This edition of the cutting-edge intellectual contemporary art event Survival Kit which takes place annually in Riga, organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, conjures up the image of the mystical Persian firebird Simurgh with the help of renowned transnational art collective the Slavs and Tatars as one half of the curatorial team and non-binary performance expert Michał Grzegorzek flanking the other. How successfully can the avian metaphor help us to disentangle the catastrophic state of world affairs?

Travelling from Russia to Latvia recently, I found myself in one of those dehumanizing border crossings – one kilometre of no-man’s-land edged with barbed wire, security cameras, and countless control posts epitomizing the political realities of territorial control. As migrants trudged with their suitcases through the midday sun, I noticed a stork – Latvia’s emblematic migrant bird – perched on one of the CCTV posts, looking down on us with a quizzical ancient wisdom. The image lingered with me and resurfaced as I approached Survival Kit 16, promising through the mythical bird Simurgh to throw light on issues of transnational identity and human freedom.

Survival Kit 16 is engaging with contemporary art’s broader embrace of mythological and mystical frameworks, a trend which has become increasingly visible from Biennales in Venice to Documenta. It represents an understandable desire to escape the rational, scientific Western thinking that has contributed to our current geopolitical and ecological crises. Artists and curators are turning toward feminine, magical, irrational and subconscious alternatives to deconstruct dominant paradigms and reimagine relationships between identity, territory, and belonging.

The Simurgh chosen as this year’s narrative device, brings considerable theoretical promise. This creature of Sufi tradition, described as “literally flaming, and non-binary,” offers a compelling counterpoint to imperial eagle iconography. Where eagles project “a lazy form of toxic masculinity,” the Simurgh embodies multiplicity, collective being, and metaphysical enlightenment. Having “witnessed the end of the world three times already,” it seems well-suited to our moment of multiple crises.

This mystical turn reflects deeper cultural yearnings. In times when governments and social structures prove unstable, there’s a natural human desire for re-rooting in alternative belief systems and connection with more-than-human worlds. Yet the question remains: can such mythological frameworks genuinely shift our thinking, or do they risk becoming elaborate forms of spiritual tourism?

Building on this mystical foundation, the Slavs and Tatars have arrived in Riga with impressive credentials for this undertaking. Since 2006, the collective has developed a practice focused on the area which lies east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China “territories historically marginalised and oppressed by Russian and Soviet imperialism” – making their involvement in the Baltic discourse particularly apt. Their trademark linguistic archaeology digs into cultural memory with scholarly rigor and subversive wit, making them ideal interpreters of transnational mythology.

Their collaboration with Michał Grzegorzek (b. 1987), whose expertise in performativity and queer culture speaks to the Simurgh’s “flamboyance and fluidity,” creates an intriguing curatorial dynamic.

These curatorial choices reflect LCCA’s broader motives, as director Solvita Krese writes in her opening statement “Besides our focus on eastern Europe we are increasingly turning to regions that are united by the shared experience of having been part of the Soviet empire namely central Asia and the Caucuses.” The choice of curators speaks to an urgent need for cultural solidarity among post-Soviet territories facing renewed Russian imperial pressure, as does the inclusion of artists from across the former Soviet sphere. In our current geopolitical moment, such cultural alliance-building represents forms of soft resistance and alternative community formation that may prove increasingly vital.

However, national markers are deliberately omitted from exhibition materials, though some artists receive geographical identification in exhibition texts, for example in the case of Shadi Habib Allah (b. 1985) as “born in Jerusalem, Palestine,” while others remain unmarked by geographical origin. This raises intriguing questions about when and why national context is deemed relevant to artistic interpretation.

The temporal span of works is surprisingly broad. One of the central pieces ‘Wings’ by Inese Jakobi (b. 1949) dates back to 1996 – a huge patchwork pair of wings one black one white is accompanied by the statement “These wings don't fly. And still – they restore maximalism, present a challenge, rattle longing, will, hope.” Icons created in 2016 by Ukrainian artist Oksana Shachko (1987–2018), a founder of radical feminist activist art group FEMEN gain poignant new relevance through posthumous inclusion following her 2018 suicide. Sergey Shabohin's (b. 1984) ‘Reliquary XX–XXI’ has been ongoing since 2009, which archives imagery from deceased artists, with each year, since 1900, corresponding to the date of death of one artist. The current ‘Version 6: Bird Conclave’ was created specifically for this exhibition. The project treats avian fragments not as decorative motifs but as spiritual mediators: “Wings and feathers, angels and flocks, Leda and Simurgh, Phoenix and Firebird, Harpies and Death Birds become visual forms of disappearance, premonition, and reflection.” His archaeological approach creates fascinating dialogues between different moments and contexts, though one wonders how successfully such temporal breadth serves the exhibition’s thematic coherence.

Shabohin’s reliquary offers revealing insight into both the ambitions of the exhibition and its challenges. His chronological grid which maps bird imagery in art demonstrates the overwhelming scope of avian symbolism across our human cultures – each entry represents decades of meaning-making that could justify its own scholarly investigation.

This breadth reflects a fundamental question facing Survival Kit 16: can a single exhibition meaningfully address the vast territory it represents? Should it? The Simurgh concept encompasses transnationalism, gender fluidity, post-Soviet identity, spiritual transcendence, and political resistance – exceptionally ambitious terrain for any curatorial framework. With twenty-three artists from diverse backgrounds working across different media, the resulting experience rewards extended engagement but risks fragmenting into discrete encounters rather than cohesive argument. This reflects broader challenges facing contemporary exhibition-making: how to create meaningful thematic coherence without reducing artistic complexity to illustrative function?

Shabohin’s work also epitomises a fundamental issue about the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Despite its sophisticated engagement with post-national thinking and mystical alternatives, Survival Kit 16 seems to remain bound to anthropocentric perspectives. Engagement with birds focuses on their role as human symbols, metaphors for human characteristics, tools for human meaning-making.

This becomes particularly evident when considering what is absent from the exhibition. In a moment of ecological crisis actual bird populations face extinction; migration patterns shift due to climate change; the recent disaster of the Black Sea oil spill epitomises the devastating crux of geopolitics and oil trade annihilates bird populations in this very region, yet the curators focus entirely on birds as cultural constructs. Latvia's rich ornithological heritage – its crucial position on migration routes, its role in conservation efforts, its traditional ecological knowledge – remains unexplored territory.

The irony proves pointed: while curators speak of moving beyond toxic masculinity and imperial thinking, they employ remarkably similar interpretive frameworks that position birds primarily as vehicles for human symbolic needs. Shabohin's meticulous documentation perfectly illustrates this pattern – across more than a century of cultural production, birds consistently serve human interpretive projects rather than being encountered as beings with their own forms of intelligence and agency.

A genuine posthumanist approach could have opened pathways beyond anthropocentric thinking while maintaining metaphorical richness and cultural resonance. While the Simurgh offers rich possibilities for thinking beyond nationalist categories and binary oppositions, mythological thinking can remain trapped within familiar anthropocentric frameworks. The stork I observed at the border crossing embodied a different kind of wisdom – one that recognized no human boundaries while remaining utterly practical in its choices.

Genuine engagement with birds might offer different ways of understanding our relationships to territory, movement, and belonging. Whether future editions might imagine survival strategies that extend beyond human symbolic needs to encompass the broader ecological relationships that sustain us all remains an open question. In our current moment of multiple crises, such interspecies thinking might offer more radical possibilities than even the most flamboyant mythical creatures – though perhaps that’s a flight path for another year’s exploration.