No order is airtight. LOOPHOLE begins with the leak: the glitch, the error, the workaround, the back door, the hole through which an official route gives way to an unintended one. These manoeuvres occupy the shadows and legal grey zones, or emerge as acts of sheer invention.
The exhibition brings together an interdimensional collection of loopholers within a single architectural microcosm. Part market, part shelter, part passage, part backstage: a place whose original purpose has been forgotten. Rūdolfs Štamers’s site-specific installation Same, Same, but Different provides this unstable common ground, where other artistic entities are allowed to meet without being made to agree. Each retains its own logic, yet proximity changes the terms: connections appear, boundaries shift, and the architecture itself is altered by what it brings together. The result is a polyphonic assemblage: separate trajectories sharing a structure without being forced into harmony.
In LOOPHOLE, these gestures find their way through money, religion, sexuality, technology, memory, storytelling and authorship. Adam’s discarded rib finds a reproductive back door. Counterfeit cash becomes the currency of a genuine journey. A digital entity stays alive through collective care. An alter ego claims the marks its author hesitates to own. The costume of post-socialist masculinity returns as an object of desire. Ceramic and molten glass enter a high-risk relationship; the lucky few come out glowing.
The works connect across distinct histories through a shared tactic: using objects, rules and institutions otherwise, making room for lives their original designs fail to accommodate. They pretend, hide, role-play, misremember and collaborate, putting whatever the system overlooks to use. The system is still running. Just not as intended.
Text: Žanete Liekīte
LOOPHOLE
MMCA Changdong Residency
Sept 3–Sept 20, 2026
Conceptual authors: Žanete Liekīte and Rūdolfs Štamers
Central installation: Rūdolfs Štamers
Curatorial team: Žanete Liekīte and Taeho Choi
Participating artists: Arnolds Andersons, Kaspars Groševs, Karlīna Mežecka, Dew Kim, Eunsol Lee, Rūdolfs Štamers and Mykolas Valantinas
Visual identity: Dans Jirgensons
Presented as part of LOW’s nomadic exhibition programme, LOOPHOLE is realised with the support of the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.
The presentation of LOOPHOLE at MMCA Residency Changdong was made possible through Žanete Liekīte’s participation in the 2025 MMCA International Researcher Residency Program.
Photography: Lim Janghwal