The Photoworks Festival – Propositions for Alternative Narratives – challenges what a photography festival is and who it can be for and takes place from 24 September to 25 October 2020.
A rethink and a reshaping of one of the UK’s longest running photography festivals – Brighton Photo Biennial – the Photoworks Festival can be experienced three ways; via a printed ‘festival in a box’, online in a digital festival hub, and through a major presentation of outdoor exhibitions on billboards spanning Brighton & Hove.
We are pleased to share the full artist list with you:
Farah Al Qasimi, Lotte Andersen, Poulomi Basu, Roger Eberhard, Ivars Grāvlejs, Pixy Liao, Alix Marie, Ronan McKenzie, Sethembile Msezane, Alberta Whittle, Guanyu Xu.
The artists – many of whom will show work for the first time in the UK – intentionally set out to explore a more nuanced perspective on a subject or topic, often using work which blurs the lines between mediums.
The programme ranges from the dazzling Afrofuturist inspired works of Alberta Whittle, to Ivar Grāvlejs poetic compositions of the everyday captured in supermarket checkout-lines, and Farah Al Qasimi’s brightly coloured observations of postcolonial structures of power and gender in the Gulf region. These works will sit alongside the poignant telling of a cross cultural relationship as experienced by Pixy Liao. The sites of past borders as observed by Roger Eberhard, and Poulomi Basu’s exploration of the war between the government and the Maoist insurgent group People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army in India feature. Alix Marie meanwhile, asks us to consider the body’s tactility and capacity to provoke emotions when transferred to the photographic medium. Sethembile Msezane’s interdisciplinary practice combines photography, film, sculpture, and drawing to explore issues focused on spirituality, politics and African knowledge systems. Ronan McKenzie’s project explores the colour brown as a concept and a starting point. Lotte Andersen’s work will bridge the online, and the real life, using collage, photography and text her flyer displayed outdoors and in the ‘festival in a box’ will act as an invitation to an online work taking place in October.
Photoworks Festival is for everyone. It can be experienced as an intimate viewing experience at home or in your community space, outside across one of the UK’s most vibrant cities or online, via engaging interactions, new dialogues and conversation and exchange. Find our more here!
