EXHIBITION’S PARTICIPANTS

Irēna Andrejeva (1981) is a Riga-based artist whose research interests include online socialization issues: the intensity and alienation of communication, intimacy and superficiality. Her latest preoccupation is the documentation of online communication and internet connection disturbances, images distorted by screen resolution. Visual interpretation of the archived material is carried out through digital textile technologies. Since 2011, in parallel with her studies at the Textile Art Department of the Art Academy of Latvia, she has taught textile design and worked as a freelance textile designer. She has participated in group exhibitions in Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Belarus, has worked as part of the audiovisual artist collective Vairāk Kauna Nav (No More Shame), and is co-founder of the hybrid design association iidziiba.

Daantje Bons (1987) is a visual artist working with themes around gender identity and sexuality. In her work, she draws from her own experiences, expressing her thoughts on learned patterns, rooted ideals, and morals. She likes to play with "suggestion" as a way of communicating ideas in which she uses aesthetics for attraction and recognisability. Her work has been prominently featured in Holland’s largest newspapers De Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad. Internationally, her work has been published in outlets such as The Huffington Post, IGNANT, i-D Magazine, VOGUE Italia, Kurier, FRAME Magazine and Refinery29. In 2018 Daantje was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award. Other exhibitions include a solo exhibition with her series Gender Playground at Space Place gallery in Nizhny Tagil, Russia (2017), a group exhibition Power Mouth in collaboration with Refinery29 and make-up brand NARS at Protein Studio in London (2017), the group exhibition Nasty Woman in the Black & White Building in London (2017), a solo exhibition called I want to show you something at De Verkadefabriek in Den Bosch curated by Theo Audenaerd (2018) and a group exhibition in collaboration with Journalist Milou Deelen and shoe brand TOMS in Amsterdam about street harassment (2019).

Anja Carr (1985) transforms bodies, faces, toys and food into a theatrical, abject and colorful world of photography, sculpture, installation, performance, video and self-invented techniques. Her 30+ solo exhibitions include galleries in Los Angeles, London, Stockholm and Berlin and she has performed in Amsterdam, London, New York, Miami, Paris etc. 60+ group exhibitions include Triumph Gallery (Moscow, upcoming), the famous Cankarjev dom (Ljubljana), Somerset House (London), the National Museum / Mellomstasjonen (Oslo) and the Tadeusz Kantor Museum (Kraków). Carr is represented in seven public collections and has received 30+ awards and grants. Her most recent solo exhibition in Oslo was reviewed in three of the biggest national newspapers and the leading Nordic journal of contemporary art. Carr's work has been shown on several state-run TV programs in Slovenia and Norway and in a number of international magazines, based in New York, London, etc. She founded the pink gallery PINK CUBE in Oslo 2011.

Vika Eksta (1987) is an artist and educator who uses photography, moving image, performance and audiovisual archives in her work. In her long-term projects, Vika combines the documentary and fictional. She has studied photography at Andrejs Grants' studio and EFTI photography school in Madrid, and obtained a master's degree in visual communication at the Art Academy of Latvia. Vika is the winner of the ADC Young Guns, FK Portfolio and Riga Photography Biennial awards for young Baltic photographers, and has been nominated for the Purvītis Prize. Since 2014, she has participated in exhibitions in Latvia and abroad, including at the ISSP Gallery, Kaunas Photography Gallery, Gallery Alma, the Latvian National Museum of Art, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre.

Krišjānis Elviks (1992) is a set designer and interdisciplinary artist. He graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia in 2019 and is currently continuing his master's studies in the Painting department. Since 2015, he has created lighting and set design for theatre performances in Latvia and abroad. Since 2017, he has participated in group and solo exhibitions.

In his creative practice, Krišjānis Elviks combines interdisciplinary qualities, cultivating interaction between scenography, performance, installation and painting. Using accessible and simple materials, the artist creates paraphrases of society and constructs abstract, but thematically dense and multi-layered reminders of the close connection between art and everyday life. Krišjānis' work has received various awards and nominations—during his studies he received the Ināra Tetereva scholarship in art, later the SEB scholarship in painting, and in 2020 Elviks was nominated as scenographer of the year at the Players' Night Latvian annual theatre awards.

