Riga Photography Biennial 2026
In her exhibition everything you need to see is already in front of you, Priyageetha Dia questions photography as a medium – repository of memories. Her perspective is rooted in the history of her family in South-East Asia, in the Malay peninsula, which in its heyday was considered to be the most profitable colony in the British Empire. During the Industrial Revolution in the 1870s, rubber manufacturing developed rapidly. The natural caoutchouc resources in South America were no longer able to satisfy the growing pace of production, and therefore the British government decided to artificially create new resources in the colonies of the Far East. Collected in Brazil, the seeds and seedlings of the hevea (a tree with a milky sap – latex) grew into huge rubber plantations on the other side of the world, where several generations of indentured labourers spent their lives, becoming cheap labour for the British rubber industry.
Working with archives and conducting field research in rubber plantations, Priyageetha approaches the past from different sides. She strives to see and hear invisible and inaudible connections, and uncover those electromagnetic webs which ceaselessly flicker around us, which carry memories and in which all of us are joined together. At the same time, the artist joins the historical discussion about the mystical, ghostly character of the photographic medium, which transforms reality into a trace, keeping visual records of personages, places and events on photographic plates, paper or in digital files.
The video installation Spectre System (2024) imagines a gamified plantation scene built using Unreal Engine, a real-time 3D creation programme. Drifting like will-o’-the-wisps in the forest are Inaivu – spectral orbs whose name combines the Tamil word “ninaivu” and the Malay word “ingatan”, both meaning memory. Inaivu are like memory-carriers, holding the weight of a past that too often is silenced or forgotten, including through oppression and persecution. The tension between the colonial past and present-day reality continues in the vision Mesh: Prelude to Spectre System (2024), which shows elongated, contorted arms in motion. Reflecting the elasticity of rubber, they blur the boundaries between the body and the environment. In ghostly gestures they trace the ways the past survives in the material dimensions of time and space and how past events influence the present.
Priyageetha Dia (NL) works with time-based media and installation. Her practice braids themes of south-east Asian labour histories, speculation of the tropics, and ancestral memory meeting machine logics. Through archival and field research, she explores non-linearity and practices of refusal against dominant narratives. Her recent exhibitions include at the Aichi Triennale (2025); Munch Triennale (2025); 4th Bangkok Art Biennale (2024); Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024); 60th La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2024); Arts House, Melbourne (2024); Diriyah Biennale, Saudi (2024); Frieze Seoul (2023); Singapore Art Museum (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2022); and La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2022). She was an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022 and the SEA AiR—Studio Residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands in 2023.
Curator: Inga Brūvere
Text by: Aiga Dzalbe
Image: Priyageetha Dia, ‘Mesh – Prelude to Spectre System’, 2024
Courtesy of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation,
photo by Marco Cappelletti
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