kim? can be described as a contemporary art think-tank based in the Spīķeri area. In collaboration with local initiatives and institutions, kim? organizes exhibitions, lectures, film screenings, and cultural and artistic events, with the objective of bringing contemporary art nearer to the local public. The title questions of “What is art?” and “What is a museum?”, posed by the board of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art, are intended to clarify attitudes towards contemporary art in Latvia, as well as stimulate a discussion. kim? is a pilot project of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art, which is planned for construction in the regrettably distant future next to the harbor district Andrejsala. EI, 2009

 I had not met my friend Vasiliy Voronov for several months, therefore our first conversation after his return from the very musical city of Saint Petersburg, which took place as we sat down on a bench at the park next to the Academy of Arts, started as an exchange of information between two spies from the “art industry”. I was telling him about the new staging at our National Theatre by the Russian director Kiril Serebrennikov and was rather ironically referring to his idea to relocate the play Voiceks to an art gallery that displays three urinals serving as a reference to ‘contemporary art’. I sneered at the fact that it would soon be almost a century since the readymades of Duchamp, and that theatre that would claim to be something more than just a reproduction of tradition, should show a more thorough understanding of art. Vasiliy noted that I tend to be too keen on generalizations, while I eagerly went on about art, theatre and music ‘in general’, saying that the coming of music into art has been fruitful partly due to performance and video, and the use of art in music largely being done for illustrative purposes. Whereas theatre, unless it acts ‘in the mode of stage frame destruction’, reproduces trivial, even banal notions about art. In the same breath I added that literature usually is not any better, which is testified by the ‘old-fashioned’ paintings, which are painted or even just contemplated by the protagonist in the world of Hemingway’s novel Islands in the Stream Thomas Hudson. JTr via kim?, Apr 16, 2012

 No more connedted to the project of the future museum, in 2012 kim? operates as an NGO.

 Click here for an overview of kim?'s publishing program.