ISSP Gallery will open the exhibition ‘History of Contemporary Photography I’

ISSP In the gallery on May 16 at 6 p.m Riga Photography Biennale As part of 2024, a series of two exhibitions “History of Contemporary Photography” will be opened, which will reflect the versions and interpretations of several artists about the processes of writing the history of local photography.

The series of two exhibitions “Contemporary Photographs of History” was created as a creative commentary to the edition “Latvijas fotografijas vērtjas in pictures”, which ISSP plans to publish in the fall of 2024. The exhibitions will highlight the subjectivity of each version of history and various lesser-known aspects of local photography – for example, paranormal practices, forgotten archives of women’s photography, the visual history of Riga’s queers and the connection of photography with poetic documentary cinema. “The writing of history, including the history of art, is never neutral, but is embedded in a social and political context, including certain power relations and a large number of personal choices. The task of Latvian photography researchers is to simultaneously fill in wide “white spots” and critically review the previous narratives,” says Liāna Ivete Žilde, curator of the exhibition series.

The new generation of photography artists – Kristīne Krauze-Slucka, Agate Tūna, Annemarija Gulbe and Konstantīns Žukovs – who have created new works in dialogue with photographers and phenomena of different historical periods, as well as in cooperation with researchers of the respective topics, participate in the exhibition cycle. In the first exhibition, Krauze Slucka worked with the archive of Inas Stūre (1958–2006), a photographer who was active in the 1980s and early 1990s but is little known today. Both artists share an experimental approach to their time and a focus on the materiality of the image. The new work raises questions about the “disappearance” of women from history and highlights Stūre’s expressive, staged images against the background of the modest living conditions and domestic life of the period of change. On the other hand, Agate Tūna, guided by her personal and artistic interests, searches for threads of paranormal and illusionistic photography in Latvia, challenging the boundaries of the usual photographic medium and its relationship with reality.

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