5 April – 12 May|Opening April 4 17:00, Latvian Museum of Photography,, Marstalu Street 8 (entrace from Alksnaja Street), Riga.
Opening hours, entrance fee: www.fotomuzejs.lv

This exhibition, featuring the work of students and graduates from the Photography Department at the University of Arts in Poznan, Poland, explores the wide-ranging topic of (UN)NATURAL BODIES, analysing it from different perspectives – including the individual, the collective, the intimate and the sensual – and addressing it as a notion that is entangled with our dramatic common history (that of World War II), is metaphorically and literally intertwined with nature, has melted into digital reality, and now craves sensual confirmation.

“This body can do wonders,” says Viktor, the first transgender person portrayed by the artist Joanna Berg. This body is very concrete, yet is fluid in its identity. It is material and sensual, yet dematerializes conventional social norms. It is a story of an individual body, yet it covers the stories of many others that have been labelled variously as non-normative, strange, hidden, rejected, and fear-provoking, but also beautiful, and attractive in their otherness. The role of the photographer in this story is not unequivocal; however, she wants to stand against the violence hidden in social rejection. Berg is aware of the violence that is inseparable from the very act of photographing, particularly when working in small spaces with a large format camera. She wants us to feel the immediate closeness and sensual presence of the body, a body that is no easy fit for our seemingly monolithic, uniform culture and society.

Yet what if the future awaits only dematerialized bodies and our experience will soon no longer need its old fleshy shell? It is to this vision of tomorrow that Agnieszka Hinc refers when she poses questions about how the status of the person and the body is changing over time. In studying various contexts of bodily experience, she makes use of photography, 3D printing, a hologram, and a video installation of humanoid figure trapped in a virtual space. Hinc makes her viewers wonder whether their bodies might one day exist only as relicts, frozen in time, replaced by interactive products. And if so, might they then be analysed solely from a user experience perspective? She creates a vision – one that is multi-layered and disruptive, yet at the same time beautiful – of human bodies dissolved in digital reality.

(UN)NATURAL BODIES brings together works by artists for whom photography is neither the ultimate goal nor the sole means of reaching a goal. All of the artists have carefully chosen methods of representing the photographic medium that not only convey their main message, but also comment, in parallel, on the medium’s intrinsic features. They work successfully at the edges of photography and other media, pushing the boundaries, and a lot happens at these edges: it is here that meanings intersect and overlap, categories are negotiated, and it is no longer obvious which bodies can be said to be (UN)NATURAL.

Participants: Magdalena Andrynowska (PL), Joanna Berg (PL), Katarzyna Bojko-Szymczewska (PL), Joanna Czarnota (PL), Aurelia Frydrych-Zdanowska (PL), Agnieszka Hinc (PL), Magdalena Machnicka (PL), Piotr Zugaj (PL)
Curator: Anna Kedziora (PL)
Organizer: Riga Photography Biennial in cooperation with Latvian Museum of Photography and Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Image: Agnieszka Hinc. From series ‘UX’. 2018