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| Super Zane Onckule, Art Critic Gallery Supernova | |
| One day I awoke feeling tired, apathetic and grumpy. I pulled the blankets over my head because I didn’t feel like getting up, looking around or talking to anyone. I said to myself under the blankets: I’ll just lie here, without moving or saying a word, for as long as I like. I won’t do a thing, just close my eyes and let my thoughts come and go.* | |
 Sandra Norbin. Och livet stod bredvid. Installation. 2009. Publicity photo | |
The first of these was that thought is best manifested through action. The hybrid gallery called Supernova opened in April 2009 and, as far as environmental requirements and available funding allow, deals with certain contemporary art issues that can be translated into exhibition format. This kind of fun is an unusual concept, in a stylish world where everything is threatening to go out of fashion. Supernova does not have its own collection or a clearly formulated responsibility to the (art) market. In a small institution, energy is generated from thoughts about the last time that something was experienced for the first time. We are interested in what happens today, here and now, and why with this – thinking of Riga, but not only. An offering made diverse by presence is a logical precondition to further change the audience’s mood and prepare for action in a more orderly environment. While this hasn’t happened, we nurture relations between artistic and social perception, organising projects by international authors addressed to the local environment. Up to now, Supernova has worked with Edgars Gluhovs (exhibition Good Cop/Bad Cop), Karol Radziszewski (Fag Fighters in Riga) and John Phillip Mäkinen (Stocks Talk), and has collaborated with Berne’s Neue Galerie on the project Why We Worry. The latest is an exhibition by Sandra Norrbin. Sandra Norrbin makes sculptural installations which are created and adapted to the architecture of a specific location. From 12 February, there will be an exhibition Och livet stod bredvid at the gallery entrance, challenging the physical space and hindering entry into it. The Norwegian artist’s latest work is an inflatable object in the form of a lifeboat, adapted for the dimensions of Supernova, and thanks to a timer attached to the air pump, an effect of inhalation and exhalation is main¬tained. This gives meaning to essence, because the function of art is not as obvious as the object placed and inflated in the gallery. | |
 Karol Radziszewski. Fag Fighters. Digital colour print | |
| The Latvian translation of the title: Un dzīve palika aiz borta (in English, literally: ‘And life was left overboard’), is a tendentious translation of the exhibition’s title, which similarly to the gallery itself is connected with a desire for expression and expansion into places where the surrounding environment usually creates barriers or even a feeling of claustrophobia, and the only possibility is to accept the situation, be conscious of it and come to terms with it. * From the text for Elin Wikström’s installation What if everybody acted that way? (1993). /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ | |
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