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.
Social Critique
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.
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.
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
BANGLADESH: Asia’s longest-running photo festival, founded on a powerful vision of social justice and driven by a tenacious dynamism, it forms one arm of a tripartite structure including a news picture agency and a media school.
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’.
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.
BANGLADESH: A photographer with a strong social conscience and a deep concern for the welfare of the marginalised members of her society.
USA: Emerging from person crisis, these images unfold a domestic conversation around the paradox of family ties and the quest for redemption.
AUSTRALIA: Documenting the dysfunctional, the dispossessed, and the dogged hope that lingers amid the ashes of failure.
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.