REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Exploring the liminal space at the threshold of realty and simulation, original and replica, fact and fake.
Cultural Critique
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture, and installation.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: Throwing the paradoxes of domesticity into sharp relief, Sian Bonnell uses absurdity to critique the socially constructed role of women in the home.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: Here, in Part Two of this extended interview with Karen Knorr, we discuss her twenty-first century imagery exploring myth, power, and postcolonial identity at the intersection of nature and culture.
UNITED KINGDOM: Part One of an extended interview with one of the foremost British photographic artists of her generation whose work has shaped debates on class, gender, and heritage since the 1980s.
IRAN / AUSTRALIA: Poetically perceptive imagery that engages the layers of displacement, difference and marginality that define what it means to be ‘other’.
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.
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.
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: Both visceral and vulnerable, Antony Crossfield’s visual language of the body engages with and challenges notions of (im)perfection, masculinity, patriarchy, and sovereignty of the self.
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 psyche.
RUSSIA/GERMANY: personal reflections on the competing connection and constraint of family life, and the untenable expectations enshrined in contemporary iconography of perfect motherhood.
CHINA: Without recourse to AI, Zhang Wei pieces together photographic fragments to create images that suggest the way in which ideological revisionism and Newspeak are deployed to encourage collective amnesia while making conformity seem inevitable.
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: An anthropomorphic metamorphosis in which bees not only evolve to humanoid form but behave with all the perverse complexity of humankind.
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’.
AUSTRALIA: A look back at the career of one of Australia’s best known photographic artists whose prolific practice has spanned five decades.
AUSTRALIA: The only Australian in the celebrated Magnum collective, Trent Parke’s work is acclaimed around the world for its innovation and originality.
SWITZERLAND: Phantom iconographies that trace a collective tourist consciousness bestriding the real and the virtual.
AUSTRALIA: A satirical exploration the artist’s complicit, often uncertain, relationship with the social conventions of being a man.
USA: Spanning six decades, Mariette Pathy Allen’s sensitive portraits have chronicled the transgender and non-binary community.
YEMEN: Caught in the tension between cultural roots and personal identity, these symbolically expressive tableaux map an intimate journey of becoming.
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.
BANGLADESH: A photographer with a strong social conscience and a deep concern for the welfare of the marginalised members of her society.
GUATEMALA: Luis González Palma grew up during thirty years of civil war, but while his images evoke sadness, they neither sentimentalise nor do they counsel despair. Rather they affirm the transcendent nature of the human spirit.
CANADA: Casting a critical but amiable eye over the medium in acts of ‘becoming photography’.
USA: Disrupting the sedimentation of artifice through a bold juxtaposition of the vegetative with the simulation, the object with its image.
GERMANY: What are the implications of an AI generated image winning the world’s largest photography competition? For photography, for society, and for the arts?
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.
AUSTRALIA: Distinctive ways of being and knowing, experienced through a queer perspective on expanded photography.
CANADA: a satirical retelling of familiar stories as Disney princesses, deities, and US presidents tumble into the real world like Alice in reverse.
THAILAND: Scathing satirical tableaux critiquing the country’s turbulent socio-political scene, created by one of Southeast Asia’s leading artists.
USA: One woman’s experience of the stifling control of a patriarchal religious fundamentalism and the processes of artmaking that helped her escape.
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.
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.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Satirical imagery that critiques the impact of colonialism in Korea and its enduring legacy of historical trauma.
ISRAEL: An exploration of the equivocal transition from child to adult in portraits of adolescents in Ukraine, Russia and Spain.
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
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’.