This years FUTURES annual event of will be hosted by CAMERA in Turin. Coinciding with the Turin Contemporary Art Week, from 4 to 6 November, one hundred artists, twenty curators and heads of major international contemporary photography institutions will be guests at CAMERA for the Annual Event of the European FUTURES Photography platform.
The FUTURES Annual Event offers a calendar of events that will take place over the three days, with appointments exclusively for the artists selected in 2022, alternating with other public events. Among these, the most important is the exhibition ON THE VERGE, curated by Giangavino Pazzola, in collaboration with Maja Dyrehauge Gregersen and Marta Szymańska, which will open to the public on Friday 4 November, in CAMERA’s Project Room.
A programme full of events on photography and contemporary visual research that also includes numerous moments of sociability and encounter between the community of artists and the public in collaboration with Centralino, Square Comunicazione and PopUp Date. Aperitifs, DJ sets and music, all under the aegis of contemporary photography, young talent and internationality.
Exhibition that brings together the works of the photographers selected after the call for Futures Photography.
Maija Savolainen, Carlos Alba, Hien Hoang, Emily Graham, Eva Kreuger, Marta Bogdanska, Alexey Shlyk, Valeria Cherchi, Io Sivertsen, Lena Dobrowolska & Teo Ormond Skeaping and Jean Vincent Simonet have been selected by the Festival and will become part of this platform that promotes the mobility and visibility of emerging photographers.
After a year of comings and goings and uncertainties, the current reality is anything but balanced. Waves of counter narratives continue to flourish and subvert our knowledge base, altering all the parameters that marked the sense of being and belonging.
In Europe, the new generations try to promote a new cultural literacy. Although it seems difficult to be able to define a direction in such a cluttered environment. Within this climate of hybrid experimentation, we are witnessing new realities being forged every day. What new ways of doing, narrating and understanding are here to stay, and what can we do with the horizon that lies ahead?
These eleven artists will explore these questions in this exhibition. These photographers were selected through an open call among the authors who are part of the platform Futures Photography, created in 2018. PHotoESPAÑA selected Carlos Alba who joins the rest of the authors selected by the rest of the European institutions that are part of this project.
A hybrid proposal in which, from different media, in dialogue with photography, the impact of technology and photography on Humanity and the natural world is investigated.
Eleonora Agostini, Matteo de Mayda, Leonardo Magrelli, Giulia Parlato and Silvia Rosi are the five photographers chosen this year for Futures by CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia and have been involved in activities along with another seventy artists from various European countries: they have taken part in workshops with photographers of international calibre, as well as numerous professional encounters at the Futures Photography Festival in Amsterdam. And now, thanks to a partnership with five independent spaces around Turin, in Italy, they will be able to showcase their work from the end of November through until mid-March 2022.
The spaces involved in this synergic cooperation process – Almanac Inn, Cripta747, Jest, Mucho Mas! and Recontemporary – are non-profit organisations working towards the promotion of new talents and the languages of contemporary art on the national and international scene. CAMERA asked each of them to host a solo exhibition, respectively by Eleonora Agostini, Matteo De Mayda, Leonardo Magrelli, Giulia Parlato and Silvia Rosi, delegating to the individual organisations the contact with the artists, as well as the conception, development and production of the exhibition.
THE PROGRAMME:
Leonardo Magrelli @ Jest
Via Bernardino Galliari 15/D, 10125, Turin
24 November 2021 – 23 January 2022
Jest is a space given over to photographic culture, operating through the organisation of exhibitions of national and international artists, courses and educational activities, events and presentations. A point of reference and a place of exchange for all lovers of the visual arts, Jest interprets photography both as an expressive and narrative medium, and as a language and democratic communication tool for the construction of a more aware, critical and participatory civil society.
Leonardo Magrelli presents a preview of his most recent work, The Plant, which is still in the expansion phase. The exhibition reflects the potential nature of the evolving work, adopting an open, fragmented and combinatorial approach that invites the viewer to interact with the images, recomposing them within customisable and ever-changing publications. The photographs thus lose their entirety and fixity, presenting a jagged dimension of the image, where individual details alternate, almost to the point of abstraction.
