Curator Roberta Atraste is the winner of the Riga Photography Biennial’s Next 2025 programme award Emerging Curator!. Until June 6, her exhibition The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poetry, which explores bureaucracy and administrative processes in art, is on view at the experimental art space Pilot of the Art Academy of Latvia. In the Nice Touch section, Roberta shares an indispensable tool in her creative process—one that helps not only with gathering her thoughts but also with convenient archiving.
«As a curator, I work with large volumes of information. When preparing an exhibition, I must consider historical context, the artists’ ideas, current issues, and observations—and seek out the connections between them all.
Notebooks and Word documents tend to be too fragmented and too small for this. Ever since sketching lessons in the art school, I’ve grown fond of A0 paper sheets, floral wrapping paper, and wallpaper rolls. When a new project approaches, one wall gets covered with paper, where everything is noted down—things that otherwise wouldn’t stay in my head all at once. The most extreme case was during art history exams, when a wallpaper roll ran horizontally across all the walls of my flat. After the project is done, it’s easy to organise and review my archive, as the rolls fit neatly into the narrowest corners of the flat.»
Roberta Atraste holds a bachelor’s degree in art history and theory from the Art Academy of Latvia and is currently continuing her studies in the Curatorial Master’s programme. As an independent curator, she has organised exhibitions in Latvia and abroad. She was also the editor of the visual arts journal Creative Bureaucracy (Mākslas Žurnāls, 2024), which compiles visual and written accounts from her contemporaries on the topic of bureaucracy in Latvian art.
Roberta continues to delve into the theme of bureaucracy with her exhibition The Bureaucrat Who Secretly Reads Poetry, open until June 6 at the Pilot art space. The exhibition is part of the Riga Photography Biennial programme Next 2025, dedicated to emerging photo artists and curators. In connection with the exhibition, a public discussion The Curatorial and Ethics will take place on May 16 at 18:00, featuring Antra Priede, Roberta Atraste, Iveta Gabaliņa, and Aleksejs Beļeckis. On May 29 at 18:00, visitors are invited to a performative lecture and workshop titled Making Secret Files and Other Magical Practices, which will explore bureaucracy, creativity, and resistance.
Viedokļi