Paula Punkstiņa The Arrows of Concerns
Exhibition dates: 14 March – 19 April 2026
Curator: Zane Onckule
What remains when we strip ourselves back to an essential core—and can that core ever be
stable?
In The Arrows of Concerns, Paula Punkstiņa approaches identity as liminal, wounded, and
continually reconstituted. The exhibition unfolds through material and psychological
compressions in which the self bends, fractures, dissolves, and reforms. Oscillating between
vulnerability, naivety, resistance, playfulness, and detachment, Punkstiņa’s works trace how
subjectivity adapts under pressure without vanishing entirely.
At the exhibition center is flexible polyurethane memory foam serves as both structure and
metaphor for exposed corporeality. It absorbs impact, yields, and slowly returns to form.
Punkstiņa treats it as a model of “essence”: mutable yet retentive, marked by experience but
resistant to permanent distortion. Coated, pierced, or coupled with intrusive
elements—bamboo arrows, taxidermy fragments, bicycle parts, synthetic hair—the flesh-like
material becomes a site of exposure. At times, it is sheathed in a honeyed, porous membrane
resembling a second skin, suggesting protection without fully sealing the boundary between
inside and out.
The sculptural objects on display operate as prosthetic frameworks for an existential
narrative. Fragmented human and animal anatomies—hair, antlers, legs—embody unstable
states of being, resonating with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, in which the body
oscillates between identification and repulsion. Clinical and industrial references—forms
reminiscent of operating tables and components of indeterminate transport
mechanisms—introduce an atmosphere of calculated intervention and constrained movement.
This sterility stands in stark contrast to the tenderness of the materials they penetrate, support,
or encircle. The resulting tension echoes the artist’s own gesture—notes that often
accompany her thinking: (..) to dodge the bullet, yet still bear the wound.
The deer recurs as a collective symbol rather than a literal figure. Connoting innocence,
youth, and belonging, this Bambi stands in for a once-coherent identity later dismantled. By
disassembling the image, Punkstiņa questions permanence and explores thresholds between
life and death, presence and erasure. Passing appears not as an end, but as a
transformation—redistribution rather than disappearance.
Photographic collages drawn from personal archives and found images extend these concerns
into memory. They evoke searching and distortion, asking whether fractured or unwanted
recollections can unsettle the self. Individuation begins with a cut. Over time, a second skin
accumulates, layered with suppressed affects and disavowed experience. Though pride and
self-narration attempt to overwrite them, these traces persist, quietly shaping identity.
In Heideggerian terms, being-in-the-world is inseparable from becoming; existence is
engagement, not stasis. Punkstiņa’s practice inhabits this tension between dissolution and
reconstruction, foregrounding vulnerability, interdependence, and an uneasy proximity to the
object-subject.
Initially conceived as an open experiment, the exhibition marks a shift in material and
conceptual approach. Moving beyond earlier work with aluminium plates and UV printing,
Punkstiņa embraces processes that translate ideas directly into matter: burned edges,
perforations, melted coatings. Translation itself becomes central—between language and
material, experience and form, rupture and resonance.
Inflected by the artist’s formative years, The Arrows of Concerns centers on the fluidity of
identity—its oscillation between stability and disintegration—and on the intimate calculus of
choice, separation, loss, and self-redefinition. The work traces a subject in the midst of
becoming, where each rupture recalibrates the terms of coherence. How many times must the
“I” be wounded before adaptation hardens from reflex into structure—and when it returns to
its seemingly “original” form, what sediments of memory and transformation continue to
course through it?
Paula Punkstiņa is a recipient of Kim? Open Call 2026.
Paula Punkstiņa (b. 2001) is a Latvian visual artist. She graduated in Photography from the
Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the Piet
Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her work emphasises explorations of identity, fragility, and
transitional states of disappearance. By combining philosophy with visual metaphors,
Punkstiņa’s artistic practice engages with the translation of concepts into material form.
Recent projects include a solo exhibition at DOM Gallery, Riga (2024) and a forthcoming
duo show with Sara Francola at Art Au Centre, Liège (2026). Recent group exhibitions
include the 5th and 6th editions of Black Market by Kim? (2024, 2025), Where Are You
Currently? at Paradise, The Hague (2025), RESTART at Prospektas Gallery, Vilnius (2024),
and the Limburg Biennale at Marres House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht (2024).
