Artist
Rūta Kalmuka
Rūta Kalmuka is a Latvian photographer whose passion for analogue photography took root during her secondary school years under the mentorship of Andrejs Grants. For roughly seven years, she immersed herself in the art of film developing, darkroom printing, and the finer details of traditional photography. This hands-on experience laid the foundation for her enduring commitment to analogue processes. Despite the demands of a busy editorial career, Kalmuka consistently nurtured her personal art practice. She created bodies of work focused on her immediate family, capturing intimate narratives through the tactile, deliberate medium of film. Over the years, she participated in numerous group exhibitions, both in Latvia and abroad, showcasing her evolving perspective on family life and everyday rituals. In 2022, she transitioned from the news agency to a new role as a photographer in a museum setting, affording her more time and creative freedom to develop her ideas. This shift allowed Kalmuka to delve deeper into the conceptual aspects of her projects, further refining her analogue techniques. Two years later, in 2024, she exhibited a long-term family-centered project at the ISSP Gallery—an exhibition that encapsulated her ongoing exploration of memory, identity, and personal history. Through her distinct blend of traditional processes and reflective storytelling, Kalmuka continues to expand the expressive potential of analogue photography.
DZEN
In her project Pupa, Ieva Maslinskaite explores photography as a medium in flux, mirroring the transformative state an insect undergoes in its pupal stage. By allowing bacteria and fungi to colonize large-format film negatives depicting highly controlled Dutch landscapes, Maslinskaite challenges conventional, anthropocentric hierarchies of image-making. In doing so, she shifts photography’s purpose from a fixed representation to a site of ecological habitation and ongoing metamorphosis.
Rūta Kalmuka’s Dzen revives an ancient Latvian spring solstice ritual, once practiced by the Livs, involving the symbolic banishment of evil spirits and the calling of light. Her method—using a large-format camera and direct positive prints on photo paper and fabric—constitutes a contemporary ritual of its own. By integrating ancestral folklore with a reflective creative process, Kalmuka underscores ritual’s capacity to heal and renew both cultural identity and personal well-being.
In Visvaldas Morkevicius’s I Want to Tell You Something, grief is articulated as a non-linear, endlessly revisited terrain. Morkevicius integrates archival photographs, images of everyday objects, and repeated scanning and printing to construct a visual echo of loss. This approach emphasizes the fragility of memory while advancing toward acceptance, becoming, in essence, a farewell letter to a former self.
Across these three works, a unifying thread is the emphasis on transformation—both of the photographic medium and of personal or communal experience. Maslinskaite’s bacterial interventions on large-format negatives invite an ecological metamorphosis that challenges anthropocentric control; Kalmuka’s revival of an ancient ritual foregrounds the cyclical interplay of darkness and light as a means of cultural and personal renewal; and Morkevicius’s layered images of grief chart a non-linear passage toward acceptance and self-redefinition. While each artist addresses distinct subject matter—ranging from environmental processes to ancestral folklore and the fragile terrain of memory—they converge in using photography as a space of transition, reflection, and continuous becoming, revealing how images can evolve with the very conditions that shape them.
The selecting committee consists of:
Iveta Gabaliņa | ISSP Curator/Co – Founder
Julija Berkoviča | ISSP Director/Co – Founder
Kulla Laas | Director of Tallinn Photomonth
Ieva Meilute-Svinkūniene | Curator
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