Survival Kit 17—Arrow of the Wind: On Artists and Healers

This year, the annual, international 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. The exhibition will take place from August 28, until  September 27, 2026 at the Riga Congress Hall.

Arrow of the Wind takes its title from an ancient Latvian spell that summons the powers of the wind to heal humans and animals. Such healing spells often combined language with chanting, movement, drumming, and song. Today, they can be understood as "magical technologies" designed to restore balance and connection with the wider fabric of life. In many ways, they practiced embodied cognition long before the emergence of contemporary neuroscience.

Drawing on this legacy, Arrow of the Wind explores the shared terrain between art and healing—spanning therapy, incantation, ritual, physical and mental healthcare, and spiritual restoration—while asking what forms of care, resilience, and repair become possible amid climate crisis, ecological loss, and planetary instability.

Across cultures and throughout history, art and healing have been deeply intertwined, finding expression in shamanic ceremonies, devotional rituals, and clinical art therapy alike. Rather than treating these traditions as separate domains, the exhibition traces the continuities and ongoing transformations that implicate them.

Recent scholarship has increasingly challenged the idea that healing occupies a marginal place within the history of art. Instead, it suggests that therapeutic practices, neurodiverse experiences, and alternative modes of perception have played a constitutive role in shaping modern understandings of creativity, artistic agency, and aesthetic experience.

Arrow of the Wind brings together artists whose practices resonate with these expanded understandings of healing. Working at the intersection of ancestral or traditional healing knowledge and contemporary healthcare, they develop what the curators describe as “life-affirming practices”: attentive and relational processes that nurture communal bonds, safeguard cultural knowledge, and deepen connections with spirits, human and more-than-human worlds, as well as with the land itself.

Central to their work is a relational understanding of perception grounded in the sensing body. Here, the classical five senses unfold into a broader sensory ecology encompassing balance and spatial orientation, embodied awareness, and forms of attention attuned to the intelligence of place. Through these practices, healing emerges not as an act of correction, but as an ongoing process of attunement to oneself, to others, and to places we inhabit.

Within this broader framework, the exhibition is rooted in Latvian ancestral healing knowledge and ritual practices embedded in forests, lakes, peat bogs, and the Baltic Sea. Historically, Latvian healing traditions combined herbal wisdom with incantations, ritual gestures, and divination methods. Fairy tales, folk songs, spells, and vernacular poetics carried this knowledge across generations despite repeated histories of occupation, displacement, and cultural suppression.

During successive waves of Latvian migration, these ancestral traditions became a vital source of resilience. They formed a healing infrastructure for communities displaced from their homeland, often without certainty of return. Cultural continuity became a form of survival, enabling individuals and communities to maintain a sense of belonging across distance, loss, and exile.

Alongside contemporary practices, the exhibition brings together five historical positions that articulate distinct understandings of healing. Daina Dagnija (1937–2019, Latvia/USA) used painting to navigate the enduring effects of exile and displacement. Betty Muffler (b. 1944, Australia) conceives art as a healing force rooted in land, community, and ancestral knowledge. Sigríður Björnsdóttir (1929–1989, Iceland) pioneered art therapy, using drawing, painting, and play to support emotional recovery during periods of serious illness. Don Cherry (1936–1995, USA) and Moki Cherry (1943–2009, Sweden) developed a collaborative practice that intertwined music, spirituality, performance, and family life, making creativity a form of everyday care. Elsa Wolliaston (1945–2026), Kenya/France/USA), has long explored the connections between embodied knowledge, sensory experience, movement, and healing.

The curators of Survival Kit 17 elaborate: “Grounding these knowledges within the exhibition, we trace intergenerational transmissions and deep genealogies—from feminist and community-based art movements of the late twentieth century to ancestral and Indigenous modes of creation in which art, care, and healing were inseparable. These practices challenged institutional definitions of art, dissolved the boundary between artwork and lived experience, and repositioned healing as an essential artistic medium.”

In this spirit, Elena Sorokina and Simona Markel Dvorák, with the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care are committed to sustainable curating. For Survival Kit 17 in particular, this considers responsible modes of production, local collaboration, recyclable materials, reduced mobility, and active community involvement. These are not logistical additions but material extensions of an epistemic position—an effort to align curatorial practice with more-than-human relationality and to rethink the exhibition as an ecology.

Solvita Krese, director of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and founder of Survival Kit festival, comments: “In today’s complex geopolitical situation, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain mental and emotional balance. The constant presence and escalation of wars are causing ever-greater physical suffering and loss. “Survival Kit 17” centres on care—an essential element of survival in today’s world. Caring for one another is also an indicator of a society’s maturity. We truly need a society capable of caring and critical thinking, and art has always been an invaluable tool for stimulating these processes.”

Participating artists: Brook Andrew, Sigríður Björnsdóttir, Moki & Don Cherry, Daina Dagnija, Anna Egle, INLAND Campo Adentro (Sergio Bravo, Fernando García Dory, Enrique F. Vázquez), d harding, Ada Van Hoorebeke, Anna Hulačová, Virginie Ittah, Zhanna Kadyrova, Ieva Kraule-Kūna, Jessie Kleemann, Estelle Labes, Pia Lindman, Angelica Mesiti, Maya Minder, Betty Muffler, Shivay La Multiple, Zaiga Putrāma, Egill Sæbjörnsson & Agusta Oddsdottir, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty, Brigita Stroda, Imants Tillers, Timo Tuhkanen, Elsa Wolliaston.

Contributions by: Naima Karlsson, Zora Snake, T.I.E, Zbyněk Baladrán

Collaboration on performance programme and video dance archive with: Linus Gratte, Performance Curator at Centre Pompidou

Local artist liaison: Ieva Laube

You can read more about Survival Kit festival and this year's curators, Elena Sorokina, Simona Markel Dvorák and The Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care here.

For press enquiries please contact Alexia Menikou (International) or Dana Zālīte (Latvia)

Survival Kit 17 is organised by Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, Riga City Council, and the State Culture Capital Foundation. 

With the participation of and support from Institut français, the Performing Arts unit – Centre Pompidou, the Flemish Government, Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, Danish Arts Foundation, The Icelandic Visual Arts Fund and The Ministry of Culture Innovation and Higher Education of Iceland,  Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), Finnish Cultural Foundation, BGSW / Baszta (Poland), Kultivator (Sweden), Kuldiga artists’ residency, Kaņepes Kultūras centrs (Latvia).