AUSTRALIA: Fables that are at once personal and universal, familial and public, recounting childhood perspicacity and adult frailty far the here and now.
Seeing is not as simple as looking.
Joseph Kosuth
RUSSIA / USA: One man’s quest for a more nuanced way of being, teasing apart notions of morality from those of dogma, of identity from those of normality.
CANADA: With well over 100,000 images and millions of possible interconnections, Luminous-Lint offers a near-infinite range of ways to pursue the study of photographic history.
USA: Patty Carroll’s ‘Anonymous Women’ parody and personify the frenetic consumerism and suffocating domesticity of ‘idealised’ notions of femininity promoted in the post-war era.
UNITED KINGDOM: Going beyond the clichés and prejudices about homelessness by facilitating each participant to create their own self-portrait.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Satirical imagery that critiques the impact of colonialism in Korea and its enduring legacy of historical trauma.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein
ISRAEL: An exploration of the equivocal transition from child to adult in portraits of adolescents in Ukraine, Russia and Spain.
LEBANON / AUSTRALIA: Dreamlike psychodramas that envision the émigré’s feelings of separation, longing and isolation.
USA: Past and present converse in an archive of American life shot from a refreshingly tangential perspective.
UNITED KINGDOM: Conjuring the familial past and a satirical future through the evocative power of photographic masks.
AUSTRALIA: Challenging misconceptions around disability and making evident the violent abuse that can sometimes be its cause.
CANADA / USA: Temporary sculptures created by balancing stones with nothing more than gravity to hold them together.
Without deviations from the norm, progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
GERMANY: The uncanny and the documentary synergise as temporal and dimensional shifts reveal a prescient vision in the context of current events.
USA: With an emphasis on the dignity of all living things, these lo-fi collage works seek to emphasise harmony and our shared human nature, free from judgement.
CHINA: Documentary images highlighting communities that, while they may seem outside of the mainstream in China, are in fact simply some of its constituents.
FINLAND: Landscapes, ice, and flea-market clothing and fabrics come together in an unusual aesthetic and conceptual marriage – part myth, part speculation.
BOSNIA / AUSTRALIA: Darkly beautiful images that use alternative photographic processes to convey the ultimate ambiguity of life as experience.
MEXICO: The fluidity of domestic intimacy explored through the lens of childhood imagination and transformational community ritual.
If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for a hundred years, educate children.
Confucius
AUSTRALIA: From the arid heat of central Australia to the windswept ice sheet of Greenland, powerful and austere images that push the very notion of landscape to its extreme.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
AUSTRALIA: Figures from history and legend elegantly reconceived with the technology and sensibility of the present.
UKRAINE: The artistic trope of the male nude re-imagined as emblem of a new generation of young Eastern European men.
UNITED KINGDOM: A photographer who looks beyond the momentary click of the shutter to understand the wider social, historical, economic, and environmental context of our globalised world.
AUSTRALIA: Fantastical photographs suggesting a domestic magic brought into being by longing, obsession or childlike exuberance.
I don't want art for a few,
any more than education for a few,
or freedom for a few.William Morris
NEW ZEALAND: Images of ephemeral land-art projects that symbolise the interdependence of natural systems that connect us all in the web of life.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: For the Korean artist Atta Kim, the process of making art has been an ongoing philosophical journey of discovery.
URUGUAY: Delicately poetic images printed sustainably without inks or chemicals, using naturally occurring plant materials.
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
AUSTRALIA: A contemporary story-teller who combines photography and words to synthesis rich and complex narratives of family, community and sexuality.
USA / CANADA: A visual ethnographer, Dona Schwartz photographs expectant parents and empty-nesters marking those moments when each couple stands outside the gates of family life.
NEW ZEALAND / AUSTRALIA: A visual storyteller exploring the interior world of the mind through the shared imagination of the community.
ROMANIA: a community of homeless people come together to find companionship, shelter and a degree of mutual sustainability in a network of tunnels under the city of Bucharest.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
Gloria Steinem
PAISES BAJOS: Retratos que hablan de la complejidad de la identidad individual, interpersonal y colectiva, de la mutabilidad del ser humano y de la fluidez interior.
NETHERLANDS: Portraits that speak to the entanglement of individual, interpersonal and collective identity, the mutability of the body, and the fluidity of being.
MEXICO: Obscure rituals that blend the contemporary with the timeless, the personal with the collective, to suggest imaginary states and real-world paradoxes.
USA: Timeless portraits made in collaboration with the inmates of three penitentiaries in the northeast of Louisiana, the US state with the largest per capita prison population.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Creating a fluid and ambiguous aesthetic space between painting, sculpture and photography, Hyunmi Yoo challenges our understanding of the relationship between visual representation, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’.
RUSSIA: Gently observed portraits of the people of Bryansk that touch on the mystery of everyday life.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo Picasso
BELGIUM: Contemporary images that evoke the past while looking to the future.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Exploring the liminal space at the threshold of realty and simulation, original and replica, fact and fake.
PERU: Art and Nature entangle the body in images that speak of the camouflage adopted by an outsider.
MALAYSIA / SINGAPORE: Apparently whimsical images that critique community erasure in Malaysia and the re-wilding of a hyperreal city-state in lockdown.
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
GERMANY: Reworking the traditional contact sheet on a grand scale, Thomas Kellner makes architecture dance.
ICELAND: Picturing the resilient lives and enduring landscapes of a small farming community in the East of Iceland caught between harsh reality and timeless myth.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
UNITED KINGDOM: Four friends of the late Tim Hetherington discuss the work of this compassionate war photographer who sought to depict Big History through the lens of small history.
