Karlīna Mežecka's solo exhibition Stare Up At Me/“Veries manī”
19 June–9 August, 2026
Curated by Zane Onckule
Borrowing its title and dramaturgical undercurrent from Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me” (2000) – a country-pop hallucination of suspended desire, emotional stasis and erotic ambivalence, punctuated by the lines “Tell the bed not to lay/Like the open mouth of a grave/Not to stare up at me/Like a calf down on its knees” – Karlīna Mežecka’s largest solo exhibition to date unfolds in four chapters: “Life”, “Death”, “Dominance” and the closing “Summary”. Through a series of new sculptural and installation-based works, Mežecka foregrounds bodies that appear as unstable figurations, suspended between surface and interior, between what is materially present and what remains imagined.
Karlīna Mežecka (b. 1995, Riga, Latvia) has been based in London since 2021. After completing a BA in Ceramics at the Art Academy of Latvia, she received an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Archive of Fragility at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2024); Security Patterns at Low Gallery, Riga (2022). Recent group exhibitions include RTRU* at KAJE, New York (2026); Dry Cleaning at Max Radford Gallery, London (2025); and Gradient Descent at Gossamer Fog, London (2024). Her works are held in the collections of Odunpazari Modern Museum (OMM), Eskişehir; VV Foundation, Riga; BTA Collection, Riga; and Roche Collection, Riga. Mežecka is the recipient of the Kim? Residency Award 2025 and undertook a residency at ISCP, New York, in September–October 2025.
Sound design by: Aleksejs Apolskis (VoidCells, Spoild)
Photography in collaboration with: Klaudija Avotiņa
Post-production: Ivo Pauls
Artist’s acknowledgements: Laura Mežecka, Rochester Square & Ewelina Bartkovska, Glasremis Studio
Supported by: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, The State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, KRASO, Kokmuiža, Media Port
Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and exhibition team:
Executive Director: Evita Goze
Programme Director: Zane Onckule
Communications Manager: Kristiāna Bērza
Sales Director: Dārta Purvlīce
Project manager: Betija Briede
Mediators: Poļina Gasparoviča, Emīlija Austra Lodiņa, Anna Annemarija Samsone, Alise Sedleniece, Linda Šterna
Technical team: Mārtiņš Aulmanis, Aldis Bušs, Andris Maračkovskis, Romāns Medvedevs
Latvian proofreading: Ilze Jansone
Latvian translation: Valts Miķelsons
English proofreading: Will Mawhood
