austra Lodiņa, Anna Annemarija Samsone, Alise Sedleniece, Linda Šterna
Technical team: Mārtiņš Aulmanis, Aldis Bušs, Romāns Medvedevs
Latvian proofreading: Ilze Jansone    
English proofreading: Will Mawhood