Paula Punkstiņa’s acknowledgements: family, Sara Francola, Tim Ross, Aida Valdés Gómez.
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Séverine Heizmann Pozza Settling at Dawn
Exhibition dates: 14 March – 19 April 2026
Curator: Paolo Baggi
Ten columns are installed throughout the space. Vertical monoliths composed of enamelled
ceramic tiles, they provoke awkwardness as a result of being depositaries of evolving,
organic painterly processes and at the same time maintaining a totemic Minimalist-coded
fixture, like John McCracken's polished towers, resurfaced after erosion. But maybe they’re
closer to Anne Truitt’s boxes, considering how their formal rigidity and phallic verticality
paradoxically generate the most organic appearance.
Séverine Heizmann Pozza’s practice draws on various interconnected systems: permaculture,
ecology and divination. These shape dynamic structures made up of their own logics of
transmission, as many complex sites which are thought of as nodes of overlapping
interdependent zones, articulated by a site-responsive painting. The unpredictability and
openness of ceramics, whose outcome is only revealed through the thermochemical process
of the kiln—painting in the dark— answers those dynamic ecosystems by stating its own
elsewhere, an autonomous site of fluxes and exchanges. Firmly closed when the firings take
place, the kiln itself looks like a reactor of some sort, enclosing the radiation which effects
the material: the surfaces are at times oxidated, due to the effect of a corrosive reaction, or
show stronger material transformations through vitrification. Their colours further insist on
the narrative of contamination: the luxurious fading palette of guppy blues, muddy browns,
deep chartreuse and troubled aquamarine greens contrast with acidic oranges and red’s
radiance due to the cadmium’s toxicity. The colors seem to owe their tint to outside
processes. Consider the reduction leading to a metallic black, seemingly illuminated from
inside, as if it owed its depth to some arcane power. Just as Riga Black Balsam isn’t Picon, it
could happen that one black looks like another but doesn’t taste the same.
These displacements give them a feeling of exteriority reinforced at Kim?, appearing both as
individuals and as a group, strangely repeating the space’s own pilasters, the structures seem
withdrawn, cut off from the world. A separation which is further pushed by the organicity and
outwardness of the works, which detach them from modernist sculpture. Consider how they
reflect on each other when they’re close. They radiate outwards, absorb and redistribute.
Their togetherness and seclusion are akin to the immanence of a rave, where, at the same
time, nothing exists outside, and the end is inescapable. Set within this fleeting feeling of
furtiveness, Settling at Dawn works as a time of grounding and resurrection. A germinal
emergence, or as the first thing one sees after having come through the night.
I’ve been mostly talking about interdependence to understand how this “painting in an
expanded field” manoeuvres a new consideration about the site, its complexity and
heterogeneity. If an ecological consideration can be useful here, it is for the articulation of
present thinking about the interdependence of events and processes in light of external
disturbances: the sites we inhabit seem more and more unstable, from increasing shaky
geological foundations to the return of full-fledged wars to geographies believed to be fixed.
Against an isolating perspective, the various systems the artist calls upon lead to a
consideration of the site in its multiplicity, as expanded nodes linked by multiple
interdependent processes. By setting up a practice rooted in this contemporary thought,
Séverine Heizmann Pozza elaborates a painterly agency which looks at accumulating thought
and matter into a series of transformations and mutations, a hybridisation of the medium
through contagion of knowledge. The exhibition’s spatiality itself becomes a site of meaning:
consider the conjunctions of the structures throughout the space, mapping out a seemingly
informative chart, like astral signs, and divination as a tool to reconfigure the given site.
Anne Truitt: “Have a feeling of having seen it all—all phenomena of whatever kind, a feeling
of being exhausted with living—a fleeting impression of the ephemeral nature of
actuality—as if the actual had ceased to interest me, and the virtual had silently usurped its
place in my thought.”
Séverine Heizmann Pozza (b. 1994) is a visual artist and musician based in Geneva. She
received her BA in Fine Arts from the HEAD Geneva School of Art and Design in 2018. Her
work has recently been shown at personal exhibitions at Milieu, Bern (2024), and Kirchgasse,
Steckborn (2021), and at group exhibitions, for instance at Forde, Geneva (2019).
Séverine Heizmann Pozza’s acknowledgements: Paolo Baggi and collaboration partners.