Elizabete Ezergaile (1994) is a Riga-based creative working in the photography and art directing fields. In 2016 she received a BSc in Communication Science from the University of Latvia and spent an exchange semester at Mannheim University School of Humanities. After finishing her studies, she started working as a fashion and event photographer, meanwhile working on her personal photography projects. In 2017 she was selected as a finalist for the FK Prize. In 2018 Ezergaile participated in the group exhibition Bodybuilding. Last year she art-directed the music video Moor by Zebra Katz that won the UKMVA Best Alternative Video Newcomer Award. Over the years she has formed a strong interest in exploring the concept of modern dating and the female millennial.

Kostis Fokas, born in Athens, Greece, is a conceptual photographer whose artistic practice revolves around the exploration of the complexities of the human body. Fokas' works have been exhibited in the USA and Europe, including at the Louvre Museum (France), Colette (France), Art Basel Miami (USA), The Benaki Museum in Athens and the Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki and Crete among others. Fokas has collaborated with and published his work in Zeit Magazine, Le Monde Newspaper, Les Inrockuptibles, L'obs , i-D magazine, Dazed and Confused, Neon Magazine (France), L'Officiel (Italy), The Advocate, Gay Times, Gayletter magazine and many more international publications, websites and art books. His work looks at and investigates the complexities of gender, sexuality, and identity through pictorial representations of the human body. In an attempt to capture the social panorama of contemporary life, the artist offers a discreet look at the body as a site of desire, fantasy, submission, and oppression.

Andi Galdi Vinko (1982) is an internationally acclaimed artist working in photography. She studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and at Esag Penninghen in Paris, as well as art history and aesthetics at ELTE University in Budapest. Her work draws visual analogies between intensely personal and intimate experiences of motherhood, womanhood, and universal human experiences of coming of age, ageing, loss, and the conflict between western and eastern European ideologies. Using both staged and documentary photography, Andi is a vivid visual storyteller who assembles her snapshots and studio photos into unconventional and unexpected narratives; juxtapositions that are playful and humorous but also elicit pathos and absurdity. Her photographs are both empowering and intimate at the same time, and are often published in the form of zines or editorials. She also works as a director and member of Kinopravda.tv. She has been commissioned by M Le Monde, Die Zeit, i-D Magazine, Dazed, Vice, The New Yorker, Tate Etc., Vogue.it among others.

Annemarija Gulbe (1997) is a Latvian artist studying visual communication at the Art Academy of Latvia. She graduated from the ISSP School photography programme in 2018 and has participated in several International Summer School of Photography workshops. In 2019 she won the Grand Prix of the Contemporary Art Biennale Jeune Création Européenne at Montrouge, France, and she is the winner of the FK Prize 2018 as best young Latvian photographer. Her series Love Re-search has been published in the FK Latvian Photography Yearbook 2019, GRAIN special release - New Talents, Jezga magazine and Veto magazine. In 2019 Love Re-search was exhibited at Organ Vida festival in Zagreb. Love Re-search at the ISSP Gallery was her first solo exhibition in Riga (2020), launching discussions about censorship in the local art scene.

Dragana Jurišić (1975) was born in the former Yugoslavia and is now living and working in Dublin. She received her PhD from the European Centre for Photographic Research in 2013. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of South Wales and Assistant Professor at Dublin City University. Working primarily with image, text and video, she has shown her work extensively and won many awards, including the Golden Fleece Special Recognition Award, IMMA 1000 Residency Award and numerous bursaries and project awards. Her work is in a number of important collections including the National Gallery of Ireland, Arts Council Collection and Irish State Art Collection. Her first book, YU: The Lost Country received accolades worldwide. Her last book Museum, a collaboration with Paula Meehan, came out in July 2019. Her newest publication, The Merits of the Tracer Fire, a collaboration with Sarah Cave, came out in December 2020.

Jordanna Kalman lives and works in NY. Her work explores loneliness, anxiety, womanhood and individuality. She received her MA in Photography from the London College of Communication and her BFA in Photography from Purchase College. Jordanna has had her work shown nationally, internationally and online. She works on many different things very slowly all at once.

Kristine Krauze-Slucka (1979) is a visual artist based in Riga, Latvia. She observes and studies the topic of changes in the relationship between man and nature, employing a mixture of analog and digital media in her artistic practice, paying attention to the processes of adaptation and hybridization, often focusing on the material aspects of the chosen media. She has graduated from the ISSP School's two-year contemporary photography education programme and obtained a Master's degree from the Visual Communication Department of the Art Academy of Latvia (2020). She also received a scholarship from the Foundation of the painter Valdemars Tone (2020) and the Nordic and Baltic Young Artist Award 2020. She has received the Riga Photography Biennale – NEXT 2021 award, earning an opportunity to publish a book in collaboration with NoRoutine Books. The artist has participated in exhibitions since 2017.

