Auguste Petre

Auguste Petre (b. 1993) is an independent curator and co-founder of the gallery ASNI in Riga. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies from the Art Academy of Latvia and is currently pursuing doctoral studies within its scientific PhD programme. Since 2021, she has also been a lecturer at AAL. Petre has worked as a curator-in-residence and researcher in Paris and Helsinki, and since 2024 has been actively participating in international academic conferences, where she reflects on post-socialism and its resonance within contemporary art practices.
She has curated more than 20 contemporary art exhibitions featuring international artists and is also the author of several exhibition concepts and accompanying curatorial texts. Among her most significant recent projects are Helēna Heinrihsone’s Wanderers (Latvian National Museum of Literature and Music), Katrīna Neiburga’s Sologamy (Latvian National Museum of Art), and MAREUNROL’S solo exhibition Fieldwork: Invisible Exercises (Riga Contemporary Art Space). All three exhibitions were nominated for the prestigious Purvīša Prize 2025. She is currently working on the major solo exhibition of Miķelis Fišers at the Great Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art.
Since 2017, Petre has also worked as an art journalist, regularly contributing to Latvian and international publications on contemporary art and theatre. In 2023, she curated the contemporary art collection for SEB Global Services, expanding her practice into institutional and corporate collection-building. Her research and curatorial interests increasingly converge around questions of materiality, post-socialist cultural memory, and the evolving identity of a generation of Latvian artists shaped by these conditions.
In 2026, Auguste Petre was nominated for the Latvian Visual Arts Award in the category Curator of the Year.

Invisible Exercises of Curation

What does it mean to curate an artistic practice rather than an exhibition? This question has emerged through my sustained collaboration with the Latvian artist duo MAREUNROL’S, with whom I have developed three projects over several years. My presentation takes Fieldwork: Invisible Exercises (Riga Art Space, 2023), a project that explored the often unseen processes behind artistic production, as a point of departure for considering the equally invisible exercises of curatorial practice.

An exhibition is only the visible outcome of a much longer process: looking, researching, discussing, negotiating, editing, waiting, changing one’s mind, and learning how to work with an artistic practice over time. These activities rarely become visible to an audience, yet they materially shape what an exhibition can become. Through the example of working with MAREUNROL’S, I will consider curating as a situated and relational practice – one that does not simply mediate existing artworks, but participates in the conditions through which artistic practices become legible and possible.
This perspective also connects to my broader research on materiality in contemporary Latvian art. I am interested in how curating itself can be understood as a material practice: how relationships, decisions, spatial negotiations, and forms of attention acquire material consequences. Rather than asking only what a curator puts on display, I ask what kinds of invisible work make an exhibition – and an artistic relationship – possible.