The Riga Photography Biennial—NEXT 2025 program outdoor project ‘(Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face’ is on view

From 9 to 22 June, in place of the familiar advertisements, Riga public transport shelters will display images from a Finnish-based Hong Kong artist Sheung Yiu’s project ‘(Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face’. Curators: Inga Brūvere (LV), Marie Sjøvold (NO). Text author: Aiga Dzalbe (LV). More information about the Riga Photography Biennial—NEXT 2025 program’s outdoor project and a map of the stops is available at: https://www.rpbiennial.com/programma/13.html ^[1]

One of the places where people tend to notice each other is public transport. As we await our departure, sometimes a longer time goes by, and unwittingly we start observing the types of people which happen to be nearby. Looking at a face is an exciting communicative process, which now increasingly takes place through social media, as we automatically submit our faces to a digital suite of cloud services. No human being knows what role their photographic likeness will play under the direction of artificial intelligence in the near or more distant future. For now, our faces are merely collected in a gigantic depository of images for an unspecified need and are used for strictly rational purposes – identity and security checks, consumer behaviour analysis, and other applications where facial search programs are useful. However, while waiting for a bus, trolleybus, or tram, we are among real people and can try to understand and not misunderstand each other by looking at the faces.

Sheung Yiu has been studying the intricacies of face-reading traditions since 2023. The artist’s study can be seen as a history of interpretation of faces across cultures and eras, which in the contemporary world – in this time of technology and artificial intelligence when everyone has free access to digital facial recognition systems – has acquired a particular relevance. In his visual study, Sheung Yiu uses his face, employing new technologies to subject it to a variety of processes testing traditions developed by the societies of the East and West. Furthermore, the study touches on the fields of anthropology and linguistics, raising the awareness of the trusting users of machine seeing: just like during the preceding centuries, and even more rapidly, stereotypes and social prejudice are spreading through language.

In project ‘(Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How to Read a Face’, the artist compares the experiences of Eastern and Western culture in their desire to judge a person’s character and fate according to their facial features. In the cultures of East Asia, face-reading is an esoteric practice developed over centuries that is related to telling the future, which even today has not lost its occult appeal, despite awareness of the indemonstrability and irrationality of its conclusions. Meanwhile in the West, physiognomy, a quasi-science that blossomed in the 18th century, was more related to medicine, claiming it was possible to determine a person’s temperament, character traits or medical diagnosis from facial features.

By taking a look at the past and dismantling the boundary between the Eastern and Western face-reading habits, Sheung Yiu’s work draws attention to the similarities between contemporary facial recognition algorithms and the principles of physiognomy, which imperceptibly encode social prejudice into machine seeing and makes it eternal. He calls for a critical perspective on digital as well as analog technologies, algorithmic and esoteric practices that generate prejudice, concluding: “A face is not merely a face. It is that which we, or the systems we use, wish to read into it.”

The Riga Photography Biennial (RPB) 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. The Riga Photography Biennial—NEXT offers visibility and provides a platform for promising young artists and helps to announce themselves to a wider audience and context. Riga Photography Biennial—NEXT 2025 program from 24 April to 6 July offers a wide-ranging program of exhibitions and education events, giving the floor to emerging artists and curators from the Baltic and other countries who have addressed aspects of the theme ‘invisible but present’. For more information: www.rpbiennial.com ^[2]

Supporters and partners of the Riga Photography Biennial—NEXT 2025: State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, exhibition hall ‘Riga Contemporary Art Space’, Art Academy of Latvia, Experimental Art Space of the Art Academy of Latvia ‘Pilot’, ISSP Gallery, Gallery ‘ALMA’, Gallery ‘ASNI’, ‘Smilga’ Culture Space, ‘VV Foundation’, ‘NoRoutine Books’, The Centre of Creative Learning ‘Annas 2’, Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Latvia, Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OKA), Estonian Embassy in Riga, Embassy of Sweden in Riga, Embassy of Finland in Riga, ‘Riga Art Week’ (RAW), printing house ‘Adverts’, ‘Hibnerstudio’, ‘Rixwell Hotels’, ‘Arctic Paper’, Valmiermuiža Craft Brewery, Arterritory.com, Echo Gone Wrong, NOBA