CURATORS

Inga Brūvere (1963) is an artist based in Latvia. In 2001 she also began curating, and in the past 20 years she has organized several projects and exhibitions in Latvia and abroad. Brūvere is the author of the idea for Riga Photo Month and one of the festival’s founders (2012). She directed the first Riga Photo Month in 2014 and is also one of the founders and directors of the Riga Photography Biennial (2015). Brūvere’s work is included in several collections, including the Latvian National Museum of Art, Daugavpils Mark Rothko Centre and Swedbank art collections.

Irēna Bužinska (1955) has received an MA from the Art Academy of Latvia. Since 1977 until 2022 has been working at the Latvian National Museum of Art as exhibition curator. She has published more than 300 articles on Latvian art history and contemporary art exhibitions. Since 1989, she has focused on the research of Latvian art history, especially on the legacy of Voldemārs Matvejs, and the activities of artists-photographers, which resulted in the exhibition Hybrid Overflights. The Artist as Photographer. Mid 19th century – 2010, LNMA, Arsenāls Exhibition Hall (2011) and an exhibition of 19th century art photo reproductions at the Art Museum Riga Bourse (2019). Curator of several photography exhibitions by Voldemārs Matvejs, Inta Ruka, Andrejs Grants, Egons Spuris, Aivis Šmulders, Valdis Celms, Atis Ieviņš. Currently, her focus is on the use of photomontage in the 1920s-30s press in Latvia, as well as amateur photo postcards. The book Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde (in collaboration with Z. S. Strother and Jeremy Howard) has been published by Ashgate (USA, 2015, 2nd edition 2019).

Igors Gubenko (1985) is philosopher, writer and curator. He teaches aesthetics, philosophy of art, cultural semiotics and feminism at the University of Latvia and gives occasional lectures at the Art Academy of Latvia. Igors’ articles on visual art and culture have appeared in Studija, Arterritory, Satori, Punctum and Kino Raksti magazines. Since 2023, he is part of the editorial team of Satori, an online contemporary culture magazine in Latvian. Igors has curated solo exhibitions by Daniela Vētra, MAREUNROL'S, Anna Dzērve and Krišs Salmanis. Together with Līna Birzaka-Priekule and Laura Brokāne, he is curating the group exhibition In the Name of Desire at the Latvian National Museum of Art.

Paulius Petraitis (1985) is an artist-theorist and independent curator based in Vilnius. His practice orbits around the expanded notion of photography within the broader social and cultural contexts. Much of his work explores the interplay between technology and the construction of meaning, examining subjectivities encoded in machine vision and networked functionality. Petraitis curated the pioneering screen-based photography exhibitions Sraunus and Blog Reblog, as well as the first art show on Snapchat This is It/Now. He has also published a number of art books, including A man with dark hair and a sunset in the background, Smoke Screen, and Contemporary Photography.

Tīna Pētersone (1994) is an independent curator from Riga, Latvia, holding an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2020,Tīna Pētersone won the first Young Curator! prize at the Riga Photography Biennial NEXT! programme. In 2021, she co-founded the art space TUR and developed an exhibition program, with two exhibitions receiving nominations for the Purvītis Prize. In 2022,Tīna was selected by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia to partake in the Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris. She was also granted the CEC ArtsLink International Fellowship and a residency hosted by the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL, USA. In 2023, she received the Baltic Fellowship to work at the Performa Biennial in New York City. Her most recent projects include a large-scale group exhibition, Field of Vision, at the art centre Zuzeum, and a public programme for the I Grew Up in the Blockhouse project at the Riga Summer Culture Programme.
Currently, she serves as a guest curator for the ‘Selling Out’ edition of the ETC. Magazine in Ljubljana, Slovenia, showcasing artists from the Baltics in the Balkans, and she is developing Nelly Agassi’s first solo show in Riga, Latvia.

Marie Sjøvold (1982) is a visual artist and works with photography, video and photo books. With her camera she explores the outer limits of consciousness, human behavior, relationships, and rites of passage. A recurring question in her work is how we perceive reality. In a continuation of this, she existentially explores concepts such as home, heritage, and time.
In her photographic work, she tells universal stories where she often uses experiences from her own life and her own family, but she always plays with the boundaries between what is reality and what is fiction. She has an intimate and playful approach to themes with an existential seriousness.
Marie Sjøvold has published several photobooks and participated in exhibitions at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Liepaja Museum, Latvia; Centrum för fotografi , Stockholm; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kristiansand kunsthall, Kristiansand; Nobel Peace Centre, Oslo; Fotografisk Centre, Copenhagen; Galleri F15, Jeloya; and Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris, among others. In 2012 she received the Fritt Ord European Photo Exhibition Award. Sjøvold’s work is included in the collections of Fritt Ord, The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Aff airs and The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

Baiba Tetere (1978) is a visual culture researcher, a lecturer at Rīga Stradiņš University, and the Head of the Latvian Museum of Photography. As a Co-Founder of the ISSP association, she has organised photography education and art projects regularly since 2006. Her career intersects the history, education, and commercial fields of photography – she has worked at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2000 – 2002), the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents (2008), and as Photo Editor at the international monthly magazine Cosmopolitan Latvia (2002 – 2007). Tetere studied the history of photography at De Montfort University (England) and obtained her doctorate from the University of Greifswald (Germany), where she studied early anthropological photography in Latvia in the late 19th century.

Liāna Ivete Žilde (1985) is a visual culture researcher with a special interest in the social meanings and uses of photography. Since 2012, she has been working at ISSP, where she and her colleagues are currently working on a publication on the history of photography in Latvia. She is studying for a PhD at the Art Academy of Latvia, and is a research assistant at the Academy’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture. She holds master’s degrees in cultural and social anthropology (University of Latvia, 2011) and curatorial studies (Art Academy of Latvia, 2023). Teaches visual anthropology, writes articles on photography and visual culture and participates in various interdisciplinary projects. Together with Anete Ušča, created the publication Baltic Stories: a visual guide to spaces of culture (2021) as well as Augsne, a radio show on local cultural initiatives.