RIGA.- From 6 July to 22 September 2019, RIXC Art and Science Festival features the UN/GREEN international contemporary media art exhibition which takes place in the Great Hall of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga.

The RIXC Art and Science Festival 2019 aims at complicating the pervasively employed notion of ‘green’ by providing a cross-disciplinary platform for the discussions and artistic interventions exploring one of the most paradoxical and broadest topics of our times. Green is being analyzed as a color, biological phenomenon, medium, symbol of certain lifestyle, semantic construction, and ideology.

‘Green’, usually associated with the ‘natural’ and often employed to recoup for what humans have lost, is addressed here as the most anthropocentric of all colours, in its inherent ambiguity between alleged naturalness and artificiality. We, as the human species, symbolically re-contextualize techno-scientific tools and their related metaphors to offset what we feel we are losing in the times labeled the Anthropocene. Are we in control of ‘green’? Despite its numerous positive connotations, ‘green’ incrementally serves the uncritical desire of fetishistic and techno-romantic naturalization in order to hyper-compensate for material systemic bio- and necro-politics, consisting of the increasing technical manipulation and exploitation of living systems, ecologies, and the biosphere at large.

The opening of the international contemporary media art exhibition UN/GREEN at the Latvian National Museum of Art is the key event in the RIXC Festival 2019 programme, which will be complemented with performances and artistic interventions. Curators of the project Jens Hauser (Germany / France), Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits (RIXC, Latvia) have chosen 20 works by Latvian and foreign artists.

Guest curator of UN/GREEN exhibition Jens Hauser is media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. For many years, ‘green’ has been relevant subject for his research. Hauser’s OUVERT project systematizes findings acquired from variety of scientific disciplines aiming to develop new ways to speak about ecological questions an alternative to currently common superficial understanding and language of ‘green’. The exhibition OUVERT will be created in France as a thematic follow-up to UN/GREEN exhibition in Riga.

EXHIBITION ARTISTS: Florent di Bartolo (FR), Rebekah Blesing (US), Karine Bonneval (FR), Adam W. Brown (US), Bureau d´études (FR), Santa France (LV), HeHe (FR / DE / UK), Robert Hengeveld (CA), Iodine Dynamics (NL / FR / US / UK), Voldemārs Johansons (LV), Eva-Maria López (DE / FR), Francisco López (ES), AnneMarie Maes (BE), Agnes Meyer-Brandis (DE), Joana Moll (ES / DE), Quimera Rosa (ES / AR / FR), Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (DE), Taavi Suisalu (EE), Rihards Vītols (LV)