RUSSIA: An artistic partnership with experimentation at the heart of a creative process that blends the sensual and the conceptual.
Staged
JAPAN: The photo-booth, the class portrait, the high-street studio, the job-applicant’s mugshot… hundreds of photographs and beneath them a single artist–model.
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.
UKRAINE: Visualising the journey towards self-realisation that dances between empathic attunement and the artist’s own interior sensibility.
RUSSIA / SPAIN: Alisa Sibirskaya creates photographic tableaux echoing themes from the Dutch Baroque and Siberian folktales that capture the luminous glow of a bygone age.
CANADA: a satirical retelling of familiar stories as Disney princesses, deities, and US presidents tumble into the real world like Alice in reverse.
FINLAND / USA: After five decades re-imagining his body as something malleable and re-interpretable, Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s images remain as vital as those of his youth, and as refreshingly original.
TAIWAN / USA: Haunting images inspired by the migrant’s ongoing negotiation of memory, perception, and identity.
MEXICO: Named one of the top twenty talents worldwide by FOAM magazine, Diego Moreno’s monsters have much to show us about familial love and about domestic abuse.
AUSTRALIA: Fables that are at once personal and universal, familial and public, recounting childhood perspicacity and adult frailty far the here and now.
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.
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.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: For the Korean artist Atta Kim, the process of making art has been an ongoing philosophical journey of discovery.
NEW ZEALAND / AUSTRALIA: A visual storyteller exploring the interior world of the mind through the shared imagination of the community.
MEXICO: Obscure rituals that blend the contemporary with the timeless, the personal with the collective, to suggest imaginary states and real-world paradoxes.
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’.
BELGIUM: Contemporary images that evoke the past while looking to the future.
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
CANADA: Combining humour with cultural critique; history with psychology, Diana Thorneycroft constructs visual stories of the anxiety and contradiction embedded in the dark subsoil of Canadian national mythology.
AUSTRALIA: An artist painting with light to create richly coloured and emotionally intensified images of the natural and human worlds.
RUSSIA: A festival that engages the viewer in a rich visual dialogue made vibrant by its openhearted warmth, aesthetic vigour, and intelligent enthusiasm for the medium.
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.
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.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture and installation.
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.