The Addis Foto Festival» is directed biannual by award winning photographer Aida Muluneh. The weeklong international festival is held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and features in its 5th edition 2018 exhibitions, portfolio review, conferences, projections and film screenings of continental and international photography.
14th Angkor Photo Festival» Siem Reap, Cambodia, is a free international platform and educational resource for established and emerging photographers.
During the Art Week 2018 more than 500 galleries will exhibit more than 1,000 artworks in photography and videoart: ART MIAMI», UNTITLED», CONTEXT», and SCOPE» started Tuesday, ART BASEL Miami Beach» on Wednesday Dec 5, and PULSE» on Thursday Dec 6.
In Thailand, completely covered up construction workers are a familiar sight. Thousands of them toil in intense heat on skyscrapers and along roadsides. In their lunch-breaks, they sit by the side of other people’s dreams they have been recruited to build, and laugh, eat and smoke, sometimes without removing their protective clothing - masks, sunglasses, balaclavas, scarves - which renders them virtually invisible to ordinary Thais.
The brilliance of Ralf Tooten’s stark portraits of these "AWC – Asian Workers Covered" – rests in his ability to make a social taboo highly visible. Tooten shot the original AWC series between 2006 and 2009. He set up his mobile studio – a dark background, a few lights – in quiet corners of Bangkok’s construction sites and photographed scores of male and female workers from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Burma. In 2012, Tooten shot a second series of portraits in Ratchaburi, a town in central Thailand, and went on to spread his work across 2000 square meters of vinyl banners on the town’s public structures – the first time contemporary art was made accessible to so many people in Thailand.
The photographs, all taken on a mid-format Hasselblad V on negative film, are deceptively simple. There’s a fashionable and yet arbitrary riot of colors at play in the subjects’ head and face coverings that betrays a stubborn vivacity quite in contrast to their blank eyes. And there are weightier reasons than heat, dust and pollution for the workers’ disguises. In many parts of Asia, light skin is seen as highly desirable, a visual marker for class and wealth. As a consequence, the men and women Tooten captured fear the sun. And as many are illegal foreign workers, they also fear the authorities.
In October 2018, Ralf Tooten was invited to exhibit AWC at the inaugural Bangkok Biennale. Once again, the photographer found a way to present his poignant images in unusual environments. His 14 by 14 meter portrait of a female worker looked out over shoppers at BACC (Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre), while screens in downtown shopping centers flashed his portraits at passing Bangkokians. The Biennale’s main curator, Prof.Dr. Apinan Poshyananda dubbed this the "Tooten Attack".
Ralf Tooten’s project offers ordinary Thais another view of their country, reminding them by whom their cities are built, while lending identity and dignity to people who enjoy too little of either. To paraphrase a famous quote by the Urdu poet Kabir: "He is putting up mirrors in the city of the blind."
Isabelle Graeff moved to England after a death in the family. Coming to terms with significant events in a person’s life requires time for recentering and questioning of identity. The personal circumstances intuitively put the German photographer in tune with the particular atmosphere in a country on the threshold of the Brexit decision.
Her work is not beholden to a specific genre. Isabelle Graeff’s snapshots seem to draw a portrait of the country. Just as the change of seasons introduces a mood shift, so her visual inventory catalogues an atmosphere that portends an upheaval. Perhaps it is merely subjective impressions that retrospectively make the connection between the photographs and Brexit and give the collection its name. But aren’t images always the result of subjective impressions? And isn’t the viewer’s gaze invariably tinted by interpretation?
Viewing it from the other side of political developments, a wholly new portrait emerges, showing a desolate cultural landscape, wide nature shots, austere urbanity and a variety of human faces. Stagnation and change, expectation and wonder, proximity and distance, familiarity and foreignness alternate. The glance towards strangers is fleeting. The alternation of subjects from image to image conveys a feeling of movement through space and progress through time. The photographer lines up impressions like links in a chain. Just like a jigsaw puzzle, these snippets combine to form a full picture between subjective premonition and factual documentation – the freedom of deciphering it is up to the viewer.
Jules Spinatsch is one of the most important Swiss photographers on the international scene today. To be specific, he has exhibited at the MoMA in New York, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Villa Arson in Nice, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Tate Modern in London, the SFMoMA in San Francisco, as well as at Kunsthaus Zürich or the Fotomuseum Winterthur, to mention only those institutions.
It is the CPG that has been the most frequent exhibitor of his work up to now, with two solo exhibitions (at the CPG in 2003 and Artgenève in 2015) and four group exhibitions, one not on CPG premises. Joerg Bader has already written five essays about the artist’s work. It is against this background that Jules Spinatsch, believing he had considered the question from every angle, wanted to take stock at the CPG of his practice of taking semiautomatic photographs.
The exhibition will bring together the 22 panoramic photograph projects he has carried out between 2003 and 2016 using a technique the artist developed himself from a semi-automatic webcam, in collaboration with the computer specialist Reto Diethelm.
Starting in 2003, the date of his first solo exhibition at the CPG entitled Temporary Discomfort, the artist has succeeded in responding artistically to a method of photographic production which would subsequently only become more widespread, namely automated surveillance photography. The first panorama made in 2003 during the World Economic Forum at Davos, the photographer’s birthplace, marks a turning point in the history of critical photography.
It has to be remembered that three years earlier Allan Sekula, as a private citizen (with no press card or accreditation) in the middle of the crowd at the major demonstration against the globalisation of the economy in Seattle, immortalised the nascent alternative globalization movement.
