The Latvian Contemporary Art exhibition in Venice will help to acquaint Europe with Latvian culture and art - one of the country’s finest and most remarkable exports. The exhibition is one of the Collateral Events of the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

The starting point of the exhibition is the Purvītis Prize, the most prestigious Latvian award in visual arts. This award, which is a product of collaboration between the Latvian National Museum of Art and a private business, has been actively and professionally recording and evaluating the art process in Latvia for seven years now, marking out the most significant phenomena. The plan for the exhibition is that it should constitute a body of works of art that represent the forms of expression, diversity of personalities, and professional qualities of Latvian contemporary art.

The curator of the project is Viktor Misiano, an internationally recognised art curator and art theoretician, who has been commissioner of a number of national exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, curator of the Manifesta 1 Biennial, editor-in-chief of the Moscow Art Magazine, and head of the board of the Manifesta Biennial. The project’s commissioner is Daiga Rudzāte.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue that is more of a book which comments on and discusses the main issues dealt with at the exhibition.

The project is carried out by the INDIE Culture Project Agency in collaboration with the arterritory.com website.