LOOPHOLE

No order is airtight. LOOPHOLE begins with the leak: the glitch, the error, the workaround, the back door, the hole through which an official route gives way to an unintended one. These manoeuvres occupy the shadows and legal grey zones, or emerge as acts of sheer invention.

The exhibition brings together an interdimensional collection of loopholers within a single architectural microcosm: part passage, part shelter, part backstage after its original purpose has been forgotten. Rūdolfs Štamers’s site-specific installation Same, Same, but Different provides this unstable common ground, where other entities meet without being made to agree. Each retains its own logic, yet proximity changes the terms: connections appear, boundaries shift, and the architecture itself is altered by what it brings together. The result is a polyphonic assemblage: separate trajectories sharing a structure without being forced into harmony.

This arrangement recalls Sara Ahmed’s idea of “queer use”: using things in ways for which they were not intended, or by those for whom they were not intended. Purpose is never neutral. An object is designed for a particular body, a rule anticipates a particular user, and an institution is organised around a particular way of living. To use something otherwise is not simply to misuse it. It exposes the assumptions contained within its original design and discovers possibilities that design attempted to exclude.

In LOOPHOLE, these manoeuvres find their way through money, religion, sexuality, technology, memory, storytelling and authorship. Counterfeit cash becomes the currency of a genuine journey. A digital entity stays alive through collective care. Adam’s discarded rib finds a reproductive back door. An alter ego claims the marks its author hesitates to own. Ceramic and molten glass enter a high-risk relationship; the lucky few come out glowing. Post-socialist masculinity returns as an object of desire.

Rūdolfs Štamers

Same, Same, but Different

Installation, mixed media

Size variable

This site-specific installation takes the form of a temporary architecture inhabited by interdimensional travellers who collect fragments of the realities they pass through and reassemble them into something new. They carry traces of collapsed worlds: obsolete systems, new rules, old news, memories, images, materials and contradictions.

Built from industrial coverings, reflective surfaces and borrowed images, the installation acts as an unstable host for the other works. They rest on it, enter it or appear to grow from it, while remaining distinct from one another. Nothing is reconciled into a coherent world; the fragments are allowed to overlap and interfere. Reflections scatter them across the walls and floor, briefly absorbing visitors as another layer of the structure.

Concept: Žanete Liekīte and Rūdolfs Štamers
Central installation: Rūdolfs Štamers
Curatorial team: Žanete Liekīte and Taeho Choi
Participating artists: Arnolds Andersons, Kaspars Groševs, Karlīna Mežecka, Dew Kim, Eunsol Lee, Rūdolfs Štamers and Mykolas Valantinas
Visual identity: Dans Jirgensons

Photo: Lim Janghwal