Silvia Rosi @ Recontemporary
Via Gaudenzio Ferrari 12, 10124, Turin
15 December 2021 – 4 February 2022
Founded in 2018 to explore the impact of digital technologies in contemporary art, Recontemporary aims to build an active and participatory community, making audiovisual languages more accessible. Through exhibitions, workshops and laboratories with schools, this cultural reality fosters collaboration and dialogue between institutions and artists on the international scene in order to offer an increasingly complete and up-to-date vision of a constantly evolving art form.
Silvia Rosi’s exhibition, held in the spaces in Via Gaudenzio Ferrari and split into three video works, retraces a key theme from the photographer’s artistic research: the deployment of memory as a means of handing down traditions and the reproduction of movements to stimulate recollection. Rosi thus analyses her family’s origins and their experience of migration from Togo to Italy, taking up the ancestral memories of her own roots.
Giulia Parlato @ Mucho Mas!
Corso Brescia 89, 10154, Turin
14 January – 27 February 2022
Mucho Mas! is an artist-run space founded in 2018 by Luca Vianello and Silvia Mangosio. A place for meetings and experimentation, sharing and research. Since its opening, Mucho Mas! has hosted emerging and mid-career artists, both from Italy and abroad, bringing back a transversal and experimental approach to contemporary imagery.
Diachronicles (2019–2021) is a project by Giulia Parlato that recounts the absence of memory and the central role that archaeology, photography and the museum take on in the fabrication of collective history. The exhibition focuses on a more installation-based approach, telling the story of the intricate and complex world the artist creates through her imagery.
Eleonora Agostini @ Almanac Inn
Via Reggio 13, 10153, Turin
4 February – 4 March 2022
Almanac Inn is a non-profit organisation that aims to develop the artistic research of emerging artists, to promote art as an educational medium and facilitate exchanges between young international artists, local audiences, institutions and art professionals. Founded as a programme parallel to Almanac Projects in London, the platform is delivered as a series of residencies and exhibitions guided by critical research.
A Study On Waitressing is the latest project in which Eleonora Agostini uses photography, text and the moving image as forms of exploration of stage, backstage and performance. The figure of the mother and her job as a waitress serve as a vehicle to address concerns about the visible and the hidden in interpersonal relationships, as well as the roles we play in our daily lives.
Matteo De Mayda @ CRIPTA747
Via Catania 15/F, 10153, Turin
4 February – 28 February 2022
Cripta747 is a non-profit organisation founded in 2008 to support research and contemporary art. It operates at the intersection of artistic practices and cultural debates, offering an annual programme of exhibitions, residencies, talks and events designed to encourage dialogue and exchange between visual arts and other expressive languages, and to offer the public an authentic and unfiltered vision. The projects carried out over the years have brought to Turin a new way of narrating the evolution of contemporary realities through the work of emerging artists and curators, but also of major historical figures. This approach makes Cripta747 a platform for meeting and exchange open to the outside world and to collaboration supporting and promoting artistic production.
Non c’è quiete dopo la tempesta (‘There is no calm after the storm’) is a long-term research project by Matteo De Mayda that weaves together archive and reportage photos, satellite and microscope images, individual testimonies and scientific theories, with the aim of telling the story of storm Vaia and the communities it affected. The project analyses what happened, weighing up the causes, responsibilities̀, consequences and future prospects, while raising greater public awareness of climate change.
The second webinar facilitated by Tania Bohórquez, Mexican visual artist and editor in the frame of Tbilisi Photo Festival X Futures programme! This series of webinars are organized in order to create new artistic and educational opportunities for our talents.
Tania Bohorquez’s webinar “On Representation: Traits Of Violence(s) In Mexico” will be held in English and provided on Friday, November 5th, at 7 PM, Tbilisi Time (CET 4 PM).
Living in societies that have established a culture of death and violation for their own citizens, minorities, and specifically, their women, demand a restructuring of the State in its exercise of power and a reformulation of the concepts of gender, violence, the welfare state, and human rights.
