Representing international contemporary art events, the program of the Riga Photography Biennale (RFB 2022) this year focuses on the state of isolation and its various manifestations and influences. In eight international exhibitions and an extensive program of educational events, the artists and curators of the Biennale will invite visitors to see the essence of isolation in as many different ways as possible and to re-learn to read the information provided by the image.
With the main event of this year’s biennial, an exhibition Screen Age III: Still Life, the cycle of exhibitions launched in 2018 continues, asking existential questions, watching how technology is slowly changing modern people. How closely does the human consciousness already merge with the most helpful and convenient technological solutions? Are we the same people we were without the smartphones and smartwatches that make it so easy to monitor the world? How has our attitude to seemingly eternal things and centuries-old ethical values changed? Who will remain witnesses in our day? The exhibition will invite you to look for answers by looking through the coordinate system tested in the history of art, namely, using the traditional genre division: portrait, landscape and still life. In the new age – the screen era – they will have changed beyond recognition.
The curators of the exhibition are Inga Brūvere (LV) and Marie Sjøvold (NO).
The RSE 2022 exhibition will be on display in the Intro Hall of the Riga Art Space Measured perspectives. The exhibition is curated by Paulius Petraitis (LT) and will feature works by Dutch visual artist Katja Mater (NL) and American photographer Erin O’Keefe (US), who have long been dedicated to the topic of perspective. In the practice of both artists, perspective is perceived both as a playing field for practical experiments and as a tool that allows to ask questions about the accepted indexal status of a photographic image. What’s more, the perspective will emerge as a significantly transformable, adaptable design. Matera and O’Keef will use the optical ambivalence inherent in photography to emphasize that seemingly fixed points of view are carefully composed, flowing, and subjective.
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