This publication marks and reflects on the Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT 2019 events and participants, offering an in-depth analysis of the themes explored by its exhibition programme and discursive events. As an independent project within the catalogue, the image series FARM ™ GC TV" (2019) by the creative collective GolfClayderman will be featured. The Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT 2019 publication will be available at participating festival venues.

In 2019, the Riga Photography Biennial award Seeking the Latest in Photography! will be presented for the third time. The award was established with the aim of discovering and introducing to the broader public the creative efforts of young Baltic artists who have managed to represent original and conceptually well-developed perspectives on the processes of their time.

In 2019, the Riga Photography Biennial award Seeking the Latest in Photography! will be presented for the third time. The goal of the award is to discover and appraise the creative efforts of young artists who demonstrate the power of the image in their works, offering an original point of view and conceptual depth, suited to the times. Award finalist’s work presentation evening provides an opportunity to take a look at the projects by 5 young artists of the Baltic States.

This exhibition, featuring the work of students and graduates from the Photography Department at the University of Arts in Poznan, Poland, explores the wide-ranging topic of (UN)NATURAL BODIES, analysing it from different perspectives – including the individual, the collective, the intimate and the sensual – and addressing it as a notion that is entangled with our dramatic common history (that of World War II), is metaphorically and literally intertwined with nature, has melted into digital reality, and now craves sensual confirmation.

In 2019, the Riga Photography Biennial Programme will be supplemented with a new event – Portfolio Review. The purpose of Portfolio Review is to create an opportunity for emerging and professional artists and photographers to meet industry representatives from the Baltic States and Europe – curators, photographers, art historians, representatives of photography festivals, book publishers and magazine editors.

Contemporary art not only mirrors the values, transformations and conflicts of its time, but also encourages and fosters change. And yet, in many parts of the world, including the Baltics, strategic and purposeful social activism in art is rather rare. In the twentieth century, as in our current moment, politically oriented art has been much more common in so-called Western countries than in the Baltics, where it is difficult to talk about consistent traditions of activism in society in general, let alone in art.

In Central European photography, the body occupies a place somewhere between history and art, suffering and delight. Photographed bodies are political: they resist, defend, and attack; they fight for freedom and to emancipate themselves. Flawed, injured, mutilated and dead bodies shock with their imperfection. Other bodies, subjected to the pressures of politics and aesthetics, sometimes attain near-perfect forms, seducing with their beauty. This lecture is an attempt to take an archaeological approach to photography of the body in Central Europe.

The Riga Photography Biennial award, Seeking the Latest in Photography!, was established in the summer of 2015 with the aim of discovering and highlighting new artists.

As a consequence of the male gaze, women are often represented in portrait photography as creatures that are simultaneously passive and desirable, both exalted and detached from reality. Entirely intimate series of documentary photos are likewise imbued with artists’ desires to see women as objects of erotic fantasy, which suggests an inability on the part of photographers to hide their physical interest in the subjects of their photographs. There are many cases of an artist—a man—photographing his partner—a woman. Vika Eksta’s series of works P. reverses these familiar gender roles, countering the male gaze.

In the Western world, the beginning of the photography art market is often said to have been the legendary 1970 auction of the Sidney Strober Collection at the Parke-Bernet auction house in New York. Meanwhile, in Poland, as in many other Eastern Bloc countries, the photography art market only started to develop in the early 2000s.

For three years now the Riga Photography Biennial has been collaborating with the Lithuanian publisher NoRoutine Books to evaluate entries for the Seeking the Latest in Photography! award. An international jury of experts is charged with judging the submissions and selecting one young Baltic artist to receive the main prize, the opportunity to have their work exhibited in Riga, while NoRoutine Books also selects its favourite of the young contenders, giving them the opportunity to publish their own photobook.