This conversation gives space to the voice of 11 women authors who represent, confront and denounce through their artistic practice diverse social phenomena derived from violence (collateral damage), the objective of this presentation is not to criminalize Mexico as a Necropolitical Nation-State, but to exemplify the gesture of resistance of women around the world.
The selected projects sublimely reinterpret the value of life in opposition to radical actions aimed at inflicting pain, suffering, and death (whether through murder, torture, kidnapping, or the violation of human rights), these visual narratives describe society's acts of resistance against the oppression of illegal drug corporations and sophisticatedly and forcefully denounce economic inequality and its ravages. They redefine the term of identity in the face of the phenomenon of human mobility, unravel the origin of discrimination inherited from the conquest, enunciate the complexity of affective relationships, domestic violence and collective trauma, more than a study of global violence in the Mexican context, it is to emphasize the gesture of these women linked to art who build a force of resistance and reparation, who try to generate new registers, new languages, and images to better understand our human experience.
Tania Bohórquez (Mexico) is a visual artist and editor, she uses photography, video, performance, and writing as her main media. Her work addresses issues of social containment and resilience in vulnerable groups. Her training as a political scientist and visual artist allows her to disseminate, discuss and interpret issues of violence, incest, family histories, drug use, and death, both aesthetically and discursively, exploring the ways in which we sustain ourselves as part of the social fabric.
Furthermore, her most recent projects are born from the intersection between art and other fields of action: as the denunciation and enunciation of taboo stories, from a personal narrative that opens the dialogue in the community; in recent years she has been linked with 150 people, mostly women from different countries, who have survived the phenomenon of sexual violence, she is interested in the multiplicity of stories and representations of trauma in the body and the resignification of pain.
She is currently concluding a project in three penitentiary centers in the south of Mexico with the participation of 82 people deprived of their freedom and is working on chapter III of the project: Incest.
She collaborates as a freelance in the art direction of photography books, she has worked with publishers RM, La Fabrica, Voices Off, Studio Vortex, AkaAka, Hydra among others. Since 2015 she is project manager of Magnum photographer Antoine d'Agata with whom she has collaborated and assisted in his artistic practice as well as in curatorial (exhibition) and editorial projects.
She has collaborated as a cultural manager in the area of education in institutions in southern Mexico (Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Centro de las Artes de San Agustín Etla), as a tutor has been part of the educational program CEACO (Clinics for the Specialization in Contemporary Art in Oaxaca), has been a tutor in government programs of Stimulus for the Creation and Artistic Development, coordinating artists specializing in Visual Arts. Since 2015 she has been part of the tutors of the Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia.
The first webinar facilitated by Pauline Vermare, a photography curator and historian in the frame of Tbilisi Photo Festival X FUTURES program!
This series of webinars are organized in order to create new artistic and educational opportunities for the Futures Talents - the photographers that are part of Futures platform.
Pauline Vermare’s webinar on "Japanese Women Photographers: On Representation And Self-representation" will be held in English and provided on Thursday, October 28th, at 7PM, Tbilisi time (CET 5PM).
Inspired by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert's recently published Histoire Mondiale des femmes photographes, this presentation will investigate the extraordinary bodies of work produced by Japanese women photographers from the 19th century to today. Meant as a complement to a history of Japanese photography that is largely masculine, this talk will reveal the abundance and diversity of historical and contemporary creation by women Japanese photographers since the birth of the medium. Looking into issues of representation and self-representation, this project intends to restore a missing link in the history of Japan and the history of photography.
Pauline Vermare is a photography curator and historian. She is a former cultural director of Magnum Photos in New York, a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). From 2002 to 2009, she worked at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, in Paris. She is the author of numerous interviews and essays on photography. She sits on the boards of the Saul Leiter Foundation and the Catherine Leroy Fund.
Pauline Vermare grew up in France and in Japan. She studied the Japanese language and civilization in Paris. The book and exhibition project on Japanese women photographers she is currently working on — and will be presenting at the Festival — was born out of her contributions to the anthology Histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Textual, 2020) and of the masterclass she was invited to give in turn for the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in February 2021 : “Miyako Ishiuchi, Tsuneko Sasamoto et Toyoko Tokiwa : Trois photographes japonaises dans l’Histoire”.
