Beate Poikāne "Petals Sprouting from the Skin"
30.07.2025. 19.00The Riga Contemporary Art Space will host “Petals Sprouting from the Skin”, a performance by Beate Poikāne, created in collaboration with artists Ģirts Dubults and Laine Luīze Freidenberga.*
The performance unfolds as a poetic system of mutual resonance between performers Laine and Ģirts. Rooted in the fantasy worlds that gravitate around Latvian origins “Petals Sprouting from the Skin” emerges as a speculative space in which the artist drifts through internalized Eastern European atmospheres and those parts of the self that feel out of place in Scandinavian cultural contexts. By refusing assimilation, a new sense of belonging is nurtured through the construction of an imagery system tied to a shared place of origin. Here, the boundaries of the human soften and merge with the environment, giving rise to new beings who carry elements of their surroundings –apple blossom buds, failed infrastructure projects, fragments of home. It marks the beginning of a gentle reimagining of cultural landscapes while searching for new forms of attachment that stretch beyond identity, and lead into landscapes of becoming.
“Frozen puddle portals / on a gloomy walk with my memory purse / Latvian void / ripening apple blossoms / to the Maxima and back / icicles melted by licking / failed infrastructure projects / springtime craving / goods from the West / sweet, sticky human / the concrete surface crumbling / our theatre at the abandoned station.”
About the artist
Beate Poikāne is a visual artist, theater maker and scenographer. Working at the intersection of visual art and contemporary theater, she creates visual dramaturgies and self-performing environments that explore how bodily experience within specific cultural and spatial contexts shapes spaces of imagination. In her work, humans interact with non-human entities, objects, and technologies as performers, becoming driving forces of ever-shifting landscapes.
Poikāne holds an MFA in Directing from the Stockholm University of the Arts' Performing Arts program, a Master’s degree in Scenography and a Bachelor's degree in Visual Communication from the Art Academy of Latvia, and has studied in the “Performance and Time-Based Art” program at the Faculty of Fine Art at KMD, University of Bergen, Norway.
Ģirts Dubults is a choreographer whose areas of exploration include language, visuality, and people. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in choreography at the Stockholm University of the Arts. Previously, he earned a bachelor’s degree in contemporary dance from the Latvian Academy of Culture and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Rīga Stradiņš University. He has also participated in the creative training program at the choreography center “La Faktoria” in Pamplona, Spain. Ģirts is a member of the contemporary dance collective “SIXTH” (Latvia).
Laine Luīze Freidenberga is a musician who created the soundtrack for the performance “Petals Sprouting from the Skin”. The sound for the piece was developed by deconstructing the traditional sound of the double bass and reimagining the musician’s interaction with the instrument.
Duration of the performance: 45’
Admission to the event with the exhibition ticket
* The piece was developed as Poikāne’s MFA graduation work in Contemporary Theatre Directing at the Stockholm University of the Arts.
