© Farah Al Qasimi, Dragon Mart Light Display
A rethink and a reshaping of one of the UK’s longest running photography festivals - Brighton Photo Biennial - the Photoworks Festival can be experienced three ways; via a printed ‘festival in a box’, online in a digital festival hub, and through a major presentation of outdoor exhibitions on billboards spanning Brighton & Hove.
Participating artists include:Farah Al Qasimi, Poulomi Basu, Roger Eberhard, Ivars Grāvlejs, Pixy Liao, Alberta Whittle with more to be announced.
The artists - many of whom will show new work for the first time in the UK - intentionally set out to show a more nuanced perspective on a subject or topic, often using work which blurs the lines between mediums.
The Photoworks Festival forms part of Photoworks’ 25th anniversary year and is a major component of Alternative Narratives, the Photoworks programming theme for 2020. Led by Shoair Mavlian, Director, Photoworks, and grounded in ten years of thinking, Alternative Narrativesattempts to rework traditional histories and challenge cultural hierarchies to support artists whose work has been lesser seen and under-acknowledged to date. The festival challenges the idea of a linear narrative of photography, instead suggesting a more complex and interconnected revisionist history which helps build a fuller and more complex story.
Photoworks Festival is for everyone. It can be experienced as an intimate viewing experience in a domestic setting or community space, outside in a busy public setting or online, via engaging interaction, conversation and exchange.
Photoworks Festival in a box
Inspired by Dayanita Singh’s innovative and seminal photobooks, Photoworks will curate a photography ‘festival in a box’ which will be released in September but available to pre-order by signing up as Photoworks Friend now. Designed as a deconstructed magazine, this will include new texts proposing alternative histories of photography alongside contemporary artists making work which present new perspectives, challenging the mainstream. Photoworks will also distribute to community groups and universities, galleries, artist studios and more. This limited edition box includes texts by Julia Bunnemann, Simon Baker, Pamila Gupta, Shoair Mavlian, Thyago Nogueira, Lucy Souter, and others to be announced.
Outdoor Festival
An open air exhibition in Brighton & Hove which can be viewed across the city will appear this Autumn. It will be presented on poster sites and billboards across the city, from BN1 to the outer suburbs, bringing a global roster of artists to the streets for the first time.
Digital Festival hub
Photoworks’ digital platforms will be transformed into our festival hub, connecting the physical work and the digital audiences. Events, artist films, podcasts and special content connecting the ‘festival in a box’ and the outdoor festival with the virtual realm will be announced soon. One project displayed here for the first time will be - Archiving your Life -led by an LGBTQ+ youth group, Queer History Now, who are dedicated to preserving queer archives and enabling the queer community to take control over the stories and narratives that are told about their lives.
Photoworks x English Heritage
Another major project drawing on the Alternative Narratives theme will be a collaboration with English Heritage’s Shout Out Loud youth engagement programme. Within the online festival there will be a display of work from a collaboration that asks young photographers to create new digital photographic artworks exploring their heritage – especially their untold heritage.
Shoair Mavlian, Director, Photoworks, said,
“Our inaugural Photoworks Festival rethinks both the form and content of traditional festivals and attempts to disrupt the well known histories of photography, breaking them apart to include new perspectives. Our festival acknowledges that the idea of a distinct history of photography is problematic and aims to highlight propositions for alternative histories alongside contemporary work that sets out to show a new or alternative perspective on a subject or topic. We look forward to presenting the festival across these three formats, allowing a wide range of audiences to engage with what a photography festival is and could be and enabling a global audience to access a festival like ours for the first time.”
Details of works by participating artists and events URL and IRL will be released next month.
Photoworks Festival Propositions for Alternative Narrativesis curated by Shoair Mavlian, Julia Bunnemann and Raquel Villar-Pérez.
