Latvia and Estonia
Combined area: 109,786 km²
Time zone: GMT+2

Latvia and Estonia are two of the three countries which make up the Baltic states (the third is Lithuania). Their capitals, Riga and Tallinn, boast UNESCO-listed Old Towns dating to 1201 and 1219, respectively.

The spiral staircase that leads to MAREUNOL’S studio. Riga contains many spiral staircases, often owing to the popularity of Art Noveau in the city in the early 20th century.

A neat desk in MAREUNOL’S studio.

“Free Palestine!”

I’d just asked MAREUNOL’S, an artist duo made of Mārīte Mastiņa-Pēterkopa and Rolands Pēterkops, and iconic Latvian designer Bruno Birmanis, if there was anything they’d like to say. This was Birmanis’ eloquent answer, followed by nods from the artists. It was early October, and I’d just arrived at the artists’ tiny, beautiful studio, a high-ceilinged room in a 19th-century European apartment building – spiral staircase in the entrance hall, and large windows flush with autumn sun. A grand and solid building, the sort you find from Germany to St Petersburg, in any city made wealthy by trade and industry.

MAREUNOL’S and Birmanis are designing Latvia’s contribution to the 2026 Venice Biennale, with a pavilion curated by Inga Lāce and Adomas Narkevičius. The pavilion is dedicated to the radical legacy of the Untamed Fashion Assembly (UFA), founded by Birmanis, which took the form of a series of interdisciplinary events held in Riga during the 1990s that merged fashion, design, and visual art. They are a little secretive, so we look through their previous work, which melds fashion and art, evoking Latvian history, deep and shallow. Birds reappear throughout, symbols of freedom. Birmanis wants to talk about their attempt to capture the “utopia of beginnings” from Latvia in the late 1980s and 1990s, the end of the USSR and the beginning of independence, a time when everything felt possible, and nothing was settled.

In the 1990s, he put on fashion expos in Riga, attended by international and local guests. “The mafia came with AK-47s, trying to shake us down. I’d been in the army, so I knew how to swear, and I swore at them and shouted. I was terrified, but this calmed them, so I invited them to the show, to the parties, and they came.” And when they did come, I was later told, they sat in the corner shyly, frightened by the bohemianism. Now Latvia, and Riga especially, is superficially settled: the city looks wealthy and very modern. Driving in from the airport and to the studio, I am reminded of Copenhagen. I’d expected something more chaotic – my only other reference for a post-Soviet city is Tbilisi, wonderful and decaying, but far from Scandinavia. But the impression of a calm and settled place is swiftly swept aside by Rolands Pēterkops’ talk of Ukraine and Russia. Time and time again, Latvians and Estonians will tell me they know where their passports are at all times, that they have emergency bags packed. The more people I speak to in Riga and Tallinn, the guiltier I feel for having not-quite forgotten, but certainly not concentrated on, this ongoing war. People are scared.

From MAREUNOL’S studio, we drove across town to the Survival Kit Festival 16. Survival Kit was started in 2009, in the wake of Latvia’s recession, the second-worst in Europe after Greece’s. Austra Bērziņa, the festival’s director, explained that the name is instructive: art is necessary for survival. After the recession, everything felt broken, and art’s funding had vanished, so a group of artists squatted a street of recently emptied boutique shops. Since then, it has been an annual event, always held in temporary, often deserted, spaces. This year’s festival is housed in a former knitting factory midway through a renovation, very nicely done. It appears as converted factories often do: glass, exposed concrete, a hint of the institution. I ask if it’s harder to find big empty spaces in fast-developing Riga. It is.

Survival Kit Festival is curated by the artist duo Slavs and Tartars alongside Michał Grzegorzek, and takes Simurgh, a mythical bird found across Eurasia, as its starting point; addressing, as the press material says: “the critical state of transnationalism via the flamboyance of the flaming bird […] an understanding of liberation as both metaphysical and political.” Bluntly, it is the best exhibition I have seen this year. Its curatorial thrust is felt throughout in a way that is natural and apparent, but never didactic; its emphasis on transnational, individual and specific experience are both humane and universalising. Images of liberation abound throughout, both practical and spiritual. The Ukrainian painter Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s works are a distillation of movement, heroic in scale and imagery, presenting often naked, bewinged women in battle or contentment, evoking Botticelli’s Primavera and Richard Dadd’s fairie paintings. Shahmuradova Tanska’s studio is in Kiev; she has kept it throughout the war. She refuses to leave – even for the launch of this festival – and says she will not do so until Russia withdraws.

