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NEXT 2025 ‘Emerging Curator!’ award-winner Roberta Atraste’s exhibition ‘The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poems’
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.
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NEXT 2025 ‘Seeking the Latest in Photography!’ award finalists’ presentation evening
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.
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Solo exhibition of the winner of the NEXT 2025 Award ‘Seeking the Latest in Photography!’: Ruudu Ulas’s ‘Difficult Objects’
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.
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Lecture ‘What Is Next? The Landscape of Polish Photography Today’ by Adam Mazur
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.
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Lesia Vasylchenko’s solo exhibition ’Chronosphere’
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.
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Group exhibition 'Neurons Desperately Seek Each Other'
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.
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Discussion 'The Curatorial and Ethics'
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.
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Conversation 'Creative Self-Realisation: Analogue and Digital Technologies'
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.
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NEXT 2025 NoRoutine Books prize – presentation of Triin Kerge’s book ‘Scenes From a Lost Family Album’
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.
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Performance lecture and workshop ‘Making secret files and other powerful practices’ by John Huntington
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.
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Vika Eksta’s solo exhibition ‘Funeral in Sloboda’
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.
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Outdoor project ‘(Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face’
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.
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Pēteris Vīksna’s solo exhibition ‘This Feels Familiar’
“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.