“When Icarus fell, it was spring” is the main event of the 12th edition of the Tbilisi Photo Festival. The exhibition combines the works of 77 American, European, and Georgian photographers into a nine-screen video installation. The event will be hosted by the Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum from October 27th to November 27th.
Futures is one of the sponsors of the show. Among these 77 artists, there a selection of Futures artists: Younes Mohammad, Kamel Moussa, Eleni Onasoglou, Bebe Blanco Agterberg, Giulia Parlato, Romain Bagnard, Eniko Hosody, Celine Croze, Arguiñe Escandón (& Yann Gross) and Julie Glassberg.
When Icarus fell, it was spring
Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum
M. Kostava str. 14, Satamba hotel, D block., Tbilisi, Georgia
Monday-Friday 13.00-18.30
Free entrance.
More information
Discover the most recent work from five contemporary Irish photographers in this exhibition at The Library Project, presented as part of Futures Photography.
Each year, the Futures members nominate a number of artists to join the project. In 2021, PhotoIreland, as one of the founding members of the platform, proposed five Irish and Ireland-based artists: Aoife Herrity, Audrey Gillespie, Clare Lyons, Jialin Long, and Mark Duffy. Now, you can meet them in an exhibition in Dublin, Ireland.
The exhibition is accessible from 7 October during opening hours at The Library Project and runs until the 24 October.
The Futures Conversations is an exclusive event in which we invite a group of professionals in the field of photography and our Futures artists for a series of portfolio review and coaching sessions. This October, these meetings take place in a private, online environment on 6, 7, 8 and 14 October, 2021.
Starting from the question "What would you like to talk about today?", curators, artists, editors, gallerists, publishers and writers meet with the Futures talents to connect and answer their questions on topics such as: advice for a project, research suggestions, business orientation, writing skills, grants application advice, etc.
The Futures Conversations is part of our annual programme and is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
Launching the 12th edition of the Tbilisi Photo Festival, a group of Futures artists selected by the festival will be showcased on an online screening on 30 September, at 9.30PM (GMT+4).
The artists presented in the event are: Celine Croze (France), Eleni Onasoglou (Greece), Younes Mohammad (Iraq), Josephina Van de Water (Netherlands), Romain Bagnard (France), Kamel Moussa (Tunisia/Belgium), Enikő Hodosy (Hungary), Arguiñe Escandón & Yann Gross (Spain), Giulia Parlato (Italy, based in London), Bebe Blanco Agterberg (Netherlands), and Julie Glassberg (France).
The 12th edition of Tbilisi Photo Festival “Sea Change” is also a consequence of global changes of the past 2 years as it is a reality, that no longer resembles what it was before nor what it could have been.
Bounded in boundless space, confronted with the present, wrapped in raging waves, we join a stream that offers us new opportunities, new visions, and shows us both the past and the future in a whole new way.
The present that is here and where we are — from this point we enter the sea, which is full of change and of which we become part of.
More information about the festival here.
After the launching, the screening will remain available on YouTube:
As part of HYBRIDS: Forging New Realities as Counter-Narrative, Futures presents the two-day conference Hybrids: Forging New Realities as Counter-Narrative. On Thursday 16 and Friday 17 September, artists and member organisations part of the Futures platform and guests from various fields will participate in panel discussions and talks.
Curated by Marina Paulenka and organised in collaboration with our 13 members, we’ve invited artists, curators, researchers, scientists, pedagogues, sociologists, anthropologists, ecologists, and feminists to provide an academic, artistic, and practical look at themes related to understanding hybrid ways of narrating and understanding our reality.
Part of the programme is also a keynote lecture and performance by Morehshin Allahyari on 16 September: The Needed Worlds. She will use personal storytelling and her work as points of departure to weave in topics such as digital colonialism, archival methodologies, and myth-thinking for building the needed worlds.