Outside the main building, in a well once used to dispose of dangerous chemicals, is Malina Suliman’s festival installation Afghan Women Wishes (2025). The invigilator, shivering in her coat, offers us masks, “for the mould spores.” Inside the basement air is thick and cold, scented with decaying fabric, the smell of poorly put-away tents, of irredeemably mildew-damaged winter clothes. Cloths hang from the ceiling, doubling upon themselves, the mottling of decay almost obscuring the beautiful calligraphy which explores the “complex relationships between dire need and reality”. Since they are not obscured, they are emphasised, words against destruction, against rot. The cloths are infused with spices, conjuring both home and colonialism, women’s work in the kitchen, and man’s exploitation for the sake of trade. This is the last day of the show, and the mould is the worst or best it will be, yet the writing is still visible.

The liberatory impulse that links Suliman’s country of Afghanistan, to Ukraine, to Bruno Birmanis’ “Free Palestine”, reminds us that the fight against repression, colonial or domestic, is international and multi-faceted. The cloths, and the rank smell of mould in the air, ought remind us equally of the damp tents in Gaza, as much as the slow rot of the economic and social lives of women under the Taliban. Why can’t we fly Ukraine and Palestine flags together?

The next morning, we visited the Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga’s most important contemporary art gallery. Its silly name is a nod to its founder, Jānis Zuzāns, who made his money in the 1990s, “legally”, I am told, in the nascent gambling industry. Alongside his collection, the Zuseum houses travelling exhibitions, but when I visited, they were between shows. No matter, since wandering the gigantic, beautiful halls, crates containing Bauhaus treasures all around us, felt like going backstage. I like going backstage. The museum’s entrance, which leads onto the café, is airy and open in the autumn sun, and as I sit and talk to Anna Pūtele, one of the curators, children run around playing. Opposite is a carwash, and people often come in for coffee while their cars are washed. Soon, it will be joined by a supermarket, which the museum is excited about. All museums should be opposite supermarkets, we decide.

Anna indulges my general questions, such as: What is a Baltic person? “Someone not Eastern European, but not Western either”. She is scared of Russia, of being abandoned. NATO looms as a protector, as does being European. This comes up many times in the conversation, a realisation that protection comes from those who think you are like them, not those who believe you to be strangers. Look at Ukraine, look at Palestine. Why the difference? Again and again during my trip, NATO comes up, its name invoked in almost holy tones. It might as well be a synonym for safety. It is jolting. I loathe NATO, its unwillingness to restrain Turkey in Rojava, its corruption, its work in the service of American interest above all else, its unremitting support of Israel’s genocide. But the world is complex, power amoral. Small countries must be clever, cling to what ballast is offered.

When I meet Solvita Krese, curator, director of LCCA, and Survival Kit’s founder, she is eating a Napoleon cake, a stack of cream and puff pastry, a popular dessert across the former USSR. I asked her about Latvia being post-Soviet. “How long will we be called that?” She says, “Do we call Germany post-Nazi?” Latvia was part of the USSR, she says, and everyone is still scared of Russian imperialism. In this way, she argues, Latvians are like post-colonial subjects anywhere in the world, though rarely seen as such. They are constantly aware of the coiled threat to sovereignty and culture. I nod, drinking my sparkling water which, all over Riga, is served at room temperature.

That night, we ate at an excellent modern restaurant, Mása, whose use of Latvian ingredients within the conventions of contemporary European cooking is impressive. It is in the diplomatic district, street after street of beautiful 19th-century apartment blocks and mansions, pristine and warmly lit. We pass the Russian Embassy, which is housed in a particularly grand building, and is empty and locked up.

Leaving the next morning, I take a final walk around the Old Town, marvelling again at the medieval solidity and baroque flights of fancy. It may be the most beautifully preserved city I’ve ever visited, stranger than Rome, more exciting than Venice, overwhelming, eccentric, half-ruined by tourist bars – sports, Irish, English, German, American – and souvenir shops, ringing always with millennial Eurotrash.

Rolands Pēterkops, one half of MAREUNOL’S, expounding.

Top left, installation view of works by Malina Suliman, Edith Karlson and Lidija Zaneripa; Top right, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, “You Shouldn’t Have to See This” (2024); bottom right, installation view of works by Inese Jakobi and Kexin Hao; bottom left Sana Shahmuradova “Tanksa”; all at House of See-More at Survival Kit Riga, curated by Slavs and Tatars and Michal Grzegorzek. 

Napoleon cake, unsurprisingly, originated in 17th-century France. An elaborate tower of puff pastry and crème mousseline, it arrived in the Russian Empire in 1912 to mark the hundred-year anniversary of Russia’s victory over France, over Napoleon himself. Supposedly, the crumbled pastry on top serves to symbolise the rough, wintery terrain upon which victory was achieved. 