COLOMBIA: An artist using clay figures to tell the stories of real people – stories of homelessness and social invisibility.
SOUTH AFRICA: Capturing the spirit of a new creative generation, fighting for gender equality and exposing the continuing plight of the working poor.
BRAZIL: Evocative images of the rural and indigenous peoples of this vast country, captured by one of its most distinguished visual poets.
FRANCE: For Denis Darzacq, the body is an instrument of social critique with which to explore the constraints and barriers suffered by people marginalised by materialist society.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.Marcus Aurelius
IRAN / AUSTRALIA: Poetically perceptive imagery that engages the layers of displacement, difference and marginality that define what it means to be ‘other’.
USA: Emerging from person crisis, these images unfold a domestic conversation around the paradox of family ties and the quest for redemption.
AUSTRALIA: Raucous, irreverently grandiose images that bring to mind the diverse traditions of William Hogarth’s 18th-century satirical etchings, 19th-century history painting and 20th-century cinema.
COLOMBIA: In addressing the trauma resulting from the ongoing multilateral armed conflict in her country, Erika Diettes focuses not on violence but on bearing witness to the grief of survivors.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Constructing from the catalogue of British oil painting ironic self-portraits that situate the alienated Asian man in the midst of Britain’s aristocratic past.
MEXICO: conceptual and performative images that capture the physical nature and metaphysical possibility of deserts around the world.
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
Alasdair Gray
UNITED KINGDOM: Environmental portraiture exploring family ties across three generations in an area of high socio-economic deprivation.
AUSTRALIA: Photographic tableaux that bring new life to the artefacts of historical and natural-history museums nationally and internationally.
SOUTH AFRICA: With a unique visual signature, Roger Ballen’s existential psychodramas have maintained their uncompromising independence, vividly capturing the imagination of generations over five decades.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.
GHANA: With few resources and no connections into the wider art-world, Nana Frimpong Oduro has developed a distinctive photo-art practice gaining recognition internationally.
AUSTRALIA: a remarkable synthesis of timeless Aboriginal wisdom and radically innovative printmaking that creates pictures of intense poetic beauty.
A picture is a poem without words.
Horace
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
BRAZIL: Spectacular images that extend the concepts of time, space and perspective to explore the complex and multifarious nature of our contemporary world.
UNITED KINGDOM: Portraits exploring the transition from child to adult as it is expressed through modes of dress, social behaviour and body image.
AUSTRALIA: An artist who uses generative computer software to autonomously breed art-works while he is sleeping.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Bohnchang Koo finds in the simplest of objects and surfaces a nuanced expression of traditional Korean values of humility, practicality and acceptance of the imperfect nature of being.
ITALY: Elena Givone uses photography and storytelling to help young refugees imagine a better future – images to inspire hope in the child and compassion in the viewer.
Industry without art is brutality.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
AUSTRALIA: Alasdair Foster, a curator, researcher, and writer who draws on an array of experiences from around the world, offers his perspective on photography – and where it’s going next. Interview by Alexander Strecker.
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.
NETHERLANDS: Knighted by the Dutch Government, Erwin Olaf has earned a world-wide reputation for his immaculately choreographed tableaux that subtly suggest the ultimate uncertainty of being.
UNITED KINGDOM: A forensic examination of plants, zoological specimens, snail trails or nylon stockings that finds poetry in precision and unexpected grandeur in the mundane.
LATIN AMERICA: Three Latino artists of Japanese heritage spend a month photographing in the Land of the Rising Sun. What will their images tell us about their identity?
LATINOAMÉRICA: Tres artistas latinoamericanos de origen japonés pasan un mes fotografiando la Tierra del Sol Naciente. ¿Qué nos dirán sus imágenes acerca de su identidad?
AUSTRALIA: A successful celebrity photographer discovers real inspiration nearer to home when he emigrates from London to make a new life in rural Western Australia.
Story telling reveals meaning without the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
UNITED KINGDOM: Throwing the paradoxes of the domestic environment into sharp relief, Sian Bonnell uses absurdity to critique the socially constructed role of women in the home.
NEW ZEALAND: Ilan Wittenberg’s extensive catalogue of Auckland men captures the uniqueness and imperfection that lays bare the inhumanity of commercially idealised masculinity.
USA: Employing the symbolic and physical qualities of water, Wendy Sacks makes photographs that speak of the complex nature of human relationships, both light and dark.
ARGENTINA: A nocturnal explorer who seeks to communicate the richness of everyday lives and the profound histories of ordinary people.
AUSTRALIA: With a subtle insistence, Marian Drew’s still-life and light-painting images question how we might inhabit and share the natural world in a sustainable and equitable way.
CHINA: Reflections on the meanings and value of family photo archives in traditional homes in Shanxi Province.
Art is not a thing;
it is a way.Elbert Hubbard
UNITED KINGDOM: A collaboration between identical twins drawing on the traditions of European folklore, Gothic Romance and Hollywood cinema, blending British whimsy with a darker psychological ambiguity that lends depth and complexity.
SWITZERLAND: Playing with the nature of visual perception, Dominique Teufen discovers the creative possibilities of the photocopier, photoflash, glossy photographic paper and grey paint.
AUSTRALIA: Rather than illustrating an idea, Christophe Canato’s images propose a paradox that animates questions around gender, sexuality and the transition from child to adult.
~ Talking Pictures ~ 