everything you need to see is already in front of you

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, on the Malay Peninsula, which, in its heyday, was considered 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.

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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.

Participant: Priyageetha Dia (NL)
Curator: Inga Brūvere (LV)
Text by: Aiga Dzalbe (LV)
Exhibition design: Inga Brūvere (LV)

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The Riga Photography Biennial is an international contemporary art event, focusing on the analysis of visual culture and artistic representation. The term 'photography' in the title of the biennial is used as an all-embracing concept encompassing a mixed range of artistic image-making practices that have continued to transform the lexicon of contemporary art in the 21st century.