Yushi Li (1991) is a Chinese artist based in London, working primarily in photography. She received her MA in Photography recently and is doing her PhD in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Li was selected as one of the artists for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 and nominated as one of the 100 RPS Hundred Heroines in 2019. Li has shown her work in various countries and had solo shows in Malmo and London. Her work mainly engages with the question of the gaze in relation to gender, desire and sexuality, culminating in the investigation of male representation as an erotic subject in light of digital social networks.

Visvaldas Morkevičius (1990) is a Lithuanian artist who uses the photographic medium to widely explore portraiture. He, in his own terms, “collects realities” by observing the daily surroundings of his subjects, and uses self-analysis in order to look into the possibilities of self-portraits. By using diverse lo-fi and hi-fi aesthetics and working with materials from classical analog photography to modern digital tools, Morkevičius manipulates the sense of time in his works and its perception.

Works by Morkevičius have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around Europe, are held in museum and private art collections such as MO Museum, Lewben Art Foundation, SEB Bank Art Collection.
Photo: Ieva Lygnugaryte

Colin Pantall (1963) is a writer, lecturer and photographer based in Bath, Europe. He has written for a range of publications and organisations including World Press Photo, Magnum, Source Magazine, Foam, and the British Journal of Photography. Colin teaches on photography undergraduate and MA courses and runs online lectures and workshops linking contemporary photography to global, historical, and narrational perspectives. His photography is motivated by the opportunism presented by immediate domestic environments and family, and includes The Mental Load of Motherhood, Sofa Portraits, All Quiet on the Home Front, and My German Family Album, projects that look at his own family and surroundings from personal, environmental, and historical perspectives.

Ngadi Smart is a Sierra Leonean visual artist and designer based between London, UK and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Her practice consists of illustration, photography and design. She also works as a mixed media artist, primarily in the form of collage. She has illustrated for The Atlantic, Time Out London, Eastpak, The Guardian, Penguin’s Riverhead Books in NYC and London’s Faber’s Children. Her photography has been published on CNN, British Journal of Photography, Vogue Italia, Atmos Magazine, and i-D Magazine.

Subspatial.xyz is an artist duo consisting of two friends and associates – Aleksandrs Breže (1994) and Armands Freibergs (1995). The project is an attempt to create their own web environment through Google Earth – playing with digital space, mystical and transcendental themes detached from reality. Subspatial.xyz often focus on the 90s generation's nostalgia for childhood signs of belonging. So far, the duo has participated in two group exhibitions – What Even in the Civita Nova art space in Liepaja (curator Tomass Pārups) and the MABOCA 2019 festival.

Aap Tepper (1991) is a visual artist based in Tallinn, Estonia. He is interested in subjectivity within visual culture and uses his own photography as well as images from social media as subject matter for his research. His works usually deal with memory and its relations to space and photographic representation in the age of digital culture. He mostly works with site-specific installations, often using photography as his favoured medium. Aap received a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree from the Estonian Academy of Arts (Fine Arts, Photography).

Pēteris Vīksna (1994) is a Riga-based artist who works with moving image and photography. Currently, his main focus is documenting places and people, changes in space. In 2020 his work was published in the book Soon by the Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA), which features various districts of Riga, revealing the cultural layers of the urban environment – their magic, contrasts, and absurdities. He also actively documents his generation at various social events and informal situations; part of this series was published in the FK Latvian Photography Yearbook 2020, a publication celebrating contemporary photography in Latvia.

Konstantin Zhukov (1990) works and lives between Riga and London. Zhukov’s artistic practice takes inspiration from various texts and literary sources – from homoerotic poems of the Islamic Golden Age, to the love letters of Oscar Wilde, and Foucault’s work on sexuality. Using literary texts as a starting point to aid in the unveiling of personal stories that explore different forms of love, attachment and sexuality, Zhukov’s work doesn’t aim to produce a historical account, but rather to reinterpret queer histories through the lens of contemporary culture. After graduating from Riga Design and Art School, he moved to London to study graphic design at Central Saint Martins (Foundation) and London College of Communication (BA). Zhukov has exhibited at Flecha Art Fair (Madrid, Spain), Paris Ass Book Fair at Palais de Tokyo, Strange Perfume in South London Gallery, Queer Frontiers by ARTIQ and Pride in London. His photography and essays have been published in Latvia, UK and Russia.