Kim? Contemporary Art Centre Presents EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap in Riga

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre will open EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap on May 29, 2026, from 6 to 10 pm at its off-site future address, Hanzas street 22 in Riga, as part of Riga Art Week.

Curated by Zane Onckule, the exhibition brings together Cammisa Buerhaus, Zenta Dzividzinska, Sophia Giovannitti, Evija Krištopane, Reba Maybury, Elza Sīle ⩙ Aly Milk, Mindy Seu, SAGG Napoli, Sylvie Fleury, Sophie Thun, Sabīne Vernere, and Paula Zvane. The exhibition will run from May 30 through July 12, 2026.

EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap stages desire as labor and sex as one of its most regulated, exhausted, and persistently unfinished forms. The title draws on the double meaning of “wet work,” referring both to covert operations and to forms of labor that leave a trace. Across the exhibition, sexual, emotional, and domestic work expand into modes of maintenance that accumulate rather than resolve into meaning.

The phrase “Over Lap” signals repetition and spill: actions that do not conclude, but instead extend across time, overlapping, leaking, and returning.

Throughout the exhibition, the notion of sexualized labor-work functions as both obligation and survival tactic, operating as an aesthetic as well as a strategy for artistic emancipation. The participating artists appear as figures of intimate and creative labor — working girls, attention operators, and mediators of intimacy — rendering desire procedural, scheduled, rehearsed, and reproducible.

Here, the body of work is maintained, trained, corrected, and optimized. Its value is measured in stamina: the capacity to sustain a pose, a mood, and a charge.

The exhibition behaves like both a body and a system: disciplined yet responsive, humid and self-aware, and constantly alert to its own exposure. Sex operates less as a discrete event than as an atmosphere — a low-pressure zone shaping posture, attention, and endurance over extended durations. Desire becomes a climate to inhabit rather than a moment to complete.

With new and existing artworks, installations, and performances spanning analogue processes to “digital wetwares,” EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap sustains the infrastructure of desire through exhibition areas that shift associatively between functional sites: bedroom and after-hours zone, auditorium, bathroom and wet room, confessional, gym, club, and darkroom.

These spaces move toward a central hall, or “aktu zāle,” carrying the double meaning of “akts” as both act and nude. The exhibition builds toward an attempt to center exposure as both performance and condition.

Set against the background of social and environmental collapse, as well as the resurgence of hatred, prejudice, and bigotry — especially where freedom of erotic and artistic expression is concerned — EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap treats censorship, described in the press release as “the other oldest profession,” not only as prohibition, but as an intentional gesture.

The exhibition also reframes sin as an age-old myth born out of the garden of Eden, less as an origin story than as a management problem.

In doing so, EDEN: Wet Work Over Lap challenges culturally and socially imposed models of embodied authority and inherited hierarchies that privilege certain modes of looking and consumption. The exhibition acknowledges, centers, and supports women as protagonists and house masters, setting their own rhythm, managing their own environment, and practicing exposure on their own terms.

Control over rhythm, gaze, and terms remains provisional, requiring constant realignment. Power circulates through measured concession as much as through overt assertion, while refusal becomes a technique and strategic abstinence suspends completion, holding energy in reserve.

In this framework, authority and ownership are relational. They become practices of attentiveness, pressure, duration, and resistance, while desire remains ambivalent, seductive, and self-actualized — binding pleasure to labor-work in ways that never fully dry.

The opening evening will include performances by Paula Zvane, Cammisa Buerhaus, and Liudmila. The program continues on May 30 at 4 pm with Sophia Giovannitti’s performative lecture Confession Prototype 1. On July 3 at 7:30 pm, Mindy Seu will present the performative lecture The Sexual History of Internet as part of Riga Contemporary 2026.

Please note that the exhibition contains erotic and sexual themes. It is not recommended for visitors under 18, and minors may enter only with an adult.