D50 Klāvs Liepiņš & Renāte Feizaka: Doom Loop

In the Doom Loop, the cycle is self-reinforcing. One act triggers another, another, and the same. Cultural doom loop, climate doom loop, personal doom loop. Artists Klāvs Liepiņš and Renāte Feizaka alert us to the moral and spiritual surveillance that is ever present. Surveillance like a watchtower that is meant to keep us in check. Here, the white cube has been deconsecrated of its religious sanctity, to reveal the fractures of the colonial and capitalist systems of power that resource, extract, produce, and skew value. To let the light in.

Klāvs Liepiņš (b. 1991, Latvia) and Renāte Feizaka (b. 1987, Latvia) began working together in 2019, with the work Traces of Red. Based between Lativa and Iceland, both graduated from Iceland University of the Arts; Klāvs with a BA in Contemporary Dance in 2018 and Renāte a BA in Fine Art in 2020. Their shared praxis is led by characters that confront the pressing questions of our day in sculpture, performance, videoworks and installation. Themes move between personal history, identity, belonging and the body, tradition, social standards and the tensions inherent in modern Catholicism. Klāvs and Renāte were shortlisted for the Motivational Award of the 2022 Icelandic Art Prize for the exhibition As you are now so once was I / As I am now so will you be at The Living Art Museum in 2021.

The D-Gallery exhibition series started in 2007. Here, emerging artists are acknowledged for their contributions to the development of local contemporary art in Iceland and invited to hold their first solo exhibition in a public museum. Klāvs and Renāte are the 50th artists to exhibit in the series.