a vocabulary for ghosts

Curated group exhibition

To exist is always to exist alongside others – people, systems, memories and presences that remain partially unseen. a vocabulary for ghosts proposes that co-existence is not only a social or political condition, but also a form of cohabiting with ghosts: invisible forces, archived and unarchived memories, and quiet presences that inhabit the periphery of our attention. The exhibition brings together three artists who develop distinct visual and material vocabularies to articulate – and, in subtle ways, care for – these spectral or marginal states.

Here, “ghosts” are not understood as supernatural entities, but as traces, residues, withheld stories, transitional spaces, and silent infrastructures that shape lived experience. These presences occupy the margins: the blue-hour edges of landscapes, the blind spots of bureaucratic systems, and the ambiguous boundaries of objects and materials. Each artist works with what is fragile or insufficiently legible, constructing a language for what typically resists representation. This pursuit echoes the ghostly mechanics of photography itself: a medium built upon the latent image, where unseen impressions wait in the dark to slowly emerge, revealing a hidden presence, or perhaps remaining permanently obscured.

In this context, tending to ghosts requires a tender and sensitive visual practice – one attuned to fragility, erasure and what might be described as the politics of attention. This installation at ASNI Gallery brings these vocabularies into dialogue through spatial gestures that emphasise thresholds, transitions, and the porousness between material and immaterial.

Each of the three artistic practices illuminates a different dimension of the “ghostly” in contemporary life. Saskia Fischer explores ecological and emotional margins, using film to articulate forms of caretaking that unfold outside dominant narratives. Ona Barbora Šlapšinskaitė exposes the residues of bureaucratic systems through redacted call-centre notes and experimental sculptural forms – objects that register both erasure and preservation, functioning as delicate material traces of invisible labour. Tom Lovelace works with photograms and performative interventions to foreground the instability of presence, gesture and attention, activating the exhibition space as a site where images emerge, fade and are re-encountered. Together, their practices propose co-existence as an ongoing negotiation with what remains obscured, fragile or only partially legible.

Artists: Saskia Fischer | Tom Lovelace | Ona Barbora Šlapšinskaitė
Curator: Paulius Petraitis
Exhibition design: Santa Ozoliņa
Opening performance “Willow”: Tom Lovelace in cooperation with Severina Venckutė
Venue: ASNI Gallery
Dates: 2026 04 18 – 05 20

Press:
Review by Madara Ēvalde (LV) | FK magazine
Photodocumentation | EGW

Documentation: Dasha Trofimova, Andrejs Strokins
a vocabulary for ghosts was part of Riga Photography Biennial 2026