All talks and panels will take place at Melkweg (entrance at Lijnbaansgracht 234A, 1017 PH), in Amsterdam, but they will also be live-streamed on YouTube (links below).
CONFERENCE
Waves of counter-narratives continue to flood our knowledge base – driven by the sharp turns in our ecological, social and political climates and amplified by a permanent synthesis of virtual and physical dynamics. Within the arts, an atmosphere of trans-disciplinary experimentation across fields and sectors has been welcomed. But what we need is a new cultural literacy and to empower artists to narrate and speculate on possible future scenarios.
During these two days of conference, we will unbox some of the most urgent issues that are triggering a demand for concrete changes. We will discuss how the cultural sector is adapting to support the aforementioned needs and what narratives can be generated to address them.
While collective digital cultures progressively demand more authenticity and ‘truth’ in visual and discursive renderings of self-identity and experience, we will address the intricacies of understanding the embodied ‘self’ in simulated reality, focusing on the roles that our digitally embodied subjectivities play within these simulated cultural landscapes.
We will explore the importance of artistic practices as a potential force addressing social and environmental concerns and discuss the ecological responsibility of the art scene in an age in which the activities of huge corporations shape the vast majority of the processes that dominate the Earth.
Moreover, we will reflect upon European socio-political scenarios, focusing on forms of social resistance and the growing support within a global community. Paying a closer look at the potential of the archives and historicism as a force to generate counter-narratives, we will discuss digital colonialism, archival methodologies, and myth-thinking.
SCHEDULE
16 September (Thursday)
9.30AM – 12.30PM – Workshop: Art in Action - Climate and Social Responsibility, organised by Krzysztof Candrowicz (private activity, exclusive to Futures artists)
2PM – 3.45PM – Panel: The Digitally Mediated Body
4PM – 5.45PM – Panel: Image-making in and outside of institutions
7.30PM – 9PM – Artist talk: Morehshin Allahyari
17 September (Friday)
10.45AM – 12PM – Panel: Belarus in Focus
1PM – 2.45PM – Panel: Counter-narratives: using the past to shape a hybrid future
3PM – 4.45PM – Panel: Love visionary or political activist – what is the role of an ecologically conscious artists or art professional today?
5PM – 6PM – Artist talk: Marina Paulenka in conversation with the artists from the exhibition Hybrids
PROGRAMME DESCRIPTION:
THURSDAY (16 SEPTEMBER)
WORKSHOP: Art in Action – Climate and Social Responsibility (Exclusive to Futures artists)
Co-created by Krzysztof Candrowicz, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Arianna Rinaldo and Erik Vroons
Thursday (16 Sept.), 9.30AM to 12.30PM (CEST)
Art in Action is an interdisciplinary and cross-sector workshop addressed mainly to art professionals working at festivals, museums, art fairs, galleries, independent artists, curators, producers, and individuals working in the visual art sector who wish to enhance their knowledge and practical skills to address social and climatological concerns. The main purpose of the open space meeting is to generate, co-create, exchange, and share new solutions.
The Art in Action - Climate and Social Responsibility project comprises a series of workshops that will explore the importance of artistic practices as a potential force in a cultural reconstruction that needs to be based on real and radical change, socio-environmental responsibility, and participatory practices with the ability to cement the concepts of community, network, and platform.
This activity is exclusive to Futures artists and it wasn't live streamed.
PANEL: The Digitally Mediated Body
Thursday (16 Sept.), 2PM to 3.45PM
How we experience the ‘everyday’ is increasingly shaped by the crumbling boundaries between our physical and digital realities. Our digital embodiment is regulated and represented through performance, self-curation, avatars, algorithmic processes, and online micro-communities. In an emerging hybrid sociocultural environment, which threatens to collapse self, identity, community, and ability, how might our digital and physical bodies be reconciled? How are the narratives of our bodies adapted as an online presence, and what processes are complicit in creating these adaptations? This panel will convene to discuss the intricacies of understanding the embodied ‘self’ in simulated reality, focusing on the roles our digitally embodied subjectivities play within these simulated cultural landscapes—and within collective digital cultures which progressively demand more authenticity and ‘truth’ in visual and discursive renderings of self-identity and experience.
