Underpainting Behind a Refrigerator is a narrative installation that brings together a series of dedications to people close to me whose artistic practices, shaped within fragile circumstances, continuously fascinate and unsettle me.

The work constructs storytelling through spatial relations between objects, painting, sculpture and audiovisual narrative. I am interested in creating a multilayered portrait of a social environment rather than focusing on a single protagonist. The installation traces connections between artists, friends and family members who continue artistic work despite unstable living conditions, lack of institutional support and often unmet basic needs. What unites them is a form of stubbornness, intimacy with their practice and an almost irrational necessity to continue artistic work. The work reflects on artistic survival within conditions of economic precarity, emotional exhaustion and structural neglect, particularly within Baltic and Eastern European contexts.

The space is enveloped in a large-scale print depicting everyday views of Riga. Within this deconstructed and gloomy landscape, smaller and more intimate sculptures and paintings are embedded. The poetic visual language is inspired by the painting style of my great-grandmother, who secretly painted oil landscapes and stored them behind a refrigerator.

At the centre of the installation stands a sculptural structure resembling the skeleton of a shelter without a roof. In the accompanying video, my mother describes imagined survival shelters she would build for herself if her artistic and teaching work could no longer sustain her. Around these narratives are reflections on artistic life shaped by precarity, mental health struggles and an inability to fully function within normative labour systems. These stories form a network of mutual recognition that can often only be understood by those sharing similar forms of situatedness.

The project continues research initiated during the SKH Performing Arts MA programme on constructing new systems of belonging while coming from the Baltics. The work was developed during Part Time Residency 2026 and is informed by Sophie K. Rosa’s Radical Intimacy, particularly its critique of individualised survival under capitalism and the invisibility of collective vulnerability.

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I approach the residency as a playground for feminine dreamscape building – exploring the “obsessive space” of a generic guys room is a container for developing characters deriving from the lyrical-self in trap music and cloud rap – I use its language as an entry point into emotional dysfunction. I am drawn to the theatricality of anti-hero identities that circulate within a narrow emotional register — where detachment, vulnerability discomfort, and avoidance reveals a larger network of precocity. 

I am drawn to the scapegoat function these figures might hold —the way they leak feelings that are widely resonated, a societal condition that is “wounded,” yet remains deeply ignorant, egocentric, Western-centric, and misogynistic. These trap lyrical-self fantasies are often underlined by a kind of hidden precarity, where wealth and sexuality are performed through an underlying instability—where success appears temporary, fragile, or unreal, and where coolness operates as a shield for emotional incapacity.

I am interested in exploring how such chosen performative selves are adopted in everyday life, particularly in relation to poverty and socio-economic complexity within a post-Soviet regional context—as coping mechanisms shaped by gendered and economically conditioned upbringings, and how they inform modes of romantic relating.

Over the course of the residency, I will build a scenographic prototype inspired by airbrush painting techniques and naïvist compositional strategies, while developing trap lyrical-self character buildup. This continues my artistic research into autofiction and the unfolding of installation-performance as a form –  stretching on a concept of placemaking as “soft resistance’’ tool.

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Frozen puddle portals / on a gloomy walk with my memory bag / Latvian November void / potent apple blossom buds / stealing from supermarket Maxima / peeling skin of my tongue while licking icicles / failing infrastructure project debts / springtime craving / Western goods / sticky sweet human / our theatre at a newly built – abandoned central station /

Petals Sprouting Out of Skin unfolds as a speculative performance space—an embodied landscape of belonging and alienation. It is agray zone giving rise to region-specific beings that carry Eastern European and Baltic artefacts, here the boundaries of the human soften and merge with the surroundings. Gravitating in the post-socialist, Baltic sea region particularity “Petals Sprouting from the Skin” drifts through internalised regional conditioning and socio-economical brokenness and searches for softness within it.

It is  a gentle reimagining of ways to function in the familiar phisical and cultural surroundings —a place for staying with the discomfort throught being in it. Shifting throught peripheral, feminine and queer bodies, it marks the beginning of a gentle reimagining for new forms of relating and sense-making throught inviting poetic ways of inhabiting spaces and our bodies.

The work is made together with artists Laine Luīze Freidenberga and Ģirts Dubults reflecting on whether cultural belonging and relation points between us three overlap – while each having our own personal or profesional relation to Stockholm we share orgins from Latvia. We try to intersect within ourselves what meanings this orgin carries, whether we can find each other in it, where we expirience disconnection and conflict, what parts of our orgins are destructive and and what social behaviours we want to unlearn and what we find precious in our situatedness and wouldn’t want to give up to more westernised contexts.

