The photo festival looked at topics that ranged from ufology to gender transition, from family abuse to Albania’s search for a new identity, from gay porn magazines to environmental crisis
Gender identities, tensions between natural and artificial, confusion between real and virtual, climate anxieties, transhumanism, etc. The BIP biennial portrays the world entering unchartered, unruly but often exciting territories
Photographer Max Pinckers collaborated with Mau Mau war veterans and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities to give a visual existence to the fight for independence from British colonial rule in the 1950s
Inspired by the Dieselgate scandal, the work recontextualizes the industry’s own visual marketing tools to reveal the stark contrast between its professed environmental narrative and actual practices
War does not only manifest itself as a military conflict on battlefields with clear physical fronts, but it also appears more abstractly in our society in various places. I Died 22 Times shows and questions the way our culture deals with warfare outside real battlefields
The series combines speculative elements with rigorous scientific material to explore the impact that biotechnology, commercial logic, legislation and socio-political values can have on our concept of “nature”
Photography and video games are products of the industrial, military and ideological apparatus of the West and embody its cultural biases. Both are characterised by the presence of a code, which conditions the user’s freedom, and by the link with exploitation processes typical of late capitalism that monetise the investment of time and energy of players/photographers. Playing then becomes an act of exploration, deconstruction and negotiation…
How do you document, with honesty and integrity, a country where the wrong colour combination or the wrong friends can get you into trouble?
Foto/Industria examines specific aspects of the relationship between games and industry, investigating the implications and repercussions in the fields of psychology, architecture, economics, history, ecology, politics, and even the deepest drives of the human soul
“The project contests the myths that sanitise the secondhand clothing trade – with its reassuring claims to charity, sustainability and reuse. In their place, it sets out to reveal the racist ideology that treats the Global South as a waste management solution”
Daniel Szalai uses animals to explore our relationship with nature and technology
Chatting with the artist about the role that the digital can play to both preserve and exploit cultural heritage, deliberately training the data of an AI device in order to imbue it with underrepresented perspectives and struggling with the Man vs Nature dichotomy
The artists developed documented and fictional material of the Cyprus buffer zone, Varosha, and British military bases, as well as areas of bicommunal activity and farming. These spaces can appear extremely defined and frozen, in part through military and surveillance architecture…
The essays collected investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism’s violence—and if so, how?
With their bare interiors, desolate landscapes and their absence of human figures and actions, the photos reveal the legacies of conflicts, violent erasures and other collective traumas in Syria, Armenia and elsewhere around the world
In 1970, a group of Buddhist monks protested against industrial pollution by traveling to factories with the objective of cursing factory owners to death
The exciting city of Bologna and a biennial dedicated to photography on Industry and Work. Say no more, […]
If you’re curious about Italian photographers’ perspective on contemporary society, here’s a brisk walk through the show…
“The recreational and tourist industry is constantly producing new sports models and trends which show a kind of detachment from the landscape context. Events that take place in a landscape that is in itself fragile due to its topographical configuration, such as glaciers, are only related to the place through the type of sporting activity practicised there”
Richard Mosse subverts equipment designed for surveillance in order to challenge documentary tropes and force us to look anew at images we’ve seen again and again
A book that unpacks the notion of the mass image through the lens of affective, representational, political, logistical and material economies
Hannah Fletcher is a photographer without a camera. She combines techniques from the past and experiments to innovate and improve photographic processes
A fun book that targets an audience of art viewers without the usual arty mumbo jumbo. There’s humour throughout the pages and there’s inventiveness in the categories Cotton chose to classify contemporary photography art
How contemporary photographers of African origin are interrogating ideas of ‘Africanness’
How society archives human DNA in the form of slivers of umbilical cord, dental samples and sperm, DNA of animals already extinct in the wild, plant seeds, vast quantities of digital data…
Interview with a photographer, bioartist and biology student whose works make visible the plight of endangered mammals in the Baltic sea, the drop in pollinator populations in the Arctic and other uncomfortable realities
Where i saw VR tapestry, learnt about Russian military deception and discovered that ravens are even smarter than i thought
Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, Helfand examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes
Linke’s exhibition scrutinises seabed mining and other forms of extraction and the effects they might have on marine life and communities
Matthieu Gafsou has spent 4 years researching transhumanism, a movement looking towards science and technology to drastically improve human cognitive, mental and physical performances
The cutting-edge research is given a human face and even if we don’t fully understand the processes at work, the pictures allow us to perceive how in this world of the tiniest particles the biggest connections are searched for
A festival dedicated to art by young talents, independent research, experimentation and unconventional curatorial gestures
Through visual art, photography and video installations, the exhibition ‘Street Dreams: How Hiphop took over Fashion’ show the looks, the codes and the creative force of hip hop
Photographer Salvatore Vitale explores Switzerland’s security measures by focusing on “matter-of-fact” types of instructions, protocols, bureaucracies and clear-cut solutions which he visualizes in photographs, diagrams, and graphical illustrations
Windowless walls, masses of concrete, eroded hills, polluted water sources, etc. The photographer documents the impact that the economic boom is having on urban areas and on the fragile Amazonian ecosystem
The promise of the exhibition is bold: explain to us that incarceration is our shared responsibility because “We too are the punishers”
Paul Lowe managed to cram into one book some 200 years of history, technology, art, society without ever making it look laborious nor indigestible
Whether his locations are far-flung (ranging from the Antarctic to the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia) or closer to home, Goiris makes them look uncannily suspended, as if they came from another planet
Presenting work from the earliest through to the most contemporary of photographers, Making It Up: Photographic Fictions challenges the idea that ‘the camera never lies’
Kinshasa is a megacity with some twelve million inhabitants but barely any art market or art support. Local artists have thus developed creative, DIY solutions to make the best of the materials available around them