Bookshop Situation Series: Some Instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter

Welcome to an evening, a book launch, a conversation surrounded by paintings with artist Andris Eglītis, poet and performance artist Agnese Krivade and curator Jonatan Habib Engqvist. Eglītis will be bringing new work straight from the studio, paintings made in subzero temperatures in Savvaļa in the Latvian countryside.

The book Some Instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter is published by Arvinuis+Orfeus and is a case study of “Exhibition” with Eglītis at the Latvian National Museum of Art in 2024. Collecting documentation by photographer Reinis Hofmanis and Eglītis, essays by Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Santa Hirša, and an interview with artist by poet and performance artist Agnese Krivade. “Exhibition” was not only Eglītis’ largest solo exhibition to date but also an attempt to bend, disturb, and rewrite what a museum and an exhibition can be. It reached outward — from the solitary figure of “the artist” toward a chorus of other voices, beings, and materials. ”Exhibition” unfolded in dialogue with works by friends and collaborators, many linked to Savvaļa, a collective project founded six years ago in his open-air studio in Drusti. Since then, Savvaļa has influenced the contemporary art landscape of the Baltics.”Exhibition” reimagines the post-socialist in dialogue with the post-humanist — a radical form of landscape painting where the landscape itself becomes the painter, and companionship an artistic method.

The event takes place inside Index presentation filmmaker Harun Farocki, and perhaps Eglītis and Farocki can be connected through their shared attention to how landscapes are produced, mediated, and read rather than simply observed. Farocki dissects images as systems shaped by labour, technology, and power to reveal how ways of seeing never are neutral. Eglītis, working through painting and spatial practice, approaches landscape with a similar scepticism, treating landscapes as marked by human intervention, memory, and infrastructure. Both artists shift the gaze to ask how environments and images alike are built, framed, and instrumentalized.

The Bookshop Situation Series at Index is based on events to present books, magazines, records and other artistic formats. The bookshop situation is a way to test content, to share it, to distribute it, offering situations to be part of a community of experimental producers and users.

With support from the Latvian embassy in Sweden.