Part Time gallery, Riga 05.03.-11.04.2026.

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.