Survival Kit 17, “Arrows of the Wind”

Amid the widespread reduction of cultural funding across Europe, contemporary art is increasingly compelled to justify its existence through demonstrable usefulness.1 One claim has recently gained traction: that simply looking at art can play a role in improving your mental (and, some argue, physical) health. Museums are marketed as instruments for the improvement of psychological wellbeing, adopting—and not infrequently tokenizing—the vocabulary of care, hospitality, and kinship.

“Arrow of the Wind: On Artists and Healers”, the seventeenth edition of Riga’s annual Survival Kit festival, offers a less superficial and more historical treatment of the relationship between art and health. Rather than retroactively ascribing reparative power to art, curators Elena Sorokina and Simona Markel Dvorák (working with the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care) trace practices in which art and healing are conjoined, emphasizing active, creative engagement rather than passive viewing. Drawing on an understanding of the human being as a social subject rather than an alienated individual, and insisting that the roles of artist and healer were once undivided, the exhibition questions several founding assumptions of modern art history.

The show foregrounds three principles: sensory ecology (the sensorium as an interconnected system rather than a set of discrete senses), attunement (an idea of healing as process rather than a fixed state), and “restorative practices” (recovery, and the renewal of narratives grounded specifically in place). The first of these shapes the exhibition spatially as much as conceptually: smell, sound, and haptics are given equal consideration with sight. To experience the show, the viewer is required to meander through the rooms of the Riga Congress Hall, originally constructed in 1982 as the House of Political Education of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party, and now repurposed as a music venue (a story of exorcism and renewal which neatly encapsulates the show’s curatorial credo).

Individual artworks, however, rarely embody just one of these ideas. In Zhanna Kadyrova’s video The Forest (2025), the viewer witnesses the changing seasons at what was once the Kakhovka reservoir—itself an emblem of the Stalinist conquest of nature—which was drained when the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed by Russian forces in 2023. Within a year, the exposed lakebed gave rise to a willow forest, whose swift growth was documented by the artist. Amid the young trees sits a boat, immovable, while the video’s palette shifts from green to red to white, and the surrounding saplings sway, echoing the movement of water that once flowed through the basin. Kadyrova shows a scene of regeneration rather than a return to the prior state (which was, in any case, an artificial one). This interplay between natural and artificial is also present in Anna Hulačová's Dolomite Lovers (2016): two wooden figures in folk costume, placed on azure hives, their cores hollowed out to host honeycombs. The sculpture is not meant to be completed by the artist alone, but has been continually modified by bees, undoing distinctions between maker and material, host and habitat, artwork and organism.2 It is a beautiful yet ominous piece: the figures’ vacant faces betray no legible feeling, be it the stress of another organism colonizing their bodies or pride in providing refuge to another species.

Historical examples of art-as-healing are contextualized through the incorporation of archival material. The most elaborate presentation (and the first work in the show) is Pain and Other Recyclables (2026), which is centered around Sigríður Björnsdóttir, an Icelandic pioneer of art therapy, who from the 1950s developed methods to support children in expressing and processing emotion. The installation by Ágústa Oddsdóttir, Mosi Kristjáns, and Egill Sæbjörnsson, described in the catalog as a “walk-in-picture,” is built around large, freestanding projection surfaces: irregularly cut, enlarged fragments of drawings Oddsdóttir made during her own sessions with Björnsdóttir. Their front faces show unsettling imagery: in “Ice Hedgehog,” a female figure hides beneath a glacial, spiky covering, eyes wide open. Venturing further, one finds child-sized chairs and oversized crayons, referencing the process of art therapy, while accompanying graphs and session notes document Björnsdóttir’s approach and thinking. One leaflet depicts plants stemming from the soil labeled “creativity”, their blooms replaced with the benefits of creative endeavor: “relief of fear/anxiety,” “more insight,” “better contact with reality.”

In moments like these, “Arrow of the Wind” seems like an epistemological proposal, prompting a return to creativity before it hardens into “art,” even a coming back to pre-categorical thinking, when the boundaries between art, medicine, and religion were not yet clearly demarcated. The root, suggest the curators, is where healing can begin. Yet a renewal always leaves a residue. Reaching the root often requires cutting, clearing away, violating what has grown over it. Kadyrova’s The Forest makes this visible: regrowth, however hopeful, takes place over ground that war tore open.