No author: The Photographic Object, Exhibition statement, The Photographers Gallery, 2009.

The internationally renowned artists in this exhibition use stitching, cutting, piercing and punching to explore the ambiguous space between two and three dimensions.

Dissatisfied with the conventional function of photography as a surface that reproduces the external world, these artists test the materiality of their medium. Through a variety of distinct propositions, this exhibition traces an eclectic journey from the potential of photography to exceed its medium to relishing its hermetic and decorative function.

Post-photographic apparatus, conference statement, [no author], 2019.

"Post-photographic discourses have primarily focused on the transformations of photographic images. But if we understand photography also as an entanglement with a specific kind of apparatus, the question one has to ask is: How this apparatus as much as our conception of it has changed?

The conference addresses this question from three perspectives: technologically, the digitization of cameras has turned them into computers with attached sensors, and former functions of the hardware are increasingly simulated by software. The construction of a camera nowadays requires less domain knowledge, which has enabled companies from different fields to introduce new camera models and disrupt a previously relatively stable ecosystem. At the same time, many artists have questioned the tool of their photographic practices by turning self-created cameras into artworks in their own rights. Finally, a theoretical critique of modernism (of which traditional photography has been an integral part), along with posthumanistic understandings of agency and technology, have helped to blur what used to be the separate concepts of the camera, photographer and image. Hence, cameras can no longer be understood as black boxes/cameras obscuras. We need to re-assess them as nodes in larger media ecological networks."

On photographic beings by Pauļus Petraitis, Press release, September 2020.

"Photographic images are routinely attributed a hold that is exercised over objects. It is as if the camera arrests and grasps – providing a suspended look into objecthood, which is somehow both insightful and (de)finite. In other words, the camera captures, the object seemingly left passive and defenceless in this one-way action.

An exhibition of the Riga Photography Biennial 2020 On Photographic Beings explores the failure of fully grasping. The display sets out to investigate photographic beings as multidimensional, complex and often ambiguous. Artists Evy Jokhova (UK/Estonia/Russia), Ode de Kort (Belgium) and Tom Lovelace (UK) featured in the exhibition specifically look into the various facets of the object-image relationship. This connection, which is traditionally viewed as stemming from an object and resulting in an image, is shown here to be more elaborate and intricate than it at first appears. The curator of the exhibition is Lithuanian artist and theorist Paulius Petraitis.

The three presented artists challenge this traditional view. British artist Tom Lovelace’s work stimulates a creative dialogue between imagery and objects, and posits itself as an intervention and interruption to the space’s regular existence. Belgian artist Ode de Kort adds to this dialogue by playfully uncovering the complexities of image-based (re)presentation. She explores ways to collaborate with artworks, indicating an object and its creator can be seen as working together. Evy Jokhova, of Russian, Estonian and UK multi-cultural background, uses the concept of mirroring in her consideration of reflection, mimicry and reproduction in photography. Focusing on these processes, she proposes to look at this essential function of photography from an unexpected angle. All artists respond to the specific setting – 5th floor Cupola Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art – in their suggestions to problematize the photographic capture.

The works presented in the exhibition can be described as photographic, yet sit outside of the usual boundaries of the medium. They challenge the notion of what a photography exhibition is or can be, opting to discuss the photographic as a shifting lens and a notion that is primarily cultural. Through this, project not only explores the potential of a photographic work to open up the complexity of the object-to-image translation through responding to the specific space, but also investigates some of the very possibilities of photography."