Beate Poikāne is starting the first stage of research and studio practice for anew work.
“In Kanuti Gildi SAAL residency I begin developing a new body of work as an inflation and deflation of hyper-romantic fantasy: a reconstruction of a fictional room that operates as both a physical installation and space for projection. I work with autofiction genre in forms of installation-performance and expanded (naïvist) painting, allowing the space to function as an unstable container for desire.
I approach the residency as a playground for feminine dreamscape building – exploring “obsessive space” of generic guys room is a container for developing characters deriving from the lyrical-self in trap music and cloud rap – I use it’s language as an entry point into emotional dysfunction. I am drawn to the theatricality of anti-hero identities that circulate within a narrow emotional register — where detachment, vulnerability discomfort, and avoidance reveals a larger network of precocity.
I am drawn to the scapegoat function of these figures might hold —the way they leak feelings that are widely resonated, a societal condition that is “wounded,” yet particularly looking into Swedish scene remains deeply ignorant, egocentric, Western-centric, and misogynistic. These trap lyrical-self fantasies are often underlined by a kind of hidden precarity, where wealth and sexuality are performed through an underlying instability—where success appears temporary, fragile, or unreal, and where coolness operates as a shield for emotional incapacity.
I am interested in exploring how such chosen performative selves are adopted in everyday life, particularly in relation to poverty and socio-economic complexity within a post-Soviet regional context—as coping mechanisms shaped by gendered and economically conditioned upbringings, and how they inform modes of romantic relating.
Over the course of the residency, I will build a scenographic prototype inspired by airbrush painting techniques and naïvist compositional strategies, while developing trap lyrical-self character buildup. This continues my artistic research into autofiction and the unfolding of installation-performance as a form – stretching on a concept of placemaking as “soft resistance’’ tool.”
Beate Poikāne is a visual artist, theatre-maker, and scenographer from Riga, Latvia. Her practice softens the boundaries between visual art and performing arts – by creating visual dramaturges and self-performing environments.
Through auto fiction in relation to cultural conditions she is paying particular attention to storytelling in peripherality and poverty and post-socialist context, female perspectives. Her lens of wording entails embodied experience as she engages with narrative and speculative fiction as spaces of individual and collective dreamlands – imaginaries that grow inside socio-economic tensions as coping mechanisms.
Primarily working with performance and installation as shifting landscapes – where humans are lingering in a net with other objects and technology. By sensing and navigating these constellations of spatial environments that attempt to resist instability by offering feminine, playful spaces for the body and seeking new, more vulnerable relationships.
Beate Poikane is currently based between Riga and Brussels, she works in Baltic region and internationally. She holds an MA in Performing Arts from SKH Stockholm University of the Arts, an MA in Scenography from Art Academy of Latvia, she has studied at Performance and Time-Based Art MA at the KMD Academy of Art in Bergen, Norway and has BA in Visual Communication from the Art Academy of Latvia.
