MEXICO: Obscure rituals that blend the contemporary with the timeless, the personal with the collective, to suggest imaginary states and real-world paradoxes.
Staged
NORWAY: Images that draw on overlapping histories of cultural suppression, religious conversion, and contested identity to weave ancient Arctic culture with contemporary ecology.
BELGIUM: Contemporary images that evoke the past while looking to the future.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture, and installation.
AUSTRALIA: An artist painting with light to create richly coloured and emotionally intensified images of the natural and human worlds.
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.
RUSSIA / ESTONIA: An artist who uses ritual and imagination to rediscover her untamed inner self and resist the growing tides of unfreedom.
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.
MEXICO: conceptual and performative images that capture the physical nature and metaphysical possibility of deserts around the world.
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.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: Voted one of the top three physique photographers in Europe in the fifties and sixties, Frank Morton published under the professional name of Hoffman of Edinburgh. This article takes a double historical perspective combining his interview made in 1986 and my own present-day reflection on his life and work, three and a half decades after his death.
RUSSIA / SERBIA: Three visions of the future: current harbingers of isolation, relics of a forgotten race into space, and a speculative evocation of post-human bio-augmentation…
UNITED KINGDOM: Latter-day descendants meticulously restaged in the pose of a painting or photograph of an historically significant predecessor, with some surprising discoveries.
BOLIVIA: An imaginative exploration of personal and collective identity amid the syncretic interplay of indigenous and colonising cultures of the Andes.
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: An unconventional approach to portraiture that subverts clichés and stereotypes to emphasise the value of real human relationships over fantasy or caricature.
IRAN: Deeply poetic imagery that speaks to complexity of grieving through the simple arrangement of objects, of alienation through the filtering of daily denial.
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.
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.
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: Quiet meditations on the confluence of memory and experience that seek the redemptive potential of landscape to translate space into place and loneliness into restorative solitude.
PERU: Christian Fuchs recreates his aristocratic forebears in performances for the camera that are as much psychological and metaphysical as visually mimetic.
RUSSIA/GERMANY: personal reflections on the competing connection and constraint of family life, and the untenable expectations enshrined in contemporary iconography of perfect motherhood.
GERMANY: The Zeitgeist evoked in radiantly melancholic portraits in which the artist paints on the black of night with light itself.
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.
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.
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.
SWITZERLAND: Playing with the nature of visual perception, Dominique Teufen discovers the creative possibilities of the photocopier, photoflash, glossy photographic paper and grey paint.
UNITED KINGDOM: An artist, activist, and co-creator of a potent form of psychological therapy centred on photography.
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
YEMEN: Caught in the tension between cultural roots and personal identity, these symbolically expressive tableaux map an intimate journey of becoming.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Colourful, painstakingly created installations that envision the artist’s innermost thoughts and feelings through metaphor and fable.
PUERTO RICO: Cinematic images evoking the narrative possibilities that haunt the Caribbean night.
AUSTRALIA: Occult rituals that combine mysticism and modern technology, embodying the personal and the cosmic, the esoteric and the erotic.
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.
SPAIN: Images that borrow the narrative or visual architecture of other stories, other pictures, animating each with the personal in ways that evoke new meaning.
AUSTRALIA: Japanese myth and sensual metaphor reflecting upon the ebb and flow of loves now unrequited.
CHINA: breaking with Chinese art traditions that eschew the nude, performative images that express the importance of trust, empathy, and personal authenticity.
RUSSIA: An artistic partnership with experimentation at the heart of a creative process that blends the sensual and the conceptual.
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.
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’.
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
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.
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.
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.
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.
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.