The laureate of Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT 2025 and the Art Academy of Latvia award ‘Emerging Curator!’ has been announced. After the international jury’s evaluation, the main prize is awarded to Roberta Atraste (LV) with the exhibition ‘The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poems’. Roberta’s exhibition will open in April at the Art Academy of Latvia’s exhibition hall ‘Pilot’ (Vāgnera iela 3, Riga) as part of the NEXT 2025 program.

The Riga Photography Biennial (RPB) – NEXT 2025 will take place on the 10th anniversary of the Riga Photography Biennial – RPB was established in 2015. The Riga Photography Biennial and the Art Academy of Latvia (AAL) Award ‘Emerging Curator!’ was initiated in 2021 to stimulate discussion about the importance of the curator as a creative personality and mediator between artists, works of art, viewers, and society within contemporary cultural processes. The first award recipient was Tīna Pētersone, curator from Latvia, with the exhibition ‘To Fall in Love, Click Here’. Meanwhile, in 2023 the award was received by Laima Daberte with the exhibition ‘Time Found’. In 2025, the decennary of the Riga Photography Biennial, for the very first time emerging curators not only from Latvia but all three Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – were invited to apply for the award.

Roberta Atraste in the exhibition ‘The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poems’ is interested in the appropriation of bureaucratic aesthetics and procedures as an artistic strategy. While these practices predate the conceptual art era, it was during the managerial revolution of the 1960s that self-institutionalization became a systematic approach. Conceptual artists adopted the roles of “managers” and “clerks” and were among the first to outsource the production of their works – not to eliminate or “dematerialize” the art object entirely, as often assumed, but to focus on activities such as registering, documenting, filing, listing, archiving, and indexing information. The standard art historical reading for such practices is in terms of institutional critique. In contrast, it is possible to develop a more nuanced reading of administrative and bureaucratic procedures in the arts, highlighting their more absurd, poetic, psychological, and indeed pleasurable aspects – elements often overlooked in popular interpretation. With an emphasis on the present moment, the exhibition ‘The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poems’ aims to explore and highlight these aspects in today’s context. The ‘Pilot’ Experimental Art Space of the Art Academy of Latvia, located on the ground floor of an office building, provides an opportunity to reach out not only to the gallery's visitors but perhaps also to its neighbours.

Roberta Atraste (1998) earned her bachelor’s degree in art history and theory at the Art Academy of Latvia and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in curatorial studies at the same institution. In 2024, she broadened her education through an Erasmus+ program, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. A significant part of her educational experience was the Erasmus+ traineeship at the State of Concept Athens Gallery in Greece (2022), where she worked as a curatorial assistant. As a curator, Roberta has organized various exhibitions both in Latvia and abroad. Roberta contributed as a researcher to the Latvian National Museum of Art’s exhibition ‘Breaking the Wall. Latvian Art 1985–1991’ (2023). Roberta compiled the visual arts journal ‘Radošā birokrātija’ (‘Mākslas Žurnāls’, 2024), which features contemporary visual and textual narratives about bureaucracy in the Latvian art scene. Together with philosopher Sofija Anna Kozlova, she co-edited the catalogue for the Survival Kit 15 festival (2024). She frequently tries to publish articles on art. Recently she has done so on platforms like ‘Latvijas Avīze’, ‘Punctum’, and ‘Blok Magazine’.

The competition was juried by an international jury: curator, artist, critic, and creative director of Publics curatorial platform Paul O’Neill (IE), curator, director of PhD Studies in art history and theory at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Julija Fomina (LT), curator, lecturer, and researcher at the Estonian Academy of Art, Triin Metsla (EE), art historian, curator, AAL vice-rector, Antra Priede (LV), and programme director at the Riga Photography Biennial, Inga Brūvere (LV).

Jury member Antra Priede justifies the jury’s choice: ‘Roberta’s application confirmed the young curator’s deep interest in the various in-betweens that surround our everyday lives and at the same time interrogates the paradoxes that every creative professional has to adapt to. In today’s global cultural space, where processes are often determined by prevailing trends, it is a pleasure to recognize an authentic and sincere application of the theme, which allows us to play with seriousness and address it poetically, testing pre-dictated boundaries.’

The Riga Photography Biennial (RPB) is an international contemporary art event, focusing on the analysis of visual culture and artistic representation. The term ‘photography’ in the title of the biennial is used as an all-embracing concept encompassing a mixed range of artistic image-making practices that have continued to transform the lexicon of contemporary art in the 21st century. The Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT offers visibility and provides a platform for promising emerging artists and curators and helps to announce themselves to a wider audience and context. The NEXT festival edition taking place in spring 2025 is to be the fifth edition of the RPB – NEXT programme.

The Art Academy of Latvia (AAL) was founded in 1919, alongside the establishment of the Republic of Latvia, and is the leading art university in the country. Embodying the spirit of creativity and freedom, AAL has been able to stand for its independence and purposefully develop – it has become an important art institution on a regional and European scale, whose aim is to provide high-quality competitive higher education and comprehensively develop art, design, and science, thus ensuring unity of creative and scientific research as well as the continuity of studies. More about AAL: www.lma.lv/lv. More about Pilot’ Experimental Art Space:

Image: Roberta Atraste. Photo by Ēriks Biters