University of Brighton, School of Art and Media
Morning venue: University of Brighton, 154 Edward Street, BN2 0JG
Afternoon venue: University of Brighton, 58–67 Grand Parade, BN2 0JY
Tickets: Standard: £15 / concession £10 / supporter £25 / Photoworks Friends £0
Photoworks and the Photography Research Group at the University of Brighton have co-produced a conference in response to the festival theme Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams which explores geographical, psychological and metaphysical currents within photography.
A dynamic programme of papers and panels will share responses to the fragile states of personal and collective geographies, addressing anxieties and fractured realities, opening speculative spaces of care, resistance, and reimagining. The event aims to support the development of new research locating photography within various fields of study. These include ecological entanglements and cosmotechnics, geological and technological anxieties, looking at how histories, identities, futures and place are interconnected.
Speakers: Holly Birtles, Annebella Pollen, Duncan Wooldridge, Aindreas Scholz, Zoe Childerley, Diane Smyth, Feiyi Wen, Eugénie Shinkle, Tsz Wai Pun,Coşkun Güçlü, Nieves Mingueza, Rachel Gillies, Mireia Ludevid, Jermaine Francis, Deborah Ireland, Jane Robb, Fergus Heron, Liza Faktor, Aliki Braine, Julia Winckler, Stephen Bull
Tickets are free for Photoworks Friends. If you’re already a Photoworks Friend, you can email friends@photoworks.org.uk to book your place.
After the conference join us to celebrate the launch of Photoworks Festival at our exhibition openings and launch party.
Discover the line-up:
Morning
Duncan Woolridge in conversation with
Annebella Pollen
As printing technologies facilitate architectural-scale interventions and large-scale visual spectacle, this talk explores the potential for photography to rethink our relationships to public space. Artist, writer and curator Duncan Woolridge discusses their practice with Annebella Pollen, Professor of Visual and Material Culture at the University of Brighton.
Panel: Fergus Heron & Aliki Braine
Chaired by Stephen Bull
Where Fergus Heron asks what it means to picture nature as a networked, more-than-human system, Aliki Braine interrogates the material and compositional structures through which landscape has been constructed as an image in the first place. Chaired by Stephen Bull, the session brings these two positions into conversation, questioning how photographic practice can both inhabit and unsettle the ways we picture the natural world.
Fighting Fish, developed on the Thames and later the Adyar and Cooum rivers in Chennai, investigates ecological destruction, myth, and memory through performance, analogue photography, and AI-generated imagery. Birtles reimagines polluted rivers as sites of layered truth; where ecological fact and mythology intertwine to surface environmental grief, governmental neglect and the memory of place.
“Roots: Forests, Rewilding and Ways of Being” is an interdisciplinary curatorial and artistic research examining the vital role of forest ecosystems, biodiversity, and interdependence in preventing climate collapse. Through engagement with visual and sound art, science and traditional ecological knowledge, it proposes responsive programming rather than a static exhibition.
The Ecological Wetroom™: Anna Atkins, Climate-Adapted Cyanotype and Photography Beyond Extraction
The Ecological Wetroom™ reimagines analogue photography through ecological care, transforming the traditional darkroom into a living system where water, plants, chemistry and scientific research converge to reduce the environmental footprint of cyanotype practice.
Beneath the Waves: Charting the Anxious Shore
Beneath the Waves investigates the English Channel coastline as a site of compounding instabilities — geological, political and ecological, asking what photographic practice can offer at a threshold that is simultaneously political frontier, fragile ecosystem and site of collective dreaming.
Afternoon
Jermaine Francis and Deborah Ireland in conversation
Jermaine Francis is a lens-based artist working primarily with photography and video. Debbie Ireland is a freelance curator and author specialising in the history of photography, with a particular interest in travel photography.
Followed by Q&A with the Photoworks curatorial team.
Panel: Nieves Mingueza, Rachel Gillies, Mireia Ludevid
Chaired by Julia Winckler
This panel brings together three practices that rework the archive: Rachel Gillies abstracts images from the British Antarctic Survey archive; Nieves Mingueza uses it to explore climate grief; Mireia Ludevid activates a family archive to challenge the affective legacies of Francoist hydroelectric policy. The panel presents three separate approaches to disrupting the archive, each interrogating grief, uncertainty, and counter-narratives that official records cannot hold.
A live, interactive “choose your own path” performance exploring land use, land access, and the purpose and burden of collecting and owning resources. Framed around an award-winning childhood geological specimen collection, this playful interrogation between gamified past and present selves informs the key questions of the speaker’s PhD research in Art and Design at De Montfort University.
Featuring some of the artists included in the publication, this talk explores the themes of the 2026 Photoworks Annual. Cosmophotographies applies Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics to photography, asking what ideology is embedded in the camera and its images, and whether the disastrous relationship with the world that emerged with European modernity can be envisaged differently.