About Photoworks
Photoworks champions photography for everyone. We’ve provided opportunities for artists and audiences since 1995. We are an international platform. Global in reach, we don’t have a venue but our online channels are always open. Our programmes, both physical and digital, bring new experiences to audiences and open up new ways to encounter photography. Photoworks is a registered charity and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation with a national remit. photoworks.org.uk @photoworks_uk
#PhotoworksFestival #AlternativeNarratives #Photoworks25
Artist biographies Farah Al Qasimi (UAE)
Farah Al Qasimi (UAE, b. 1991)is a photographer who lives and works between New York and Dubai. Working primarily with photography, video and performance, Farah Al Qasimi examines postcolonial structures of power, gender and taste in the Gulf Arab states. In her series ArrivalAl Qasimi features jinn folklore that is common across the UAE explicitly using the visual language of horror cinema.
Her recent works challenge the viewer to consider their own understanding of reality, aspiration, individuality and the reflected image. Elsewhere, the artist creates works that confront commonplace notions of figurative photography and portraiture. Early 2020 the art organisation Public Art Fund installed Al Qasimi’s series of photography, Back and Forth Disco,in public bus shelters across the city.
Further selected exhibitions include Lahore Biennale, Lahore, Pakistan (2020); Open Arm Sea, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX, USA (2020); March Projects, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2019) Age of You, MOCA Toronto, Canada (2019); List Projects: Farah Al Qasimi, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA (2019); Artist's Rooms, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE (2019), Conversation 7 (with Marcela Pardo Ariza), San Francisco Arts Commission, SF, USA (2018) and No to the Invasion: Breakdowns and Side Effects, CCS Bard Galleries, New York, USA (2017). She has participated in residencies at the Delfina Foundation, London (2017); the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2017); and was awarded the New York NADA Artadia Prize and the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer's Fellowship (2018). Farah studied photography and music at Yale University in 2012 and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2017.
Al Qasimi is currently a critic at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Poulomi Basu (IN)
Poulomi Basu (India, b. 1983) is an Indian transmedia artist, photographer and activist. Poulomi’s work has become widely known for advocating for the rights of women. Published in 2020, her photo book Centralia was Shortlisted for the 2020 Rencontres d'Arles Discovery Award. For this work Poulomi was also awarded a National Geographic Explorer 2020 award. She createdBlood Speaks to utilise the power of photography and visual storytelling/activism to result in tangible social change and amplify the voices of women from the majority world. In 2018 she collaborated with Action Aid on the campaign #MyBodyIsMine and with WaterAid in 2014 for To Be A Girl, raising £2 million and providing 130,000 girls with reusable sanitary kits and built toilets. In December 2015, she created The Rape in India Project, a crowd sourced platform to share photos of sites of rapes to protest against the shocking frequency of sexual assault in India.
Her work has been internationally exhibited and she won the Magnum Emergency Fund in 2016 and was a Magnum Foundation Human Rights Fellow in 2012. In 2017 the artist was shortlisted for the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award and the Catchlight Fellowship in 2017 with Blood Speaks and selected for the Sundance New Frontiers Lab with that same project. She has also been shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award for Centralia,and for the FOAM Paul Huf Award amongst others. She is the Director ofJust Another Photo Festival, a traveling guerrilla visual media festival that democratizes photography by taking it to the people and forging new audiences. Her festival was listed by BJP as 2015’s most Cool and Noteworthy and in 2016 in JM Colberg’s Conscientious Photography Magazine as an alternate voice of the ‘audience’. The artist is also a visiting lecturer for the Visible Justice & Collaborative Unit at the London College of Communication, and has also undertaken the 'Reporting in Crisis Zones' hostile management training at Columbia School of Journalism, kindly supported with a bursary from the Rory Peck Trust.
Roger Eberhard (CH)
Roger Eberhard (Zurich, Switzerland, b. 1984), is both an artist and a publisher. His photographic works deal with political and sociological implications of a world that has transformed from an industrialised to an optimising society. The range of Roger Eberhard’s topics is wide – his series Aussichtdeals with the reprocessing of a former Nazi concentration camp in Ukraine and the memory that is stored within the walls of what is today a luxurious hotel. While the project Norma describes the absurdity of a Potemkin village in Hamburg, Eberhard’s Shanty Town Deluxe focuses on the marketing potential of poverty. For that project he traveled to South Africa to photograph a fancy hotel that offers its visitors a township experiencewithout ever having to set eyes on people who are actually suffering. His series Standard raises questions about a world that becomes more anonymous through the increased standardisation, about a society in which the known replaces the community and where only the recognisability offers a sense of security. During one year Roger Eberhard travelled to 32 cities on all continents to photograph the standard room of a Hilton hotel and the view from the room. His most recent project, Human Territoriality, shows sites of past borders. Across the globe and crisscross through the history of spatialized politics, this body of work strings together photographs of former demarcation lines. Works by Roger Eberhard are exhibited internationally and found in important collections, both public and private. In 2011 he founded the Zurich based publishing company b.frank books, which publishes 4 to 6 artist’s books per year. Currently Roger Eberhard lives and works in Stallikon (CH) and in Berlin. Roger Eberhard studied at Hochschule der Künste in Zurich and at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, USA. Eberhard’s photographs can be found in public and private collections, including Fotomuseum Winterthur, and have been shown at C/O in Berlin, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and at the Swiss National Library in Bern.
