Sweating the Future at Riga Art Week

Situated opposite the Latvian National Museum of Art – the Baltic region’s first purpose-built art museum – is a small contemporary gallery space that wouldn’t feel out of place in London’s Mayfair: Galerija ASNI, a Riga stronghold headed by Riga Art Week co-founder Elīna Drāke and curator Auguste Petre.

Since its founding in 2024, the gallery has helped bolster the city’s status as a contender in the global art market. Last summer, the owners enlisted Mareunrol, the fashion-design duo Mārite Mastiņa-Pēterkopa and Rolands Pēterkops, to exhibit. Those same artists recently presented the archive of Untamed Fashion Assemblies (UFA) – an experimental performance project organised by Riga cult fashion figure Bruno Birmanis – at the Latvian Pavilion in Venice. Next on the agenda for ASNI is Lithuanian-raised Gabija Grušaitė, an artist representative of a similarly ascending post-Soviet art scene.

It’s a Thursday morning when I visit the show. Grušaitė has just made the final touches on Circulation, curated by the bookish but elegant duo Francesco Ragazzi and Francesco Urbano; academics with doctorates in philosophy and visual and media studies, respectively. The show’s centrepiece is a self-shaped industrial device comprising a clear, heat-resistant epoxy sheet suspended from an engine crane and gripped by red mechanical vices. The sheet is underlaid with heating elements, the top half threaded with warm electrical wiring (37 degrees Celsius, Urbano notes, instructing me to touch it) and the bottom with blue wiring pumping cool glycol (10 degrees Celsius). Close to the crane, a quartet of humidifiers douse milky vapour into the space, causing the hanging sheet, the artist, the curators and myself to sweat. As Ragazzi puts it, the work is “crying”.

Gabija Grušaite, CIRCULATION, 2026 (installation view, Galerija ASNI). Photo: Ansis Starks. Courtesy the artist, Riga Art Week and Galerija ASNI, Riga

It’s a complicated setup. Visually, it makes you feel cold. But it gets to the core of Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian and broader Baltic values. “Underfloor heating is almost part of the national identity,” says Grušaitė, deadpan. Her explanation is twofold. First, it is indeed commonplace for Baltic homes – across the class spectrum – to be equipped with what in Western Europe and the US is seen as a middle-class luxury. Second, and crucially, it serves as a neat explainer for the show’s curatorial conceit: that modern humans seek to contain and control their natural environments, separating themselves from external climates by artificial means.

In the artist’s native Lithuania and the surrounding nations, this has a post-Soviet nuance. Grušaitė sees these cautious, borderline claustrophobic tendencies as trauma responses to a failed communist regime that ended in the 1990s and the early stage of capitalism that replaced it. For her, it highlights the comfort blankets inherent in the Baltic mentality. Grušaitė explains that growth in education and job opportunities for her generation gave rise to optimism about American-style capitalism, particularly as it created opportunities for Baltic people to own property.

“A lot of my friends have recently acquired their first flat, and everyone is going through the renovation process,” Grušaitė tells me. “It’s this dream that we can have our own homes. And of course, these are going to have underfloor heating.”

She ties this to a national reluctance to criticise the new economic model imported from the United States. After all, without NATO, the Baltics will remain vulnerable to Russian aggression.

In that sense, there’s a stifling humility at the heart of Grušaitė’s show. Opposite the sculpture, a wall is fitted with Home Depot-esque panelling and tubing used for, once again, underfloor heating. Two screens play scenes of carefully orchestrated human-animal interactions, including footage from a safari trip Grušaitė filmed. Overhead, an AI-generated love song she wrote plays, continuing a “conversation between machines and nature”. Elsewhere, a series of laser-engraved UV-glass panels – designed to regulate climates in open spaces such as galleries – line the edge of the room, each annotated with Grušaitė’s loosely drawn maps informed by bird migration routes and her experiences of village life. The work evokes an internal conflict between a shiny neoliberal techscape and looser memories of agrarian communism.

The exhibition’s conceptual weight is further anchored by the artist’s own biography. Her partner, Justas Janauskas – hovering in the gallery as we speak  – is a figure synonymous with the region’s tech-driven ascent as the co-founder of Vinted, the pre-eminent marketplace for the "pre-loved." He has since transitioned into the role of private patron, co-founding the London-based Upė Foundation alongside curator Adomas Narkevičius (who, fittingly, is co-curating this year’s Latvian Pavilion). Upė operates with a sophisticated, intellectual mandate, drawing comparisons to the Delfina Foundation, the initiatives of Nicoletta Fiorucci or Yan Du’s Asymmetry Foundation.

Gabija Grušaite, CIRCULATION, 2026 (installation view, Galerija ASNI). Photo: Ansis Starks. Courtesy the artist, Riga Art Week and Galerija ASNI, Riga

“Patronage for Baltic art is personally important to me as I come from the Baltics myself,” Janauskas says, his tone suggesting a sense of civic duty. “I think the region has a lot to offer in terms of experimental artistic and curatorial practices, and a lot to learn from more established fields in terms of structure and governance.”

