Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT 2025 Award

Young artists from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are invited to submit their work for the Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT 2025 Award Seeking the Latest in Photography, in collaboration with ISSP Gallery.

Overview

The goal of the award is to discover and appraise the creative efforts of young artists who demonstrate the power of the image in their works, offering an original point of view and conceptual depth reflecting our current times. The Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT is seeking portfolios of artists who stimulate discussion and offer diverse ideas. At the same time, they wish to provide a public platform for young artists at the beginning of their creative journey in photography or a medium associated with it, so that they can present themselves to a wider audience.

The competition is open to emerging artists and photographers from the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – provided that the work they are entering in the competition was created within the last three years. The award winner will be offered a solo exhibition at the ISSP Gallery in Riga in April 2025. The gallery will also host the RPB award ceremony.

Practical Info

Applicants must fill in an application form indicating their date and place of birth, current residence, information about their project and an outline of their creative biography, which must include their education and creative experience. Plus, they must submit 10–15 photographs (artwork created in the past three years, or a project still in progress).

The prize recipient will be determined by an international jury comprised of the art critic, historian and curator Adam Mazur (PL), the artistic Director of Tallinn Photomonth Kulla Laas (EE), artist and curator Paulius Petraitis (LT), art historian and critic Santa Hirša (LV) and artist and curator of the ISSP Gallery Iveta Gabaliņa (LV).

The award winner will be offered a solo exhibition in April 2025 at ISSP Gallery (Berga Bazārs, Marijas iela 13 k-3, Riga) within the framework of the Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT 2025 programme. The jury members will nominate five finalists who will present their work at the exhibition launch. The foundation VV Foundation will choose a laureate for a €1,000 monetary prize and an opportunity to spend a month working at their residency PAiR (Pāvilosta Artist in Residency) in Pāvilosta, Latvia. The founders of the independent publishing initiative NoRoutine Books, Gytis Skudžinskas and Vilma Samulionyte (LT), will select one of the participants for their own award – the opportunity to publish a photo book.

About Riga Photography Biennial

The Riga Photography Biennial 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 biennial covers issues ranging from cultural theory to current socio-political processes in the Baltics and the wider European region. Using the format of an art festival, Riga Photography Biennial attempts to record changes taking place all over the world and invites us to collectively interpret them – something we not only need to see but also imagine whilst translating the complicated and oversaturated contemporary visual language into meaningful relationships between our daily reality, the camera lens, historic material, contemporary art, technologies and the future. How has our understanding of photography and image changed because of digital technologies, and how does it manifest itself in the work of art? For the organisers of the biennial these are important questions to present and analyse, whilst at the same time introducing Latvian audiences to leading works of international art as well as the ideas of prominent art theoreticians presented in the form of symposiums, discussions and publications in parallel with exhibitions and performances. The first Riga Photography Biennial took place in 2016.