OPENING! 11 June: Thrifters and Transformers • 18.00 conversation with the artists • 19.00 opening More info

White Dwarfs and All Those Beautiful Nebulas

Past exhibition

28.11.2024–26.01.2025

White Dwarfs and All Those Beautiful Nebulas

Artists
Eike Eplik, Kristi Kongi, Anna Mari Liivrand

Venue
Contemporary Art Center,Riga,Latvia, Latvia

The idea

Once upon a time, the Universe was a dark ocean, with no stars to provide light, warmth or matter for planets and moons to be born and potentially nurture life. The Big Bang changed all this by giving birth to galaxies full of stars and planets with giant black holes holding these illuminated worlds in their grip. This now billion-year-old cosmic world seems eternal, yet astronomical research begs to differ. In the 18th century, British astronomer William Herschel became the first to detect a white dwarf star in the vast sky of the universe, although it would take more than a century for scientists to understand what it was he had observed. A white dwarf turned out to be a former star that has collapsed into an energy-dense, Earth-size stellar object, which eventually turns into a stellar remnant – a black dwarf. Even though no fully-formed black dwarf has yet been detected, we can, to put it in Julijonas Urbonas’s words, “cosmically imagine” how, after billions of years, a universe will slowly switch off all its light bulbs.






Works

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Bios

Eike Eplik is a sculptor and installation artist who is deeply fascinated by biodiversity and its complicated relationship with humankind. She creates sensitive and imaginative works full of personal mythology through different visual expressions and materials such as clay, plaster, metal, wood and ready-made. Echoing philosopher Astrida Neimanis’s idea of water-connected worlds, the artist takes a humble approach to all living things, and in her art, strictly defined categories and hierarchies do… More

Kristi Kongi is a painter and installation artist whose works are based on her observations, emotions and memories placed in specific or imagined places. She uses colour, light and space as her main world-building tools and installations as extensions of her paintings, often creating a “painting inside painting” effect. Besides painting on canvas, walls, floors and ceilings, she also uses various coloured materials such as fabric, plywood and acrylic plastic to create… More

Anna Mari Liivrand (born in 1993) is an installation artist who also works with drawing. She is a sensitive creator interested in the conventional use of everyday materials and related unconscious judgements. Using poetic language, Liivrand explores evanescence and melancholy in today’s society. In recent years, Liivrand has focused on everyday rituals, ornaments and decoration. She often examines them from the point of self-creation and how they act as anchor points in an… More

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