REPUBLIC OF KOREA: For the Korean artist Atta Kim, the process of making art has been an ongoing philosophical journey of discovery.
Experimental
URUGUAY: Delicately poetic images printed sustainably without inks or chemicals, using naturally occurring plant materials.
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.
GERMANY: Reworking the traditional contact sheet on a grand scale, Thomas Kellner makes architecture dance.
AUSTRALIA: Pat Brassington exploits the legacies of Surrealism while subtly subverting those (primarily masculine) traditions with a clearly feminine and feminist inflection.
AUSTRALIA: An artist painting with light to create richly coloured and emotionally intensified images of the natural and human worlds.
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 and philosophical depth.
USA: Repurposing their household possessions 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.
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.
AUSTRALIA: Photography, digital montage and embroidery combine in images that draw the viewer into the often-disquieting aesthetic of dreams.
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
AUSTRALIA: From cinematic tableaux that evoke the unsettled memory of social rituals and guilty entanglements, to experimental images of landscape caught in a speculative dialogue between subjective experience and philosophical reflection.
USA: An artist whose creative practice is as feisty as it is experimental, transforming her external appearance into visual metaphors of inner dissent.
UKRAINE: An elegy on a coming of age overwhelmed by the coming of war, of the landscapes of youth laid waste.
CUBA/USA: Landscapes aesthetically reconceived as near and far, vista and texture marry in the moment.
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.
SWITZERLAND: Playing with the nature of visual perception, Dominique Teufen discovers the creative possibilities of the photocopier, photoflash, glossy photographic paper and grey paint.
ARGENTINA: An artist and inventor who builds cameras to capture both space and time: from brooding art deco architecture to mind-bending aerial imagery and the world’s longest continuous photographic negative.
URUGUAY: An artist, chemist, craftsman, essayist, poet, and teacher, who imbues photography with a newfound physical and philosophical dimension.
AUSTRALIA: Integrating science and aesthetics, David Malin’s photographs changed the way we think about the universe.
NORWAY: Images that seek to envision personal psychology and shared trauma suggesting an abstract and affective sense of what lies beyond that which can be seen but must be felt.
CANADA: Experimental photographic techniques that poignantly evoke the subtle grandeur and ultimate fragility of the Arctic region.
POLAND / AUSTRALIA: Blending the chemistries of photography and vegetative decay to create hauntingly beautiful images exploring themes around memory, time, habitat, health, and inner contemplation.
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.
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?
RUSSIA: An artistic partnership with experimentation at the heart of a creative process that blends the sensual and the conceptual.
SPAIN: an artist who is also a scientist, harnessing scientific technologies to visualise the invisible.
MEXICO: Harnessing artificial intelligence to create photo-based images that may well come closer to the true nature human visual perception than will ever be possible with a camera.
AUSTRALIA: Luminous yet elusive images that navigate the gulf between the world of the senses and the interior realm of the self.
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.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
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’.
PORTUGAL: The long-running annual festival of photography in Braga takes a lively approach to integrating imagery and architecture, concept and conviviality that has sustained the engaging freshness that is the hallmark of the event.
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.
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.
BRAZIL: a festival pioneering the use of screen-based technologies to reach out from the metropolitan art institutions to connect with communities in the poorest districts of the urban margins: to engage, to educate and to empower.
UNITED KINGDOM: A festival that celebrates its sense of place and community while engaging the leading edge of technological possibility and international innovation.