Riga Architexture Today;

The breakdown and build-up of the Latvian capital

18th January - 15th February 2007

This exhibition was the result of a collaborative effort between Viewfinder Photography Gallery and students from Goldsmiths University’s Photography and Urban Culture MA course.  Exhibited was the work of 10 graduates inspired by a group visit to Riga in May 2006.

Where many of us would point our cameras towards vistas and companions, The Riga Collective have directed theirs towards a description of individual Urban Culture.  Formerly part of the Soviet Union, and having recently joined the European Union, Riga is a city in flux, undergoing rapid transformation, the ‘Paris of the Baltic’ with its art nouveaux architecture and timber building, and displaying both Latvian nationalism and Soviet ‘internationalism’.  Buildings are going up and coming down and, as the city literally morphs, so too may its social structure. 

The photographs presented here showed impressions of the textures of the city from the backstreets, alley ways, school yards, in the medieval centre, in cavernous interiors, noticing the writing on the walls of the city,  the ghostly traces of the soviet past and the imaginings of the Riga to come.  The building structures are the nests, the casings, the foundations, walls and finally the shells of urban existence.  Here are the discarded, the regenerated and the in-between. 

By exploring alternative modes of urban representation, not just post-Soviet photojournalistic styles, and by recording and displaying the material nature of a city, can we gain an insightful understanding of its personality?  We might see this as a type of portraiture in amongst the changing faces of Europe and a comment on a loaded history, its decay and preservation.

We hope that this project will foster and initiate new relationships between London and Riga arts communities and create social dialogues using photography.

Exhibited work by:

Alison Rooke                  Gesche Wuerfel

Andris Kupriss                Isidro Ramírez

Annalia Palma                Laura Cuch

Cristina Sàez                 Patrizia Valpondi

Paul Halliday                  Rina Liddle