BUSH LEGS
Survival Kit 16: House of See-More
August 30–September 28, 2025
Curated by Slavs&Tatars and Michał Grzegorzekk

For the 16th edition of Survival Kit in Riga, Vasiljeva presented two installations: "WC Ride" and "BUSH LEGS". The latter was specifically created for the exhibition space and reflects on this year’s theme. House of See-More, curated by Slavs and Tatars and Michał Grzegorzek, takes the mythical bird Simurgh as a point of departure to reflect on transnational solidarities, collective transformation and the blurred boundaries between individual and shared survival.

BUSH LEGS draws from a personal memory rooted in the post-Soviet 1990s when Ola Vasiljeva’s father worked as a docker in the port of Ventspils. Amid economic hardship, shipments of frozen U.S. chicken known as Bush Legs became both sustenance and symbol. When the official routes could not accommodate personal need, informal ones emerged. Chickens were surreptitiously thrown over the port fence and guided by a covert system of marks and codes developed and choreographed by the harbour workers. The neon form reimagines one of these marks not as a literal reproduction but as a luminous residue of improvised survival tactics. It is less a tribute than a signal flare about how survival travels through side channels and how people learn to read what was never officially written.

The installation consists of a neon object mounted in the windows of the exhibition hall alongside four large-scale drawings made directly on the glass using dust and chalk.