Skuja Braden are an international collaborative artist duo working across porcelain, sculpture and installation. Their practice explores transformation, cultural narratives, and the tension between order and chaos. Porcelain, with its long associations with refinement, status and decorative tradition, becomes in their work a more expressive and unpredictable material. Their installations bring together literary, autobiographical, political and art-historical references, often with a sense of intimacy, contradiction and humour.
Their major solo exhibition Samsara at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Rīga, Latvia, in 2020 marked an important moment in their practice. The exhibition received the Kilograms kultūras award for Visual Art, one of Latvia’s leading cultural awards, and was selected as one of eight finalists for the Purvītis Prize, Latvia’s most significant award for visual art. Skuja Braden also received the DELFI People’s Choice Award, recognising the public’s choice among the finalists.
Following Samsara, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art invited Skuja Braden to apply for the commission to represent Latvia at the 59th Venice Biennale. They were awarded the commission and presented Selling Water by the River at the Latvian Pavilion in Venice. The installation brought together more than 300 porcelain works and introduced their collaborative practice to a wider international audience.
In 2025, Skuja Braden received the Baltic Award for Visual Arts, recognising their contribution to contemporary art in the Baltic region. In 2026, they presented Above the Below and Sanctum of Flow, a permanent site-specific installation commissioned for the Kistefos Museum Visitor Centre in Norway.
Their ongoing projects include Marginalia, a site-specific sculpture accompanied by a solo exhibition at the Liepāja Art Museum, developed as part of Liepāja 2027, the European Capital of Culture programme.
Working together for nearly three decades, Skuja Braden have exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, biennales, art fairs and public institutions across Europe, North America and Asia. Their work is held in public institutions and private collections internationally.
Through their long-standing collaboration, Skuja Braden continue to explore what porcelain can become, moving freely between sculpture, vessel, body, ornament and architecture.
"Skuja Braden is a collective practice rooted in porcelain, domestic space, and lived lesbian experience. We work together as a single author. We work with porcelain the way others use confession: as a material that remembers everything. It carries the weight of the decorative, the domestic, the “pretty,” the feminine — categories that art history has too often treated as lesser. We take those categories and turn them inside out. In our work, ornament is not softness. It is pressure. It is endurance. It is camouflage.
We build objects and reliefs that seduce first — glaze, color, surface pleasure — then shift into something stranger: satire, tenderness, obsession, danger, devotion. The work is a theatre of women’s lives: desire and shame, care and rage, myth and survival. Archetypes appear — the saint, the bride, the doll, the goddess — but they don’t behave. They mutate, resist, and return as real bodies with real stakes.
We believe craft can carry truth. Not polite truth. The kind that makes you laugh and wince at the same time. The kind that sticks."