Various Latvian fried treats. Popular fried food items include pelmeņi, dumplings often served with sour cream and dill, and žagariņi, crispy dough knots or sticks typically dusted with icing sugar.

The plethora of dried fish on offer at Riga Central Market.

The first thing I noticed at Tallinn airport was that the crests representing the Estonian state on the arms of the border guards here sit alongside the logo of the multinational outsourcing company G4S. It made me think of the rapacious speed of post-Soviet privatisation, the wholesale stripping of state assets, redistributed from the hulking, corrupt Soviet government to hulking, corrupt multinationals.

But then, I saw the exercise machines facing the runway and felt better. Do all airports have fitness zones? Following the advice of the trip’s manager, we ordered a Bolt inside the terminal. I felt a little ashamed when we left to get into it, passing a long line of taxi drivers smoking and chatting outside their pristine vehicles. The cab dropped us at the edge of the old city, which is pedestrianised, vehicles kept out by stone birds, the shape, almost, of rubber ducks. Tallinn’s old town is dimmer than Riga’s, more medieval, less obviously exuberant; it is quieter, too, and heavier with age. Another cab took us out of the old town to our friend Carmen’s, where she’d promised to feed us Estonian delicacies. Inside, we were met with the smell of cooking, heavy with smoke, and the sound of NTS. Carmen had just been to the countryside, to a house with a smoke sauna, generally for smoking meat and fish. There, she’d been experimenting with grain, mushrooms and cloth. In the kitchen were two other artists, Siim and Gaida. The meal smelled of the country: we ate chanterelles in cream sauce, and a sweet porridge called kamavaht, calling up Estonia’s dark woodland. 

Estonia retains parts of its pagan past, a forest religion, reminding me of what I know of Shinto. Gaida’s grandmother still kept a praying stone in the forest, upon which she left offerings for forest spirits. On special occasions, New Year and birthdays, the table would be left set with food all night, so the spirits could enjoy the celebration, too.

None of the artists believed, really, in the spirits, but they still felt their presence in the culture. They seemed to feel warmly towards them,  just as they did about their traditional foods, which are seldom seen in restaurants. Carmen explains, “Our parents, and people a bit older than us, remember when there was no foreign food here, and so when they go out to eat they want to eat something new or exciting. It’s only us, who grew up with all of this, who want to reclaim traditional things, to protect them.” I’m reminded of various new English folk collectives like Boss Morris and Goblin Band, who mine rich seams from often ossified traditions, showing that folkways have always offered apparently novel forms of expression.

The next morning brings another bright sky, the white of the medieval church opposite our hotel gleaming, behind it another church, its spire terror-inspiringly sharp. The breakfast room is lined with glass friezes of classical women, which must have been installed at the turn of the last century. In the elevator – the kind with a manual door – a plaque above the old control panel reads “LAST USED IN 1931”.

We visited the studio of Merike Estna, who will be representing Estonia at the next Venice Biennale. She is warm and engaging, and had just returned from Mexico where she’d been living. She had an English accented with Spanish, her mistakes Spanish mistakes. “It’s silly,’ she says, “Because I lived in London for years, but I’ve developed a Spanish accent in Mexico.’”

Merike’s grandmother didn’t believe in forest spirits; she was Lutheran. “She believed it was a sin to sit still and do nothing, so when she was not doing women’s work, she would make things. With craft, she resisted sin.” Merike follows in this tradition, subverting and exploring the way craft can be tactile, the ways it can be art. My favourite of her performances sees a picnic atop a canvas, the food becoming part of the painting, its grease and imprint adding new colour and motion. I’m drawn to this, especially, as half my mind’s on my own foray into culinary-inflected performance work, Greed, which I presented two weeks later.

Caliban and the Witch (2004) by Silvia Federici sits on her desk, a reminder that witchcraft, too, is women’s work. On the wall of the studio, which is very neat – she keeps explaining it isn’t her normal studio – is a self-portrait of her pregnant. As a painter, she says, she is a DJ: “when the technique has been developed, I sample this and that.” The figure is surrounded by black, and Merike reminds me that motherhood is not only life, but death. The child also consumes the mother. She asks if I have heard of the black lace weaver. “It is a spider. After she gives birth, she emits a hormone that makes her young eat her. She writhes in pain, but it is what she wants.” We talk and talk, about babies, and then we have to rush to the sea.

Between exhibitions, we go to the Kai Art Center. Kadri Laas-Leppasepp, the co-founder, explains that the centre is aimed at facilitating greater connection between Estonian art and the outside world. Everything, she says, is a private initiative, which brings both freedom and difficulty. No longer are we in the utopia of the nineties, when everything was simply stitched together ad hoc.

