Riga Photography Biennial 2026
Lecture by Adam Mazur ‘Coexistence: Natural/Artificial. Polish Photography After AI’
April 30 at 18.00 | Riga Contemporary Art Space, Kungu Street 3, Riga. Opening hours: Tuesday–Saturday 12:00–18:00. More information: makslastelpa.riga.lv
Coexistence: Natural/Artificial. Polish Photography After AI proposes that the crucial question is no longer whether an image is natural or synthetic, but how these types interlock within contemporary photographic practice. The lecture will open by recalling artistic practices that anticipated AI-oriented work, by contemporary masters of photography such as Aneta Grzeszykowska and Kobas Laksa, as well as figures less closely affiliated with the art world, like Andrzej Dragan. The main section of the presentation will focus on the relationship between photography and AI, which began less than five years ago. In Poland since 2020, camera-based pictures, machine-generated images, and the archival photograph have increasingly inhabited the same workflows, the same screens, and the same economies of attention. Coexistence is not a truce between two opposites; it is the present condition of looking and making under platform circulation, dataset logics, and contested trust in Poland now, and institutions. The lecture revisits indexicality as a shifting contract rather than a stable essence. Consider Weronika Gęsicka’s ongoing manipulation of archival family photographs through neural networks: her project doesn’t destroy the documentary authority of these images but multiplies it, creating what she calls “parallel memories” – each iteration as indexically valid as the original, yet pointing to no singular referent. This is co-existence at the level of the archive: AI doesn’t replace human memory but generates adjacent temporal corridors where alternative histories unfold with equal conviction. Works in a similar vein have been created by, among others, Kobas Laksa and Mateusz Sadowski.
A second cluster of practices treats nature not as the opposite of computation, but as its testing ground. At Fotofestiwal Łódź, Szymon Rogiński’s dialogues with Andrzej Strumiłło, extended through AI-generated visions of the taiga, stage a documentary dilemma: the landscape photograph as record meets the landscape image as projection. The work shows how “natural” motifs – forest, weather, animality – circulate through datasets, and how the aesthetic of the real can be rebuilt without the encounter it once implied. The question shifts from “is this true?” to “what relation to the world does this image authorise?” Characteristic of these experiments is the combination of analogue and digital, of historical photographic techniques with hallucinatory images generated and produced with the aid of algorithms. This is the direction pursued by artists such as Nicolas Grospierre, Marcin Kozłowski, Robert Kuśmirowski, Konrad Kuzyszyn, Andrzej Szwabe, Janek Zamoyski, Barbara Konopka (MorGan) and Igor Pisuk.
The lecture will be an opportunity to explore the most compelling positions and proposals for artistic uses of photography in conjunction with AI. It offers a kind of report – an account from a rapidly shifting field of experimentation – and a first attempt to historicise it, to pause it for a moment and analyse what we are seeing, alongside the echoing question, “is this still photography?”
Adam Mazur (PL) is a curator specialising in photography and the art of Central and Eastern Europe who, through curating Polish and international projects, connects private collectors/institutions with galleries and public institutions. From 2002 to 2013, he served as a curator at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, where he curated, among others, the group exhibitions New Documentalists, Red-Eye Effect: Polish Photography in the 21st Century, as well as solo exhibitions by artists including Konrad Pustoła, Martha Rosler, and Wojciech Wilczyk. He is an editor of anthologies and exhibition catalogues, and the author of numerous books, including Histories of Photography in Poland 1839–2009 (2010) and The Mutilated World: Histories of Photography in Central Europe 1838–2018 (2019). Between 2013 and 2022, he worked as an independent curator, organizing exhibitions by artists such as Rafał Milach at Futura Gallery in Prague, Aneta Grzeszykowska at the State Art Gallery in Sopot, Artur Żmijewski at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, and Piotr Uklański at the National Museum in Kraków. Since 2022, he has been the director of the Hilary Majewski House in Łódź and curator of exhibitions organized by the institution in Poland and abroad. He has curated and co-curated major survey exhibitions such as Photobloc (ICC Kraków, 2019; MUO Olomouc, 2020; NGA Vilnius, 2021), Looking for Trouble: Contemporary Photography from Central-Eastern Europe at Image Gallery in Aarhus (2023), and Images Falling from the Sky: The Phenomenon of the Helsinki School of Photography at the State Art Gallery in Sopot (2024).
The exhibition is organized by Riga City Municipality Institution RIGA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE and Riga Photography Biennial, with the support of the Riga City Municipality