2026 01 28 – 03 15 Exhibited at Photography Gallery (Vasario 16-osios str. 11)
„Plantiness is the sensorial and conceptual resonance of vegetal life as it becomes entangled with human ways of perceiving, naming, and dwelling. Rather than isolating a plant as an object of study, plantiness turns our attention to the constellation of qualities through which plants appear, act, and co-perform in the world. Plantiness is not the plant itself, but an assemblage that combines material characteristics and evolves into a shimmering field of relations through which its presence is understood and felt. It unfolds through the cultural, spatial, and political conditions that shape how plants come to matter. Plants are never mere background; they are active agents—living sculptors of landscapes, quiet communicators, collaborators in memory and migration.
Exhibition PLANTINESS explore the role of plants in a human life, place and culture. In each encounter, plantiness emerges as a kind of performance: a relationship staged through time, space, cultural heritage, and meaning. It demonstrates a way of perceiving plants as thinkers and communicators, as beings whose lives ripple through ours in ways both subtle and transformative. It is about to imagine human life not alongside plants, but with and through them. The artistic invocation of plantiness invites to reimagine coexistence with plants not as objects to be used, but as partners in ongoing worldmaking. Working with their colour, fibre, scent, and residue becomes a gesture of attunement and reciprocal storytelling. The sensorial qualities of plants—odour, sap, tactility, fibrous presence—become forms of knowledge, revealing how vegetal matter marks, stains, and transforms the surfaces it touches. In this material engagement, the artwork becomes a space where the plant’s agency registers not only visually but also haptically and olfactorily, inviting audiences to feel plant presence with more than just the eyes.
Through plant dyes, imprinting, staining, and slow extraction, plants leave traces on fibre and surface that register their agency: colour that bleeds with weather, scent that fades over time, fibres that fray and mend. These marks are not decorative; they represent performances of plantiness, shaped by specific ecologies, histories, and more-than-human labour. Working with fibre foregrounds the shared materiality of human and plant bodies—threads, skins, and vessels through which life circulates. In this fibrous interconnection, plant matter and human touch meet, intertwine, and respond to one another, forming a sensorial realm where bodies encounter, affect, and transform each other.
The exhibition features works created between 2024–2025. Created across various visual art media including staged photography, textile objects, and installation, they all arise from an ongoing multisensorial engagement with the artist’s dwelling place—Ikšķile, Latvia— its urbanised post-colonial landscape, waters, soils, natural processes, and characteristic vegetation. Sustainability grounds the work, embedded in both process and material selection: discarded linen, repurposed fabrics, found objects, and carefully gathered regrowing parts of common plants.“
Rita Broka is a Latvia-based interdisciplinary artist and researcher. She holds a PhD in Arts, a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Art Academy of Latvia, and a Master’s degree in Creative Industries from the Latvian Academy of Culture. Her artistic practice and research focus on the multisensory perception of landscapes and embodied relationships in deep connection with place and material. Her work is grounded in natural processes, the use of fiber and organic materials as primary artistic media, and the exploration of plant materiality as an agentive and sensuous substance and cultural foundation. She is particularly interested in contemporary innovations of inherited practices—especially through the use of botanical dyes and hands-on techniques—as well as in sustainable creative approaches that integrate ecological awareness and ethical, material responsibility. She is and assistant professor at the University of Latvia, the author of publications, regularly organizes solo exhibitions, participates in group exhibitions, and leads public events and open-access lectures, fostering connections artistic practice, research, and community engagement.
