“Survival Kit” is one of the most significant annual contemporary art events in the Baltics. Organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art since 2009, the festival brings together curators, artists and art enthusiasts from Latvia and around the world in Riga every autumn. The festival’s venues – often empty or unused buildings – are an integral part of its identity.
This year, the annual contemporary art festival Survival Kit is curated by Elena Sorokina and Simona Markel Dvorák, with the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care. The project, titled Arrow of the Wind: On Artists and Healers, explores the shared terrain between art and healing — spanning therapy, incantation and ritual, physical and mental healthcare, and spiritual restoration.
Within this broader framework, the project is rooted specifically in Latvian ancestral healing knowledge and ritual practices embedded in the land — forests, lakes, the Baltic Sea, and peat bogs. Historically, Latvian healing traditions combined empirical knowledge of medicinal herbs and natural remedies with magical techniques, ritual gestures, and careful observation of seasonal cycles. Fairy tales, folk songs, spells, and vernacular poetics carried these practices forward, preserving divination methods, herbal wisdom, and ritual protocols despite histories of oppression.
Festival programme can be found here.
Festival's opening times:
Mon, Tue: closed
Wed-Sat: 12.00 - 20.00
Sun: 12.00 - 18.00