VIETNAM: Focusing on people at the margins of society, these relaxed domestic moments explore, without sensationalism, the intimate companionship that is a foundation of our shared human experience.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
BRAZIL: a festival pioneering the use of screen-based technologies to reach out from the metropolitan art institutions to engage with communities in the poorest districts of the urban margins: to engage, to educate and to empower.
AUSTRALIA: Photography, digital montage and embroidery combine in images that draw the viewer into the often-disquieting aesthetic of dreams.
CAMBODIA: With a focus on discovery, education and sharing, this festival and workshop program provides a generous and egalitarian environment in which to learn new skills, exchange ideas and establish new friendships.
UNITED KINGDOM: Quintessentially British in their rigorous formality, these allegorical tableaux grow from the personal experience of an intergenerational life partnership condemned to the margins of ‘otherness’.
NEW ZEALAND: Located on the rim of the Pacific, this is a festival of and by the people: stimulating creativity, encouraging participation and celebrating the many and diverse expressions of human imagination.
INDIA: Described as “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”, Pushpamala N’s pioneering and influential feminist–conceptual photographic performance works seek to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse in India.
AUSTRALIA: In a world that all too often seeks to segregate professionals from amateurs, celebrities from ordinary people, Head On provides an alternative based on mutual respect and a passion for photographic creativity.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Alfred North Whitehead
SWEDEN: A simple pinhole camera used to create images that evoke the primordial and the post-apocalyptic; a tension between humankind and the rest of nature.
THAILAND: With a focus on Asian documentary practice, this festival maintained its independence by building not only the event but also a new photography centre through the work and solidarity of photographers themselves.
UNITED KINGDOM: Whimsical, poignant, fantastical, dark… these family photos restage the complex nature of parenting and the domestic dynamic, from ageing and the shift in mutual dependence, to ultimate departure.
ARGENTINA: One of the world’s longest running photographic festivals, Festival de la Luz it is both a celebration of photography as a means of enlightenment and an egalitarian meeting of diverse people and cultures.
USA: Repurposing their household possession to create a mandala or build a spaceship, Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen use photography, video, performance and installation to explore the paradoxes of the American Dream.
Creativity is contagious, pass it on.
Albert Einstein
UNITED KINGDOM: A festival that celebrates its sense of place and community while engaging the leading edge of technological possibility and international innovation.
BANGLADESH: A photographer with a strong social conscience and a deep concern for the welfare of the marginalised members of her society.
LITHUANIA: Set in the historical centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life, KAUNAS PHOTO is a festival that sits at the intersection of tradition and innovation, all laced with a dash of humour.
AUSTRALIA: An unconventional approach to portraiture that subverts clichés and stereotypes to emphasise the value of real human relationships over fantasy or caricature.
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.
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
Chinese proverb
AUSTRALIA: the stark reality of global warming given particular poignancy by an artist who identifies with the melting icebergs.
ARGENTINA: Memories of the Dirty War starkly visualised by one of the survivors of the regime’s Clandestine Centres of Detention and Torture.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture and installation.
USA: Emerging from person crisis, these images unfold a domestic conversation around the paradox of family ties and the quest for redemption.
SOUTH AFRICA: Capturing the spirit of a new creative generation, fighting for gender equality and exposing the continuing plight of the working poor.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Cesar A. Cruz
URUGUAY: An artist, chemist, craftsman, essayist, poet, and teacher, who imbues photography with a newfound physical and philosophical dimension.
AUSTRALIA: Documenting the dysfunctional, the dispossessed, and the dogged hope that lingers amid the ashes of failure.
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
PERU: Art and Nature entangle the body in images that speak of the camouflage adopted by an outsider.
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
Goethe
MEXICO: Stories of an irrepressible archaeology and exhausted modernism; of rampant urban expansion and sublime natural grandeur.
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.
BRAZIL: Evocative images of the rural and indigenous peoples of this vast country, captured by one of its most distinguished visual poets.
NEW ZEALAND: Images of ephemeral land-art projects that symbolise the interdependence of natural systems that connect us all in the web of life.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.
UNITED KINGDOM: Environmental portraiture exploring family ties across three generations in an area of high socio-economic deprivation.
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
AUSTRALIA: An artist who uses generative computer software to autonomously breed art-works while he is sleeping.
AUSTRALIA: In a career spanning six decades, this celebrated aerial photographer has captured the magnificence of the Great Southern Continent.
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