MBAL is hosting the first retrospective of American photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager (b. 1979), one of the most iconic artists of our time. Prager’s unique body of work, built up over the past ten years, consists of photographs and films whose common denominator is a meticulously crafted mise-en-scène. An undeniable sense of Hollywood and pop culture permeates the work of this self-taught, Los Angeles-based artist. This exhibition brings together her most important series of photographs, which together evoke a universe filled with drama, emotion and humor. Los Angeles serves as both inspiration and backdrop for her compositions – carefully staged scenes bathed in an atmosphere both intriguing and seductive. Prager favors complex sets, unafraid to deploy hundreds of extras who, lost in thought, are given equal standing in her quasi tableaux vivants. She recreates everyday scenes with her trademark attention to detail, yet her artifice is invariably betrayed by a solitary female figure in the crowd, isolated by an angst all her own. The exhibition also includes five films – Prager describes her immersive film installations as ‘full-sensory versions’ of her photographs. At once timeless and era-specific, Prager’s instantly recognizable aesthetic veers between fantasy and hyperrealism. Hers is a world governed by a palpabletension between fact and fiction, superficiality and depth.
How not see a network of close interconnexions between several worlds in Su dance, Shiite rituals, Peul scari cations. The reduction of photography to the documentary form prevents access to a universe, that of a human community which turns sacri ce into the supreme act of knowledge. The exuberance and pleasure experienced in the solitude of pain pay tribute to the dead and the gods. Serenity and ecstasy are at the end of the journey of abandonment and violence.
If it is true that these “transmitters” are recognisable for their excess and that they show appearances which we consider grotesque, this is the price at which the body rises. We cannot access the other world without disincarnating ourselves in ours. Because they accept to become an instrument of higher powers; by offering themselves to them, Isabel Muñoz’s subjects can rejoin their ancestors, whether real or mythical.
313 Gwangmyeong-ro, Gyeonggi-do, 13829 Gwacheon - South Korea www.mmca.go.kr
Civilization: The Way We Live Now is an international photography exhibition co-produced by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP), Minneapolis/ New York/Paris/Lausanne. The exhibition features over 500 original prints by over 130 photographers from 32 countries.
This exhibition was organized to attempt a view of our global civilization, as it has taken shape over the past 25 years. Looking through the camera lens, the exhibition focuses on our current "planetary-wide" civilization, and how the world’s citizenery responded with the formation of a distinct "collective life." The audience, upon entering, will be faced by the immensity of contemporary civilization, and its pulsating vitality.
The exhibition approaches "civilization" from an all-encompassing perspective when charting the journey of human society and—as the concept of civilization becomes ever more complex and abstract—it shows how the world of photography embraces and interpretes "civilization," and enriches our understanding of its meaning. Through this exhibition, the public is invited into the collective lives of contemporary society, to survey its formation, and surmise what’s to come in the future.
After its showing at the MMCA, Civilization will travel on to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; and the National Museum of Civilization, Marseille, France.
This exhibition is curated by William A. Ewing, and Holly Roussell from FEP, and Bartomeu Mar&iacu…
Opening of SITUATIONS/To look is to labor: Friday, 7 December from 6 to 9 p.m. Join some of the artists and speakers of the conference «Image Net/Works» for drinks and snacks.
The photographic industry not only introduced new fields and practices of work, but was furthermore instrumental in the optimisation of industrialised forms of labour. Photographic images, in turn, became crucial in re-organising our perception by capitalising on our gazes. In today's digital systems, the viewer’s gaze is tracked and analysed to perfect the “harvesting of eyeballs”, turning every spectator into a worker.
In the production models of our so-called attention economy, digitally networked technologies and photographic media play a fundamental role. Photographic images on major social media platforms are accompanied by metrics that suggest their value, giving rise to new forms of labour, with influencers, cloud workers and crowdfunding campaigns being some of the – more or less visible – agents in the global production tied to the networked image. The current cluster investigates these increasingly complex modes of production and the relations between photographers, the image network, as well as images and their viewers.
Established in 2010, the Addis Foto Fest biannual is a photography festival that is directed by award winning photographer Aida Muluneh. Produced by Desta for Africa (DFA), the weeklong international festival is held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and features exhibitions, portfolio review, conferences, projections and film screenings. Through the participation of the continental and as well the international photography community our main objective is to support the development, dissemination and promotion of image from Africa.
Lianzhou Foto Festival celebrates photography with over 60 international shows and a thematic exhibition. The theme exhibition ‘The Wind of Time’ of Lianzhou Foto Festival 2018 will gather the work of 25 local and international photographers, all investigating the ways we have shaped our world to fit our modern needs, technological ambitions, globalized and liberal ideals – and how in turn, this new modern world has shaped us, impacted labour and trade, modified the way we interact and occupy space. Curated by French curator Jérôme Sother, the theme exhibition will present artists such as Mathieu Pernot, Mohamed Abakar, Jacqueline Hassink, Yann Mingard, Oliver Sieber, Zhou Tao, Tom Wood, Salvatore Vitale, David de Beyter, Eline Benjaminsen, Lau Wai and more.
Furthermore 30 solo exhibitions are included by Paulo Coqueiro (Brazil), Erwin Blumenfeld (Germany / USA), Koji Onaka (Japan), Zhang Kechun, Zhang Er (China).
The Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2018 presents to the public 21 exhibitions of Greek and international photography, of varying themes and photographic approaches, with the participation of 142 artists from many countries of the world.
At this year's event, the central exhibition entitled Capitalist Realism is curated by Penelope Petsini and assistant curator Fotis Milionis. Structured in two large sections hosted at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and the Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Center, the exhibition attempts to highlight issues that contribute to the emergence or exacerbation of economic crises in the international environment, on a contemporary and historical horizon.
This year's event, which marks the 30th anniversary of its founding, adopts some new ideas and practices for the festival
