FW Spotlight: Top Submissions of April
This month, we have selected three exhibitions, one in Frankfurt, one in Riga, and one in Greenville, that together form a compelling journey through contemporary art. These shows lead us into the quiet folds of sleep, the fragmented mirrors of memory, and the breathing textures of living ecosystems. Across these three cities, artists invite us to traverse thresholds where control dissolves, time collapses, and life reorganizes itself into new, shimmering possibilities. What binds these distant explorations is a shared refusal to surrender to passivity, a common thread of active resistance woven through vulnerability, decay, and interspecies kinship.
submerged us into the politicized infrastructure of sleep, that most private and yet profoundly exposed human act. In Dörr’s vision, sleep was no longer a shelter but a battlefield, a resource extracted and commodified through the invisible tendrils of late capitalism. His Latent Entity, a digital being pulsing with the collective slumber of participants scattered across the globe, flickered like a spectral heartbeat across the glass architecture. It was not a character to command but a force to surrender to, appearing only when the waking world retreated, and vanishing again at dawn, defiantly rejecting the ceaseless gaze of surveillance. Here, Dörr revealed sleep not as a refuge but as an emergent form of rebellion: the radical act of giving up control, of opting out of productivity, of becoming useless in a system that demands constant utility. His installation pulsed with the soft yet insistent rhythm of unseen solidarity, a murmuring body without a narrator, a slow and quiet insurrection against the capitalist clock.
Where Dörr mapped the outer territories of techno-capitalist control, Bīrmane charted the inner wastelands of emotional decay. The peeling posters, the metallic shards underfoot, the hypnotic, barely shifting soundscape, all spoke to a cyclical entropy where nothing is truly lost but endlessly recycled into new, fragile forms. In her stitched and severed works, memory was not a fixed archive but a trembling, living fabric, endlessly undone and rewoven. Walking through her exhibition demanded not only physical balance but emotional equilibrium; every step, every glance became a negotiation with disintegration. Here, the personal and the collective blurred into a shared archaeology of loss, where even the deepest sorrows were revealed to be ancient, communal patterns, a collective mourning etched across time. If Dörr’s Latent Entity resisted control by refusing visibility, Bīrmane’s works resisted despair by revealing the tenderness hidden within collapse, the regenerative power in decay.
Finally, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid – Greenville, Living Things offered a radical counterpoint, not by mourning what fades, but by cultivating what still breathes. Hannah Chalew, Michael Evans, Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado, and the collective Kosmologym eschewed dystopian fatalism, instead collaborating with fungi, plants, and other non-human agents to imagine futures rooted in mutual care and interdependence. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s cyborgian vision, these artists tore down the false walls between nature and culture, self and other. Here, collapse was neither end nor tragedy, but the fertile ground for unexpected new alliances. Living systems, messy, adaptive, beautifully impure, became both medium and message, carrying the seeds of futures not yet foreclosed. Their works insisted that the horizon was not an inevitable cliff but a living, breathing line, forever shifting, forever open to those willing to reimagine it.
Through Dörr’s spectral nocturnes, Bīrmane’s mourning collages, and the living tapestries of Living Things, these exhibitions wove a shared narrative: a quiet but profound defiance against the closing of possibilities. They each asked, in different tongues, in different textures, what it means to inhabit a world where vulnerability is not weakness but a hidden wellspring of resilience. Where fading does not mean erasure but transformation. Where sleep, memory, and ecosystems can become spaces of radical hope.
In this choreography of decay and regeneration, we glimpse the fragile architecture of a different future, one that doesn’t deny collapse, but dares to dream beyond it.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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