From 24 April to 6 July, the Riga Photography Biennial’s Off-Year Programme – NEXT 2025 – takes place across various locations in Riga. This year it centres around the theme “Invisible but Present” and features a dynamic lineup of exhibitions, lectures, and discussions.
NEXT 2025 serves as a launchpad for emerging artists, offering them a space to make their mark on the contemporary photography scene. At the heart of the programme are two key awards: “Seeking the Latest in Photography!” and “Emerging Curator!” – open to young artists and curators from Baltic countries and beyond.
Three exhibitions will be featuring artists whose participation is supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Latvia.
1. NEXT 2025 ‘Emerging Curator!’ award-winner Roberta Atraste’s exhibition ‘The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poems’
April 25 – June 6
Experimental Art Space “Pilot” of the Art Academy of Latvia, Vāgnera Street 3, Riga.
Opening hours: Tuesday–Saturday 12:00–18:00. Entrance: free.
Official opening: April 24 at 18:00.
Participants: John Huntington (SE), Arta Kauliņa (LV), Sara Krøgholt Trier (DK), Katariin Mudist (EE), Evija Pintāne (LV).
2. Solo exhibition ‘Chronosphere’ by Lesja Vasylchenko
May 9 – July 6
Exhibition Hall “Riga Contemporary Art Space” Intro Hall, Kungu Street 3, Riga.
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11:00–18:00. Entrance: 5.00 EUR.
3. Outdoor project ‘Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face’ by Sheung Yiu
June 9 – June 22.
Riga public transport stops.
Four Nordic artists supported Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Latvia to participate in the NEXT 2025
John Huntington (Sweden) lives in Gothenburg and is educated at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and at Konstfack in Stockholm. He is an independent visual artist working in a conceptual tradition expressed through performance, sculpture, photography, text and installations. With various forms of interventions, his art questions notions we take for granted: in everyday life, work environments, public institutions and political spaces. In his various projects, Huntington examines the borderland between everyday life and art, between individual and institution, between citizen and society. He is particularly interested in how we as citizens encounter and interact with larger institutions and enterprises, and how to open up new spaces of reflection through cautious norm violations and deviations from standard practices, most notably by using strategies commonly found in bureaucratic and administrative environments.
Sara Krøgholt Trier (Denmark) is a visual artist who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, in 2024. Her artistic practice revolves around digitally rendered films and images, though she also works with text and sound. She is interested in image- and reality-constructions, often employing digital 3D software to create visual compositions that blur the line between reality and fiction. Her work examines how our society is built on narratives that both shape and reflect our physical, social, and cultural structures. She is fascinated by how our sense of self and shared reality are influenced by fictions within the society we live in, which, in its extreme, can lead to alienation and feelings of disillusionment and loneliness.
A central focus of Sara Krøgholt Trier's practice is to examine Western democracy as an institution and the unstable foundation it seems to rest upon in the present moment. She is interested in how democratic ideals such as equality and freedom often collide with the actual realization of democratic structures in real life. Through her work, she aims to highlight the gaps that exist between societal ideals and individuals' personal experiences of what it means to exist.
Sheung Yiu (Hong Kong/Finland, 1991) is an image-centered artist and researcher. His artwork explores imaging practices emerging at the intersection of ubiquitous photography and large-scale computation. He looks at photography through the lens of new media, scales, and network thinking; He ponders how the posthuman cyborg vision and the technology that produces it transform ways of seeing and knowledge-making. Adopting multi-disciplinary collaboration and image studies as a mode of research, his works examine the poetics and politics of algorithmic image systems, such as computer vision, computer graphics, and remote sensing, to understand how to see something where there is nothing, how to digitize light, and how vision becomes predictions. His work takes the form of photography, video essays, exhibition installations, and artist books.
Lesia Vasylchenko (Ukraine/Norway) was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, but is currently living in Norway. Lesia's works across a range of media, including video, photography, installation, and curatorial. In her research-based practice, Vasylchenko explores encounters between visual cultures, media technologies, and chronopolitics. She is the founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and in Fine Arts from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Vasylchenko has recently exhibited at the Pochen Biennial for Multimedia Art (Ex Oriente Ignis), the MUNCH Museum's Triennale (The Machine Is Us), and the Henie Onstad Triennale for Photography and New Media (New Visions). She is the recipient of the Sandefjord Kunstforenings Art Prize in 2023 (Norway) and is currently nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025. Her work is part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA / Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki, Finland.
PROGRAMME of the Riga Photography Biennial.
Image: a detail from “Difficult Objects” by Ruudu Ulas, 2021–2025.