For this panel, we invited Emily Graham (Futures artist), Jan Berger (artist), Bogomir Doringer (artist, curator and head of Education and Research at NXT Museum), Ugo Woatzi (Futures artist) and Aurélie Bayad (Futures artist). The panel will be moderated by Sarah Trottier (external PhD Candidate in Gender Studies and Critical Theory at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University).
PANEL: Image-making in and outside institutions
Thursday (16 Sept.), 4PM to 5.45PM (CEST)
While in parallel a permanent synthesis of online and offline dynamics is changing the way knowledge is produced, spread and consumed, which kind of new forms of showcasing are institutions and alternative platforms presenting? Within this pressure cooker of hybridized transgression, we are witness to an environment of intensive experimentation, with multidisciplinary artists at the forefront. But how successfully is the cultural industry adapting alongside them? And which new forms of narration might we need where we are heading to?
With speakers from multidisciplinary practices, we will discuss their engagement with image-making as curators: how they make difference and switch, inside and outside their institutions.
This panel is a conversation among Rein Deslé (curator at FOMU), Valentine Umansky (International Art curator at Tate), Poulomi Basu (award-winning Indian transmedia artist and activist) and Clarice M. D. Gargard (journalist, filmmaker, writer and co-founder of Lilith Magazine and Lilith Agency). It will be moderated by the artist, writer, founder of Meta/Books and co-founder of Engagement Arts NL, Delphine Bedel.
ARTIST TALK: Morehshin Allahyari - The Needed Worlds (Lecture and Performance)
Organised by Marina Paulenka and Morehshin Allahyari
Thursday (16 Sept.), 7.30PM to 9PM (CEST)
In this lecture and performance, Morehshin Allahyari will use personal storytelling and her work as points of departure to weave in topics such as digital colonialism, archival methodologies, and myth-thinking for building the needed worlds.
Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian-Kurdish media artist, activist, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She uses computer modeling, 3D scanning, and digital fabrication techniques to explore the intersection of art and activism. Inspired by concepts of collective archiving and cultural contradiction, Allahyari’s 3D-printed sculptures, and videos challenge social and gender norms. She wants her work to respond to, resist, and criticize the current political and cultural situation that is experienced on a daily basis. Her work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops at venues throughout the world, including the New Museum, MoMa, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale di Archittectura, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst among many others. She is the recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship (2021), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship, and the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. She has been awarded major commissions by The Shed, Rhizome, New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Liverpool Biennale, and FACT.
FRIDAY (17 SEPTEMBER)
PANEL: Belarus in Focus
Curated by Fotofestiwal Lodz
Friday (17 Sept.), 10.45AM to 12PM (CEST)
The Belarusian revolution has been going on for almost a year. Street protests, brutally suppressed by OMON's special forces, have been replaced with other forms of social resistance that are supposed to weaken the authorities (e.g., residents do not pay electricity bills, taxes, etc.). At the same time, the authorities constantly use all possible forms of repression – from hijacking a plane carrying an influential blogger, Roman Protasevich (May 2021), to short-term arrests for wearing symbolic white, red and white colors.
The government's attack on independent media has been going on since the beginning of the revolution. Currently in Belarus, there are at least 32 journalists in prison, including photojournalists. According to Reporters Without Borders, Belarus has already surpassed Saudi Arabia (31 journalists), Myanmar (30), Syria (14), Turkey (11), Vietnam (17), Iran (14) and Iraq (5).
The most spectacular protests took place in the summer and fall of 2020, and they are also best documented by photojournalists. On the spot, they were photographed by: Nadia Buzhan, Tanya Kapitanova, Olga Shukailo, Vadzim Zamirouski, Vialeta Savitch and others. Most of them have had experiences of arrest, shooting and physical violence. Many of them had to leave the country, those who were working in their profession at the risk of putting their lives and health at risk, or often in hiding.
