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.

Roberta Atraste is the recipient of the NEXT 2025 Emerging Curator! award for her exhibition The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poems , which will be presented as part of the NEXT 2025 programme at the Pilot Gallery.

In the exhibition The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poems, Roberta Atraste turns to the bureaucratic and administrative processes involved in art. Although these practices existed even before conceptual art, it was in the 1960s that artists began functioning as “managers” and “clerks”. Those in the field of visual art were among the first to entrust the production of their work to others – not in order to completely erase or dematerialise the art object, as is sometimes believed, but rather to engage in such activities as registering, documentation, archiving, listing and indexing. In art history, these practices are sometimes related to the concept of institutional criticism. Yet it is also possible to see them in another light, stressing the often-ignored absurd, poetic, psychological and sometimes even pleasurable aspects of these procedures. The aim of the exhibition is to study and present the aesthetics of bureaucratic and administrative processes in a contemporary context. The Pilot Gallery is located on the ground floor of an office building, providing an opportunity to reach out not only to the gallery’s visitors but perhaps also to its neighbours.

Jury member Antra Priede explains 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 recognise an authentic and sincere application of the theme, which allows us to play with seriousness and address it poetically, testing pre-dictated boundaries.”

The winner of the competition Emerging Curator! was chosen by an international jury: curator, artist, critic and creative director of Publics, Paul O'Neill (IE); curator and 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 and AAL vice-rector, Antra Priede (LV); and programme director at the Riga Photography Biennial, Inga Brūvere (LV).



Participants: John Huntington (SE), Arta Kauliņa (LV), Sara Krøgholt Trier (DK), Katariin Mudist (EE), Evija Pintāne (LV)
Curator: Roberta Atraste (LV)
Scenographer: Krišjānis Beļavskis (LV)
Image: Katariin Mudist, Slugs Like Us, installation, 2024