Riga Photomonth – the first festival in Latvia during the pandemic

On Tuesday, May 26, the annual photography festival Riga Photomonth will start, which is the first festival in Latvia that will take place during the pandemic. Subject to assembly restrictions, the festival’s events – exhibitions, performances, projections, discussions and tours – will take place not only on the Internet platforms Facebook, Zoom and Twitch, but also in exhibition halls and the urban environment.

This year’s festival focuses on the instinctive, the natural and the unknown, bringing to the fore the visuality of photography and art and the artist’s emotional state, which is especially important to talk about in this period of crisis and uncertainty. The works of artists are associated with such concepts as dreams, despair, desire, death and also downtime.

“Despite the difficult conditions, we decided not to cancel the festival, but to adapt it to the new order. The main exhibition, which was planned at the Riga Circus, will turn into various unusual performances in the urban environment and on the Internet. It will be an experiment for both the organizers and the artists, as well as for the spectators,” explains the festival director Arnis Balčus. The core of the Riga Photomonth will consist of performances and mini-exhibitions of nine artists – some of them will be seen in person to a limited audience in the urban environment, but some as live and video recordings on the festival’s social accounts. Check the web page dikstave.lv for an overview of the program, which will later include the documentation of the past events.