I am a little rude, because I am puppy-excited to make everyone I meet a spokesman for their country, for the people’s fear and the people’s dreams. She says yes, every day is consumed with anxiety about the war, and everyone has plans to get out. But she cautions against letting it dominate, particularly as Tallinn is further from Ukraine than Berlin. Mostly, she wished people elsewhere would not forget. For instance, after a residency in Spain she found herself exhausted by explaining the war over and over, explaining the history of occupation, the threat of an imperial power. But the answer is to get on with things, to make art, because otherwise there is nothing. “Talk to Olga,” Kardi says, “She’s much more expressive.”

Gaida’s grandmother still kept a praying stone in the forest, upon which she left offerings for
forest spirits

The butchery hall of Riga Central Market. Riga Central Market is made from zeppelin hangars, sold to Latvia by the cash-strapped German state after the First World War.

Olga Temnikova runs Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, one of the most important in Estonia. When we arrived, she was on the phone, talking quickly in English, laughing often. I am immediately besotted. The gallery is flooded with light, illuminating shining ceramics, a gigantic, curling, organic mass. Hanging up, she apologises and offers coffee and Soviet candies. I take one that tastes of banana, vaguely, or its memory, and we sit. I ask her questions about the gallery: who collects here, who has money? I mention Estonia doesn’t really have an oligarchy, which is good for a country but bad for a gallerist, which she laughs at. “It’s true. There isn’t really an old generation of collectors here, and the younger ones are all a sandwich generation, old parents, young kids. So, a lot of my work is explaining why something is worth something, why it is art.”

I asked her about the war. “There are so many brilliant Ukrainian artists here now, and it seems to have a galvanising effect on creation.” Her assistant comes out, wearing a beautiful blue suit. “I try not to objectify you, but you look so lovely!” She exclaims, before quickly switching to Estonian. “But like everyone else, I am always worried. My husband – you know what men are like – drives cars to Ukraine, for the army. Convoys of them with other men, once a month. It’s his way of coping, but is also a bit of a holiday. War is strange.” I tell Olga some gallerists use kindness, and others meanness, to get their way. She is of the former, I beam. Her face turns mock serious, and she replied, “But who makes more money?”

Olga recommends a nearby Dagestani restaurant, The Kurze, for lunch, and when we arrive we find an empty room, which smells delicious. I poke my head into the kitchen, a hive of quiet activity of steam, and a young man gestures for me to wait while he gets the owner. I argue with Lowena, my photographer and partner, a marital spat caused by exhaustion and overstimulation, and eat superlatively delicious food – multicoloured dumplings and bread stuffed with lamb, drink Borjomi. After, we walk to an antique market above a mall and find the strange paucity of post-Communist antiques, an endless repetition of crystal glass, military paraphernalia, and strange, beautiful stuffed toys.

Our plane is in the evening, so we visit the National Gallery. It is a beautiful building, like wonderful modern institutions everywhere. Is this what it was like to see palace after palace in Renaissance Tuscany? Impressive but a little dull? Then we cross the park, past the Presidential Palace and the President’s beehives, and to the Kadriorg Art Museum, which sits in a baroque palace erected by Peter the Great, Russia’s most Europhilic Tsar. It is painted gaudy pinks and greens, almost hard to look at, a child’s toy. Inside, there is a flurry of activity, where smartly dressed children are running around, many carrying instruments. Inside white marble, all fanciful, silly, and from upstairs, there is the sound of music – a recital by students of the music academy. The children’s voices rise higher and higher. I am transfixed. And within that purest and spookiest of all things, the sound of children singing, I touch transcendence, forget myself. This is art’s true purpose, its highest purpose, the most it can expect – to disrupt time, to alter reality, to flex its extravagant forms to an end that is both heavy and immaterial. Children are tomorrows, each one, from Ukraine to Palestine, across Riga and Tallinn, yet to be corrupted by sour-faced practicality. I do not want to leave their singing. .

Peter the Great, who commissioned the Kadriorg Palace, was no stranger to vulgarity. Aged 18, he founded a club named ‘The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters’, which by the time of his death aged 52 had become a motley crew of clergymen, politicians and noblemen, all united by their shared love of blasphemy and debaucher y. Sadly, Peter died before the construction was complete, and the palace was only sporadically occupied until the Art Museum of Estonia took it over in 1921. 

Top right, exhibition view of “Gardens”, Tanja Muravskaja and Light, at Saarinen House as part of Tallinn Photomonth contemporary art biennial. Bottom left, “Nirvana”, Kris Lemsalu at Temnikova & Kasela gallery, Tallinn.