Pixy Liao (CN)
Pixy Liao, (Shanghai, China b. 1979) is an artist who currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Liao's long-term project Experimental Relationship challenges conventional notions of gender dynamics and socially accepted norms. She is a recipient of NYFA Fellowship in photography, Santo Foundation Individual Artist Awards, Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival Madame Figaro Women Photographers Award, En Foco's New Works Fellowship and LensCulture Exposure Awards, etc. She has done artist residencies at Light Work, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Center for Photography at Woodstock, University of Arts London, School of Visual Arts, Pioneer Works, and Camera Club of New York. Liao has participated in exhibitions and performances internationally, including the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles (France); Asia Society (Houston); National Gallery of Australia (Sydney); Chambers Fine Art Gallery (New York & Beijing); Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong); Stieglitz 19 Gallery (Belgium); Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool); the Museum of Sex (New York); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing); and He Xiangning Art Museum (China). Liao holds an MFA in photography from the University of Memphis.
Ivars Grāvlejs (LV)
Ivars Grāvlejs, (Latvia, b. 1979) is an artist who has been taking photographs since childhood. Often Grāvlejsis described as an “enfant terrible”. He plays with language, with combinations of words and images, and mystifies the spectator with a certain degree of infantility. The art of provocation is typical of Grāvlejswho, as it happens, can pretend nothing special is at stake. The artist holds a Master’s degree from FAMU in Prague and is currently a PhD student and teacher of “speculative spiritual photography” in Czech Republic. His work has been displayed across Europe, with solo exhibitions including: Prague-based work such as 'A glass of champagne' in 2015, 'THERE WILL BE DICKS!' in 2014, and was featured in the 4th Biennale in 2011; 'Who's Next' in Moscow in 2013; and his 'Early Works' shown in Bratislava in 2010.
Alberta Whittle (BB, UK)
Alberta Whittle (Barbados/UK, b. 1980) is an artist, researcher and curator. She is a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. She was a RAW Academie Fellow at RAW Material in Dakar in 2018 and is the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/9. Alberta has been a Board Member for the Scottish Contemporary Arts Network (SCAN) since 2017. Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces.
Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows, including at Grand Union (2020), Eastside Projects (2020), DCA (2019), GoMA, Glasgow (2019), Pig Rock Bothy at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019), 13th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2019), The Tyburn Gallery, London (2019), The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2018), RAW Material, Dakar (2018), FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017), FRAMER FRAMED, Amsterdam (2015), Goethe On Main, Johannesburg (2015), at the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), and BOZAR, Brussels (2014), amongst others. Her work is part of The Scottish National Gallery Collections, Glasgow Museums Collections and The Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art. Over 2021, Alberta will be sharing new work as part of Art Night, Liverpool Biennial, Empire Remains at Grand Union, business as usual : hostile environment at Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Right of Admission at the University of Johannesburg.
About our partners:
English Heritage cares for over 400 historic buildings, monuments and sites - from world-famous prehistoric sites to grand medieval castles, from Roman forts on the edges of the empire to a Cold War bunker. Through these, we bring the story of England to life for over 10 million people each year. Untold Heritage is part of Shout Out Loud, English Heritage’s national youth engagement programme. Shout Out Loud is funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Kick The Dust programme. Untold Heritage is additional Kick The Dust activity funded by DCMS through the Youth Accelerator Fund.www.shoutoutloud.org.uk
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
