THE WHITE NIGHT Contemporary Art Forum

There are nights when it’s better to stay awake!

During the night from August 30 to August 31, the Contemporary Art Forum “White Night” will take place in Rīga for the third time already. The tradition of arranging White Nights started in Paris and later, wishing to share this experience and stimulate the exchange of artists, five European capitals – Brussels, Madrid, Paris, Rīga, and Rome – joined into a common project entitled the White Nights Europe. The idea of the White Nights now is taken over by other European cities - Bucharest, Valletta (Malta) and Porto and has also gone beyond the European borders, being arranged in, Toronto, Tokyo, Montreal, Chicago and elsewhere.

The White Night in Latvia is a one-night manifestation of contemporary culture with the participation of different cultural organizations, Latvian and international artists offering a broad interdisciplinary programme embracing such fields as theatre, music, film, visual art and movement.

Nightly events are usually surrounded by mysterious aura. At night everything looks a bit different, shapes of familiar objects become unclear, the usual thoughts change their direction. Night-time can provoke unexpected ideas and lets one develop surprising experiments as well as makes one look at familiar issues from a different angle. Darkness nurtures human fantasy, and only with the help of light we can see in the darkness.
This year’s events are linked by a line of light – a special tram line of the White Night that crosses the city as a radiant and mobile firefly beginning its route in the „silent centre” next to Andrejsala, then moving along the Freedom Monument, around the Central Market and Spīķeri, over the Daugava to reach the Arkādijas Park.

Venues for the White Night events are parks, trams, yards, cafes, industrial territories, floating platforms and buildings that are going to obtain a different function during this night. The White Night is an invitation to look at cultural processes from a different perspective, to yield to surprises and broaden borders of ones experience.