🎙️ Zuzeum Art Museum invites you to a conversation with artist Krišs Salmanis as part of the public programme of the exhibition “Collections.”
📅 Friday, 20 March, 18:00
🎟️ Registration fee 2 EUR, register here
🗣️ The event will be held in Latvian
Krišs Salmanis is one of the leading figures in Latvian contemporary art, whose works are distinguished by conceptual precision, subtle irony, and a particular sensitivity to space, rhythm, and perception. Several of his solo exhibitions have become landmark and unforgettable events in Latvian art.
Together with Kaspars Podnieks, Krišs Salmanis represented Latvia at the 55th Venice Biennale with the project “North by Northeast / Ziemeļi–Ziemeļaustrumi.” His works have also been shown at the kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Alma Gallery, the National Library of Latvia, and other institutions in Latvia and abroad. Together with Anna Salmane and Kristaps Pētersons, he received the Purvītis Prize in 2017 for the exhibition “Song” (Dziesma), and in 2025 he was again among the nominees for the Purvītis Prize.
Salmanis also gained broader public attention for his Vladimir Putin “death face” poster, originally created for the cover of Ir magazine on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and later installed on the façade of the Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum directly opposite the Embassy of Russia in Riga. What began as a personal, emotional gesture became a powerful public and political statement, and in 2022 it received the public media annual award “Kilograms Kultūras” in the category “Surprise.”
Salmanis’s video work “Skilando” (2016), currently on view in the exhibition “Collections”, reveals the journey of a tired monster through an almost abandoned hotel. Skiland is a vast concrete building in the rural hills of the Japanese island of Shikoku. Built as a grass-skiing resort, it is now a crumbling trout farm and a hotel, most of the time inhabited just by the couple who own it. During an artist residency in Tokushima Prefecture in 2016, Salmanis created the video work, inspired by the site’s distinctive, gloomy atmosphere.
Meanwhile, at the contemporary art space TUR, Salmanis’s solo exhibition “Landscape” is on view until 21 March, where the artist presents an installation shaped by his experience in the Latvian National Guard.
The artist talk will be an opportunity to gain deeper insight into Krišs Salmanis’s artistic practice, hear stories about how his works are made, and ask questions about his creative process, choice of materials, and the development of his ideas.
*By attending this event, you agree to have photos or videos of you or your children taken for Zuzeum marketing purposes. You can refuse to be photographed or filmed by informing the photographer or camera person.