During this panel, we would like to briefly present the socio-political situation in and talk about the situation of photographers in Belarus and how the international community can support them. The panel invited Maxim Sarychau (Futures artists and photojournalist), Alexey Shlyk (Futures artist), Andrei Liankevich (photojournalist and Managing Director of Month of Photography in Minsk) and Volha Shukaila (photojournalist). The talk will be moderated by Marta Szymańska (Fotofestiwal Lodz).
This talk wasn't live streamed.
PANEL: Counter-narratives: using the past to shape a hybrid future
Friday (17 Sept.), 1PM to 2.45PM (CEST)
What is the potential of the archive to be used for creating counter-narratives? How can history be re-told to suggest other futures? In this panel, we take a starting point in recent events such as the Black Lives Matter and the decolonising movements that have created ripples in academic institutions, gallery worlds and have made a marginalized topic into a public mainstream debate. We will look at the works by Futures artists who are all in some ways using past and present history to change the dominant narrative. We will discuss the possibilities of photography to visually interrupt and challenge national linear narratives by suggesting other hybrid stories and adding multiple layers leading to changing perspectives.
For this panel, we invited the Futures artists Hien Hoang, Mark Duffy and Silvia Rosi, Dr. Rolando Vazquez Melken (Associate Professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and Cluster Chair at the University College Utrecht), Julia Gelezova (cultural producer and curator at PhotoIreland) and Richard Kofi (visual artist, artistic researcher and curator). The panel will be moderated by Dr. Nina Mangalanayagam (artist and a Senior Lecturer in Photography at HDK-Valand Academy, Gothenburg).
PANEL: Lone visionary or political activist – what is the role of an ecologically conscious artist or arts professional today?
Friday (17 Sept.), 3PM to 4.45PM (CEST)
What is the ecological responsibility of the art scene in an age in which, according to a study by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the activities of huge and therefore influential corporations shape the vast majority of the major processes that dominate the Earth. In the Anthropocene era, mankind is undoubtedly shaping the environment, but the question is what are the individual's, and above all an artist's or art professional's, playing field and role, and what impact can they have on the environment while environmental scientists are predicting changes of astonishing amplitude already in the medium term. Is it enough just to minimise the ecological footprint of the art scene, or is it more a matter of political activism and a nuanced approach in which we define our role as a part of the living world rather than as shapers of the planet? What can save us, the acceleration of technological innovation, draconian living standards restrictions and, in either case, what can a creative human being add to all this?
For this panel, we invited Ángel Luis González Fernández (Director of PhotoIreland), Maja Dyrehauge Gregersen (Director of Copenhagen Photo Festival), Maija Annikki Savolainen (Futures artist), and Marta Bogdańska (Futures artist). The panel is moderated by István Virágvölgyi (Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center).
ARTIST TALK: Marina Paulenka in conversation with the HYBRIDS artists
Friday (17 Sept.), 5PM to 6PM (CEST)
In this talk, the curator Marina Paulenka invited for a conversation the artists presented in the exhibition HYBRIDS: Forging New Realities as Counter Narrative. The show investigates the impact of technology and knowledge production on humankind and the natural world through projects by 11 Futures artists: Maija Savolainen, Hien Hoang, Emily Graham, Carlos Alba, Eva Kreuger, Marta Bogdanska, Alexey Shlyk (in collaboration with Ben Van den Berghe), Valeria Cherchi, Io Sivertsen (in collaboration with Ylva Gulpinar, Christa Barlinn Korvald and Signe Rosenlund-Hauglid), Lena Dobrowolska & Teo Ormond-Skeaping, and Jean-Vincent Simonet.
The talk invited the artists Carlos Alba, Eva Kreuger, Alexey Shlyk, Valeria Cherchi, Io Sivertsen, and Jean-Vincent Simonet.
HYBRIDS: Forging New Realities as Counter-Narrative
Curator: Marina Paulenka
Concept and text: Salvatore Vitale and Saba Askary
Exhibition: 10 September - 17 October 2021
Conference: 16 & 17 September 2021
Melkweg Expo
Marnixstraat 409
1017 PJ Amsterdam
HYBRIDS: Forging New Realities as Counter-Narrative is made possible with the support of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.