NEXT 2025: Performance lecture and workshop ‘Making secret files and other powerful practices’

Performance lecture and workshop "Making secret files and other powerful practices" by John Huntington in the Riga Photography Biennial—NEXT 2025 program

A pedagogic and performative lecture about bureaucracy, creativity, and resistance. With the office as a starting point, the event explores the modern human tendency — or even addiction — to systematise everything around them. John Huntington will present examples from his long-term project The Twilight Bureaucracy — a collection of events, objects, and interventions that delve into the hidden layers of administration and the alternative realities of office life.

The session will introduce various ritualistic methods — small-scale, practical techniques that can be used in the workplace to combat feelings of powerlessness and frustration.

The event includes a short practical exercise. Each participant is asked to bring one printed, text-based document from their current workplace. Extra standardised papers will be provided for those who come empty-handed.

John Huntington (SE) is an independent visual artist working in the conceptual tradition, using performance, sculpture, photography, text, and installation. Through various forms of intervention, his work challenges taken-for-granted norms in everyday life, work environments, public institutions, and political spaces.

His projects examine the boundary between everyday life and art, between the individual and the institution, between citizen and society. He is particularly interested in how we, as citizens, encounter and engage with larger institutions and enterprises — and how cautious norm violations and subtle deviations from standardised systems, especially within bureaucratic and administrative frameworks, can open new spaces for critical reflection.

Huntington lives in Gothenburg and studied at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm.

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About the Riga Photography Biennial (RPB)

The Riga Photography Biennial (RPB) is an international contemporary art event focused on the analysis of visual culture and artistic representation. The term “photography” in the biennial’s title is used as an umbrella concept encompassing a broad range of artistic image-making practices that continue to shape the visual language of 21st-century contemporary art.

The Riga Photography Biennial—NEXT offers visibility and a platform for promising young artists, helping them introduce their work to wider audiences and contexts. RPB—NEXT 2025 runs from 24 April to 6 July with a wide-ranging program of exhibitions and educational events. More info: www.rpbiennial.com

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