The exhibition Human Computer is devoted to the group of eternal existential questions whose answers have to be re-evaluated from time to time. At its centre is the naive question: “Who am I?”, followed by a flood of similar attempts at self-understanding: “Who are we? Where do we come from and where are we going? Why is this happening? Why do we act like this? What do I feel? How do you feel?”

“To experience Seers’ and Sargents’ work is to experience snapshots, rumours, doubtful information – fascinating fragments that refuse to add up to a neat, narratively satisfying whole. To experience one’s memory of their work is something else entirely. Recall a work on a Monday morning, and it’s a story of childhood and exile. Recall it on a Tuesday night, and it’s a meditation on Platonic optics and 19th-century methods of indexing and surveillance. Memory does its work, generating different readings, different histories, and different shapes for the viewer’s future self to adopt.”

In the face of ghostly AI-processed images, photography confronts an existential crisis. Exhibiton A Breaking Point, A Delicate Balancing Act delves into photography's melancholy amid technological shifts. Featuring non-traditional works by Ieva Rojūtė, Albert Grøndahl, and Benjamin Freedman, it raises critical questions about the medium's role in our uncertain world.

For the exhibition To Be We Need to Know the River, three Baltic artists share their thoughts and emotions about nature – the living, unified system, one of whose elements is human. It's no accident that it takes place in Sigulda, since the unique local landscapes with picturesque river panoramas and Devonian rock outcrops – sandstone cliffs and caves – have been particularly beloved by travellers from as early as the Romantic period in the 19th century. Unfortunately, talking about nature in the 21st century means neither enjoyment of the landscape, nor the struggle against it, but rather talking about the changing climate that threatens us all, about ecology, the greedy exploitation of nature through the use of technologies, the mistaken relationship between humans and nature in which Homo sapiens ignores the survival needs of all other species for the sake of its own convenience.

The creative workshop together with artist Līga Spunde is suitable for children aged 5 to 12 years. Necessary materials will be provided on site. Families are welcome to come at any time convenient for them throughout the duration of the workshop from 11:00 to 14:00.

Shape/Share Another World! Photomontage in Latvian Press in the Interwar Period is the first exhibition to present photographs from Latvian press publications of the 1920s–30s that were created using this technique. The exhibition includes a selection of contributions to this field by Zina Āre, Jānis Baltiņš, Roberts Briedis, Reinholds Kasparsons, Eduards Kraucs and Robert Alexander Riedel.

Second year now the Riga Photography Biennial - NEXT has been collaborating with the VV Foundation 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 ISSP Gallery, while VV Foundation also selects its favourite of the young contenders, giving them the opportunity to to spend a month in the artist residency PaIR in Pāvilosta.

In this part of the world, photography is saturated with blood and pain. Just when things seem to be getting a bit better, war or conflict breaks out again, or some psychopath organizes an ethnic cleansing. Also in the 21st century, artists using photography commemorate, warn and empathize with victims, accuse perpetrators and document crimes. Even if in Central and Eastern Europe we are "accustomed" to cruelty and images of trauma that stay with us for generations, we still have no theory of this type of representation. Ever since the landmark publication Picturing Atrocity. Photography in Crisis (edited by Geoffrey Batchen et. al.), we know how to question our role as a photographic voyeur, but what we do not know is how to cope with the condition of a bystander.

For Latvians, the annual potato harvest extends beyond a mere agricultural routine — it is a cultural ritual laden with historical significance that symbolically marks the connection between humans and the land. The experience of collectively encountering the earth, sensing the gently turned soil's fluffy texture and its tangy aroma mingling with the brisk autumn breeze, instinctively serves as the foundation for the Latvian understanding of life and death. Seemingly mundane, the potato emerges as a potent symbol, embodying survival, community, and the resilience of the Latvian people.

For Latvians, the annual potato harvest extends beyond a mere agricultural routine — it is a cultural ritual laden with historical significance that symbolically marks the connection between humans and the land. The experience of collectively encountering the earth, sensing the gently turned soil's fluffy texture and its tangy aroma mingling with the brisk autumn breeze, instinctively serves as the foundation for the Latvian understanding of life and death. Seemingly mundane, the potato emerges as a potent symbol, embodying survival, community, and the resilience of the Latvian people.

Visual perception is a complex system involving vision as well as the mind and memory processes, and today it has become an important field of research in relation to the medium of photography. With the development of photographic technologies, the culture of seeing has also changed, yet the photographic image's aura of trustworthiness, or its documentary nature, still survives in the era of Photoshop, smartphones and internet. The capacity of new technologies to manipulate and generate images serves as a motivation to revisit and re-evaluate the legacy of analogue photography, since present-day confusion regarding the dominance of visual fakes is part of a debate that has been around since the inception of the photographic image in the mid-19th century.

In the history of Latvian book publishing, even in the 20th century there are not many children's books whose design would involve photography. One of the reasons is the fact that only after the establishment of an independent Latvian state did publishers start to engage with the question of books as works of art. Jānis Roze, the founder of the eponymous Jānis Roze publishing house, was among the first to pay attention not only to the quality of the books' artistic design, but to take note of the opportunities provided by photography as a medium. Designs of the school textbooks that he published made use of photographs by Jānis Rieksts, Mārtiņš Lapiņš, Dāvis Spunde and others. Yet this practice was not implemented on a broader scale. Although a number of Latvian modernist artists were familiar with German designer Jan Tschichold's concept of New Typography and the experience of Russian constructivist artists, which envisioned radical changes in type design and text layout as well as the use of photomontage – also in the layout of children's books – these ideas did not gain popularity among the Latvian public. Hence the major publishers Valters un Rapa, Jānis Roze, and Ansis Gulbis continued to release lavishly illustrated picture books for children.

The idea that the fiercest competition in today's economy is the competition for consumers' attention has long become a truism. Social media is a space where not only international corporations but also private individuals are engaged in such competition, and for most of us, audience attention does not translate to direct monetary gain.

How can one simultaneously fill the vacuum of in-depth historiography whilst critically re-examining existing narratives? Contemporary Histories of Photography series of exhibitions brings together several artists' perspectives, commentaries and interpretations about the processes of writing the local history of photography. The exhibitions are conceived to accompany the publication A Visual History of Latvian Photography, to be released by the ISSP in 2024. Kristīne Krauze-Slucka, Agate Tūna, Annemarija Gulbe and Konstantin Zhukov have created new works which refer to and engage in dialogue with photographers and phenomena from different historical periods as well as in collaboration with researchers of the corresponding themes. Examining materiality, experimental technologies, photography's relationship to cinema, and paranormal photography, a genre that sits uneasily in the context of fine art, the artists challenge the boundaries of the familiar history of photography. The exhibitions employ the perspectives of women's and queer histories as well as question the role of the photographic medium in shaping national and local identities.