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At the visit to Air Reservoir, a sanctuary for aerial beings – lies a testament to our times. You are invited to put on the external lungs and depart in a a place where the air itself carries the weight of a slow catastrophe. This is a creeping loss, a gradual disappearance of respiratory beings. In this landscape powered by the possibilities of worlding explores the differences and similarities between the human breathing system and that of birds, insects, snails. A performative respiratory ecosystem is formed in the mutation of human made- remains and aerial beings. As you move through this space, you become a witness to delicate death dance of human intervention. There you encounter a more distributed lung structure with air sacs that has a function in maintaining a balanced flight for birds, who breathe two times faster and snails whose lungs stretch upwards into the depth of a shell. These dynamics of contrast are explored, while being challenged with the human-bodied limitations in perceiving air.

Author: Beate Poikāne
Performers: Sofija Putniņa and Kristers Krūms
Composer: Liza Kuzyakova
Voice: Linda Mence
Choreography consultant: Laima Jaunzema
Producer: Ieva Briede
Produced by New Theatre Institute of Latvia, Homo Novus festival Commissioned by Santa Remere and Bek Beger.

Duration 45 min (happens in the dark hours of the day) Location : concrete skatepark or open asphalted field

Language: In English and Latvian

Accessibility: We had Surdo sign language translator on the premiere as  integrated part of dramaturgy. Original piece was accessible to people with mobility variability and it was accessible to wheelchair user with assistant. Accessibility can be specified depending on the selected location.

 

 

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A performative sketch ‘Snail highway’ was developed at Metropolis residency, Copenhagen extending from snail chapter in my previous work ‘Air reservoir’.  In this month I was working with  a speculative fantasy and site-sensitive method through small scale scenography and spatial sound dramaturgy. Here I chose to dwell into a chapter devoted to snails, it is a playfull suggestion to imagine a different sensory mapping of the world and perception of speed, while touching upon our human-bodied limitations to feel along with our soft-bodied companions. The piece is in conversation with decentralisation of human in the performing arts. My process was informed by a phone call with Rikka Vuonrenmaa, who generously shared her personal observations of their behaviours and by Montana university research on land snail sensorial orientation.

For the Snail Highway I wrote a new text which was vocalised by me and Josephine Sommer. Within the given framework I was exploring aesthetics of tech use in a landscape, it emerged from a wish to place a pre-recorded voice detached from a body, leading to a merge of organic and cyborg shapes. Tripods became media-player holders and lamps at the same time and speakers started to take a shape of snail organs. The sketch was performed on the forbidden beach on the last day of September, to enter it visitors were guided thought a hole in a fence. In the end of the piece spectators are invited to sit down in a concrete ‘amphitheatre’ and give up the visual sense, alowing their hand to become a snail extension of their body.

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Snail Highway was performed in performance evening Proveromet as part of BIT Teatergarasjen festival Oktoberdans in Hordeland Kunstsenter, Bergen.

Snail Highway is a exercise on human and snail perception, involving small scale scenography and spatial audio. More about the piece here: https://beate.poikane.com/snail-highway-2024-metropolis-copenhagen/

A performative sketch ‘Snail highway’ was developed at Metropolis residency, Copenhagen extending from snail chapter in my previous work ‘Air reservoir’.  In this month I was working with  a speculative fantasy and site-sensitive method through small scale scenography and spatial sound dramaturgy. Here I chose to dwell into a chapter devoted to snails, it is a playfull suggestion to imagine a different sensory mapping of the world and perception of speed and sensuality, while touching upon our human-bodied limitations to feel along with our soft-bodied companions. The piece is in conversation with decentralisation of human in the performing arts. My process was informed by a phone call with Rikka Vuonrenmaa, who generously shared her personal observations of their behaviours and by Montana university research on land snail sensorial orientation. Pre-recorded voice detached from a body in national geographic obsservations slowly fails to introduce the snail being  invites spectatorss to give up the visual sense, alowing their hand to become a snail extension of their own body.

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Whether hovering above the ground, swimming through the air or swinging with one’s winglike arms – the dream of flight as a psychic and bodily experience can appear in different modes. Despite the everyday occurrence of human flight in aircrafts, they are unable to be as aerodynamic as birds and the fluidity of their movement remains impossible to simulate. Consequently, the dream of flight with its surreal character is by no means exhausted. Often regarded as a yearning for freedom of motion in space, the desire to conquer the air should not be misjudged as merely a rationalised experience. Rather, the dream of flight positions itself as an aesthetic sensation that seduces the dreamer with its dialectic of heaviness and lightness.

