In order to underscore the importance of the curator within contemporary cultural processes as a creative personality and mediator between artists, works of art, viewers and society, Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT in collaboration with the curatorial programme at the Art Academy of Latvia initiated a new programme in 2021: the competition Emerging Curator!, which was open to applications from young Latvian curators. In 2025, young curators from all three Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – were for the first time invited to apply for the award.

This year the Riga Photography Biennial Seeking the Latest in Photography! Award was presented for the sixth time. The goal of the award is to discover and recognise 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. It highlights emerging Baltic artists whose works are already full of these qualities.

This year the Riga Photography Biennial Seeking the Latest in Photography! Award was presented for the sixth time. The goal of the award is to discover and recognise 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. It highlights emerging Baltic artists whose works are already full of these qualities.

The talk will focus on Polish photography today. The marginalisation of traditional associations, crisis and change in the definition of festivals, and even the creation of new models of photographic institutions are all part of the new institutional landscape of Polish photography. The rapid changes that began in the 2010s were accelerated by the Covid epidemic and the war in Ukraine.

The speculative notion of a “chronosphere” is the conceptual framework of Lesia Vasylchenko's first solo exhibition in Riga. Chronosphere, a constellation of interconnected works, explores the intricate interplay of temporal scales, ranging from the microtemporal, such as remote sensing of planetary surfaces and computational cycles, to the macrotemporal, including ecological trauma and the nuclear age.

Invisible yet present. Accompanying. Consequential. Where do thoughts arise and how are the threads that permeate the mind formed? Regarding how they arise, I can only make assumptions. An immense number of neurons form links with each other. To understand the functioning of a separate unit, it has to be seen in a broader context, creating neuron maps as part of research.

One of the meanings of the word “to curate” is curare – to care – and in recent years curatorial discourse has devoted increased attention to this aspect, creating a relational aesthetics that is based on deeper ethical postulates, such as caring about the inclusivity of processes, listening, and a clear delineation of boundaries by all sides.

New technologies are rapidly changing the way humans create and consume art and culture. Yet how do they affect human creativity? If you work in the creative field, most likely you are no stranger to these changes. After all, the arrival of new technologies has always had an effect on creative processes.

This year the Riga Photography Biennial Seeking the Latest in Photography! Award was presented for the sixth time. The goal of the award is to discover and recognise 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.

A pedagogic and performative lecture about bureaucracy, creativity and resistance. With the office as a starting point, the event deals with contemporary human beings’ profound addiction to systematising everything surrounding them. John Huntington will show examples from his long-term project “The Twilight Bureaucracy” – a collection of events, objects and interventions exploring the undercurrents of administration and the alternative sides to office life.

Around a dozen years ago, my aunt Zoņa passed away. At the time, I had recently started to take photos and was infatuated with the great photographers of the Magnum photo agency – mostly men of French, Jewish and Anglo-Saxon origin, who created photographic stories under the aegis of the agency, which was established in 1947, documenting life and conflicts across the world.

One of the places where people tend to notice each other is public transport. As we await our departure, sometimes a longer time goes by, and unwittingly we start observing the types of people which happen to be nearby. Looking at a face is an exciting communicative process, although one which now increasingly takes place through social media, as we automatically submit our faces to a digital suite of cloud services.

“I have always been obsessed with documenting the city and its liminal territories. In turn, I encourage the viewer to become an active investigator in order to decipher the meaning of space and the human activities that might have taken place there.