Art-mediation in museums in Latvia – curator’s view

Kaspars Vanags

Head of the Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum, art curator and theorist

In the mid-1990s, in collaboration with like-minded cultural practitioners, Kaspars Vanags founded in Riga the creative platform Open, which organised major cross-disciplinary events, fostering collaboration between practitioners in visual arts, electronic music, new media art and literature. As a curator, he has devised projects casting art in the role of a critical social tool, tackling or creating alternatives to the agenda of consumerism: “Slideplays” (1998), “Subversion in the City” (2000) and “T-Shroom” (2002). He subsequently turned his attention to studying art history and obtained MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In 2015, he was the Curator of the Latvian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Art Biennale, which showcased Armpit, a work by artists Katrīna Neiburga and Andris Eglītis. Among his latest exhibitions and art projects are “Slash: In Between the Normative and Fantasy” (2016) at kim? Contemporary Art Centre (2015), “You’ve Got 1243 Unread Messages. The Last Generation Before the Internet. Their Lives” at the Latvian National Museum of Art (2018), microRIBOCA – interseasonal public programme of Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) and “Sekretiki: Digging in the Soviet Underground” (2020) at Contemporary Art Museum “Garage” (Moscow). Starting from 2020 is director of Pauls Stradins Museum of History of Medicine.