In Parade of Flying Episodes Beate Poikāne depicts the lustful, nocturnal experience in dream sequences. The performance Parade of Flying Episodes (2023), Poikāne’s Master’s research in Scenography at the Art Academy of Latvia, was the starting point for this picturesque venture. Together with Andrejs Poikāns, sound artist, and Laima Jaunzema, choreographer and performer, Poikāne took inspiration from Gaston Bachelard’s essay Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (1943), mythological legends, science, art-historical discourses, but also personal dream experiences to show a series of flying episodes. In this exhibition context Poikāne extends the artistic research and translates the performative moment into space. The audience is guided through sequences of theatre situations that spotlight object-performers as active agents. A sky-like stage set, kinetic sculptures, video works and a sound installation seduce the audience into a twilight state between dreaming and waking. Hence the self-performing environment invites the audience to dream away within the liminality of fiction and reality.

Beate Poikāne | artist 

Andrejs Poikāns | sound 

Viktoria Weber | curator 

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‘Parade of Flying episodes’ is a performance where objects, configurations and choreography is based on a fragment “Dream of Flight” from Gaston Bachelard’s essay “Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement” (1943).

Parade of Flight Episodes is part of Beate Poikāne’s master’s research in scenography.Performance (45 min) took place in ‘Tu jau zini Kur’ concert hall in Tallinas street quarter, Riga, on 30 and 31 of May, 2023.  The work was created together with artist and choreographer Laima Jaunzema and sound artist Andrejs Poikans. Performers – Laima Jaunzema, Clea Filippa, Beate Poikane.

As a sub-theme of the masters thesis, is the human desire to fly and repetition of this motif in history, that in the work is explored in a metaphorical and direct way. “Parade of Flight Episodes” is a performance that takes scenography as a point of departure in the creative process and explores the possible outcomes of such an approach. In the artistic study, the theme is carried out on an associative and visual level, taking into account the images described by Gaston Bachelard, supplementing them with other visual references and connecting them with personal experiences. The artistic means of expression of contemporary theatre are studied, focusing on visual dramaturgy, performing with objects and objects – performers.

The work outlines the repetition of the human dream to fly as an inexhaustible motif of the imagination, which takes on different fantasy formations through time. Just as the everyday world is affected by inventions, the world of dreams and imagination is also formed in connection with the fantasies of the individual and society about the possible and the impossible.

Scenography reveals itself in choreographical composition that explores the body’s relationship with objects, attempting non- hierarchical way of stage relationships. The sound composition of the show was created thinking about the rising, floating and falling dynamics inspired by Deniss Smalley spectromorphology sound shape diagram and Bashlar’s ‘Dream of Flight’. Composition  is mainly dominated by synthetic timbres, leaving the listener’s ear open to associative connections.

Supervisor – Kaspars Groševs

Scenography: Kinetic sculptures / objects (electronics, paper, wire, wood), video projections, costumes.

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Concert is a premiere for Ernests Vilsons composition for clarinet. As one of influences for the sound piece Ernests mentioned Duch landscape painting. In the scenography and in the arrangement of space I try to transmit the proportions from Jacob van Ruisdael oil painting View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields (c. 1670–1675). Proportionally the biggest part of the painting is taken by the sky (by the empty space). I approach that by leaving the concert hall empty and by placing audience on the stage to higher their viewpoint as the view of the landscape painting is from above.  Trought the 3 parts of the concert the performer moves further and further away from the listeners, from foreground to the back of the room, in this action sound becomes more faint and is “bleached” along the way. As objects in the space, I use lights, ventilators, technical stands and a wooden branch, they become active participants in the created scene and invites to think both about natural phenomena of wind, light and outside space and simultaneously reviling their artificial nature of the stage.

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Installation (video (0’5) on a phone screen, fabric, scale models)

The work consists of reconstructions of personal memories, interrelationships of the urban environment and psychological states creating my psychogeography of Riga. During the creation of the work I realised that trying to depict a memory is like writing down a dream, it is difficult to capture, the fluidity of memories seems in conflict with any static and fixed medium that could capture it. While creating the work, I wanted to simultaneously show the inner emotionality and the physical location – the external shape of the space, so that they exist in parallel. 

The outdoor and indoor spaces that I chose to create in the scale models were chosen based on my memories of the most critical states of romantic loneliness.  The most critical feelings I tended to repeatedly experience in the similar spaces, many of them indicate returning home by yourself. Scale models represent the factual locations and the internal space is shown by the “pocket video”. In the process of creating the work, I was influenced by Olivia Laing’s “The Lonely City”, where I create a related to the careful examination of urban elements i

n relation to feeling of loneliness and separation. Great influence is also Gee Debora and Situationist walking practices. 

Walking for me is both the subject of the work, the necessity of survival in my daly routine, and an essential part of my art practice, where the generation of ideas for artworks takes place while walking. In conversations, I often used to describe my life in Riga with the trivial phrase “Solo trip”.

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