The Upė Foundation serves as his strategic response to this gap. While anchored in London, the project’s ambitions extend far beyond the established centres of Western Europe.

“Upė’s mission, in a nutshell, is to catalyse new cultural exchanges between the Baltics and the rest of the world,” Janauskas says. “It is a big mission, but we start small with specific projects.” He emphasises that the programme prioritises “non-tangible professional and personal experiences” – such as fellowships and deep research – over the material ego of new architecture.

Janauskas’s pivot from tech-disruptor to cultural catalyst mirrors the fractured reality of the Baltic art economy. It is a system increasingly defined by a K-shaped trajectory – a post-pandemic phenomenon familiar to the US and Western Europe, where the affluent double down on discretionary culture while the rest of the population retreats.

“Lithuania has emerged as a relative growth leader, while Latvia and Estonia have experienced more subdued or uneven performance, creating a degree of divergence across the region,” observes Stephen Dutton, global insight manager at Euromonitor, in an interview with The Art Journal. “At the same time, growth is increasingly concentrated in higher-value sectors such as technology, while more traditional industries face slower momentum. These dynamics tend to put pressure on the middle class, which is typically a key driver of mass tourism demand.”

This economic cooling is palpable on the ground; I encountered few casual tourists during my stay. The era of Riga serving as a Baltic version of Mallorca for Russian holidaymakers abruptly ended following the invasion of Ukraine.

“However, [these dynamics] also support continued growth in higher-income segments, which are more resilient to economic volatility and more likely to engage with cultural travel, particularly events such as art fairs,” Dutton says. “This creates a somewhat bifurcated tourism environment where mainstream demand is more constrained but affluent, experience-led travel remains comparatively robust. In many markets, middle and lower-income consumers are being squeezed by inflation, higher travel costs and geopolitical uncertainty while higher-income travellers remain insulated.”

For this affluent class, the offerings across Riga Art Week represent a potent and untapped market.

A short walk away, the Riga Contemporary Art Space presents Zoom In: Ecology, a group show that further dissects the anxieties of contemporary capitalism. Estonian duo Kristina Õllek and Kert Viiart’s video installation, titled As the Earliest Carrier Emerges (2024), is viewed from clay-clad deckchairs. It follows the comb jelly – perhaps the planet’s first sentient animal – through a documentary lens. Splicing underwater footage with images of rare fossils, the creature describes itself as a “wanderer,” drifted by the currents of the ocean, the shifts of geopolitics, and the relentless flow of economics. It is another oblique reflection on the collision between the natural world and the systems we build to contain it.

Gabija Grušaite, CIRCULATION, 2026 (installation view, Galerija ASNI). Photo: Ansis Starks. Courtesy the artist, Riga Art Week and Galerija ASNI, Riga

Another ten minutes walk away, at Pilot, the Art Academy of Latvia’s experimental art space, a bucolic vision of Latvia unfolds in the group exhibition Garden State by the collective Latvānija. Patchworked textile dens are strewn across the gallery, BMW car parts rest on a gigantic glove (Latvia is famous for its knitted mittens), while a campy skit plays inside a tent on the other side of the room, following a kvass-drinking drag king on a date with a fellow traditional Latvian. Here too, the interaction between nature and an encroaching neoliberal present plays out.

I make my return to Galerija ASNI, noting once again the Latvian National Museum of Art and, this time, a neighbouring cacao-matcha shop. Together, the three buildings crystallise the feeling that this is a city in motion, shifting into the next stage of its increasingly K-shaped capitalist journey while its artists riff on an underdog mentality that seems deeply embedded in the Baltic psyche.

Delfina Foundation’s founding director, Aaron Cezar, visited ASNI just the day before. “I just returned from Latvia after being hosted by VV Foundation,” he tells me. The foundation, which promotes contemporary art in Latvia, has invited curators to visit Riga annually for the past four years.

Cezar is optimistic about the Baltics, citing the Venice pavilions – from Merike Estna’s expanded notions of painting in the Estonian Pavilion to Eglė Budvytytė’s moving video installation in the Lithuanian Pavilion and the Latvian Pavilion’s focus on experimental fashion through Birmanis and Mareunrol – as evidence of “a diversity of practices and approaches that grapple with the complexities of the past while projecting new possibilities for the future”.

Back in the region itself, he argues, this momentum is being matched by a growing ecosystem of artist-run spaces, non-profit initiatives and independent foundations that are creating more fertile conditions for further experimentation.

As Cezar sees it, these developments are underpinned by a new wave of support for artists and curators, from VV Foundation in Latvia to Upė Foundation, helping to build connections that the region has historically lacked. If Cezar’s forecast proves correct, the underdogs may be on the cusp of a micro-boom.