5 April – 8 May|Opening April 4 19:00, ISSP Gallery, Berga bazārs, Marijas Street 13 k. 3, Riga.
Opening hours, entrance fee: www.issp.lv

In 2019, the Riga Photography Biennial award Seeking the Latest in Photography! will be presented for the third time. The award was established with the aim of discovering and introducing to the broader public the creative efforts of young Baltic artists who have managed to represent original and conceptually well-developed perspectives on the processes of their time. In 2019, an international jury awarded the main prize to Annija Muižule (LV) for her photo series Joyful Businessmen Throwing Papers and Having Fun in the Office (2018). The special prize – an opportunity to produce a photography book – was awarded by the publisher NoRoutine Books to Reinis Lismanis (LV) for his project Trial and Error (2018). From 2019, Seeking the Latest in Photography! is awarded in the framework of the biennial's off-year programme NEXT, in collaboration with ISSP Gallery.

Annija Muižule (1992) is a Latvian-born visual artist and researcher currently working and living in the Netherlands. While obtaining a BA with a major in photography from the Royal Academy of Art in Hague, her work underwent a radical shift from telling stories through images to telling stories about how images are made and their modes of existence. Finding herself increasingly confronted with overwhelming amounts of visual information, Muižule began questioning the human capacity to comprehend visual culture. Most importantly, she wanted to know: How visually literate are we, actually? By reflecting on photography as a technology, a medium, and a form of communication, she attempts to ‘un-learn’ and question the lessons photography has taught us.

Commenting on her series ‘Joyful Businessmen Throwing Papers and Having Fun in the Office’, Muižule writes:

"In a world projecting itself through imagery, photography has become an omnipresent representation of reality. Images are an inevitable part of daily encounters, a consistent background to our subconscious environment, and serve largely to sustain our capitalist economy. Most of the images surrounding us are produced by image-making industries such as that of stock photography. Companies like Getty Images have often been criticised for their production of generic images. The use of such images in articles, on insurance websites and for travel brochures serves to sell us models of behaviours, directing us how to express our emotions, desires and frustrations. This has led to the development of communication- based infrastructures with the power to aggregate emotions into manufactured modes. My project consists of three art works that in different ways approach the question: What are the implications of image-making industries for our perception of reality?"

Commenting on their choice, the jury noted:

“Investigating the commodification of the image as well as the interaction between photography and words, Annija Muižule offers a humorous and critical analysis of contemporary photography. She utilises a conceptually clear and admirably simple approach, drawing attention to the depiction of emotions in stock image collections and the choice of words in the names of JPG image files. Thus, in her work the interplay between our expectations and what is offered by stock image collections becomes a distinctive method of research within contemporary photography and illustrates the ways in which these images not only describe but also shape our understanding of the world.”

Participants: Annija Muižule (LV)
Award jury: Michael Biedowicz (DE), Iveta Gabaliņa (LV), Jonatan Habib Engqvist (SE), Sten Ojave (EE), Paul Paper (LT), Amelie Schuele (DE), Mitch Speed (CA/DE), Diāna Tamane (LV/EE)
Curator: Inga Brūvere (LV)
Organizer: Riga Photography Biennial in cooperation with ISSP and Goethe-Institut Riga
Image: Annija Muižule. From series ‘Joyful Businessmen Throwing Papers and Having Fun in the Office’. 2016-2018