VENICE.- The Latvian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale presents Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia, an exhibition dedicated to the radical legacy of the Untamed Fashion Assembly (UFA), a one-of-a-kind interdisciplinary event at the intersection of experimental fashion and visual art, held in Riga throughout the 1990s. Curated by Inga Lāce and Adomas Narkevičius, the pavilion brings together archival material and new scenographic interventions to revisit the project’s visionary spirit through the work of UFA’s founder, Bruno Birmanis, and the contemporary artist-designer duo MAREUNROL’S. Commissioned by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, the exhibition will run from 9 May to 22 November 2026.
Untamed Fashion Assemblies (1990-1999), initiated by artist and designer Bruno Birmanis, were unprecedented interdisciplinary gatherings at the intersection of fashion, performance, drag, club culture, and visual art. At a time of profound political and cultural transition, they carved out a space for artistic freedom beyond both Soviet social norms and Western markets. The Assemblies drew together local and international designers, artists, and students, fostering transnational solidarities and experimental practices across the Baltics, Caucasus, Central Asia, and Western Europe.
Echoing the carnivalesque logic of the Assemblies, Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia approaches them as an unfinished project, one that speaks to urgent conversations around artistic experimentation, gender self-performance, anti-consumerist production, and collective imagination. In a time of renewed authoritarianism and market enclosure, the Assemblies offer a vital counter-history: a space where irreverence, joy, and self-expression briefly took centre stage. The exhibition asks how this resonates today, what kinds of solidarities, identifications, and forms of beauty may be dreamt into being when the rules are, even briefly, suspended.
Curators of the Pavilion Inga Lāce and Adomas Narkevičius elaborate, "Untamed Fashion Assemblies emerged in a moment of upheaval, when the collapse of one system had not yet given way to another. They offered a space where artistic expression could break loose from the strictures of ideology and market logic alike. Unconfined by the theatre stage or the commercial runway, fashion became a tool for self-narration, excess, and joyful defiance, a place where fantasy didn’t need to justify itself. What unfolded in Riga and Jūrmala wasn’t an attempt to mirror the West, but something stranger, and radically its own."
Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia was selected by a jury, which was headed by the Director of the Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMM) Māra Lāce, and included Maria Arusoo, Director of the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art, Sebastian Cichocki, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Līga Marcinkeviča, Head of the Master's Programme at the Latvian Academy of Arts (LAMA), and Kitija Vasiļjeva, Producer of the Latvian Pavilions at the 56th and 59th Venice Art Biennale.
Commissioner of the Latvian Pavilion, Solvita Krese, LCCA comments, “This project is a powerful reflection of LCCA’s long-term mission to illuminate overlooked or lesser-known aspects of our recent history, to reconsider and rewrite dominant narratives, and to restore significance to past events that deserve recognition. We continue to explore artist archives, inviting contemporary practitioners to re-interpret them through a current lens. At present, we are focusing on research around the Untamed Fashion Assembly — a phenomenon of its time with a profound and lasting influence on the region’s creative landscape. I’m especially pleased that this story will now find a stage in Venice, in collaboration with MAREUNROL'S, weaving its subversive and inclusive energy into the city’s carnivalesque atmosphere — offering a resonant platform for new assemblies to emerge."
