Month: July 2024

At the edge of the everyday world celebrates over 20 years of work by internationally acclaimed Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi. She is best known for finding beauty in the everyday, her work characterised by a poetic or dreamlike quality that imbues mundane scenes and objects with a sense of wonder and transcendence.

Drawing upon work made over two decades, the exhibition reflects upon the fragile beauty of the world we collectively inhabit. From Hokkaido’s snowy landscapes to home life during the Covid pandemic, Kawauchi captures the connections and continuity of life on this planet we call home. 

Works presented will include: Illuminance, Ametsuchi and M/E. The title is taken from an essay written by Masatake Shinohara for Aperture in 2021.

About Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi was born in 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. In 2001, she simultaneously published three books – Utatane, Hanabi and Hanako – leading to critical acclaim. She has subsequently published multiple books, including: Aila (2005), the eyes, the ears and Cui Cui (all 2005), Illuminance (2011), Ametsuchi (2013), The River Embraced Me (2016) and M/E On this sphere Endlessly interlinking (2022). 

Kawauchi has held multiple solo exhibitions, including:  Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris, 2005), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, 2006), Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2012), Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto (2016) and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2022). 

She has received multiple awards, including: the Kumara Ihei Photography Award (2002), the Infinity Award from the International Centre of Photography New York (2009), and the Sony Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award (2023). 

More information: https://arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/rinkokawauchi/

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The archiving impulse is one that attempts to trace, document, and make sense of the world. In response to the photographic archives of Hong Kong held by the University of Bristol and the University of Hong Kong, artists Billy H.C. Kwok, Jay Lau, and Lau Wai have developed new projects that interpret the archival stories of their home city, while revealing the gaps that exist. The works created explore how Hong Kong has always been a place of duality: both real and imagined, public and private, fact and fiction. This exhibition is produced by WMA, in collaboration with the Royal Photographic Society and the Hong Kong History Centre at the University of Bristol. 

Billy H.C. Kwok transforms basic visual art elements into a language for AI bots, using colour, composition, and perspective in photography as commands. Images generated by AI expand the photo archive of Tiger Balm Garden, a garden of great social and historical significance built in colonial Hong Kong during the 1930s. In this newly commissioned work, new characters and scenarios are introduced, at times animated, uncovering facts and establishing connections beyond our knowledge and imagination. Kwok’s back-and-forth communication with AI also points to the tug of war between the artist’s vision and AI’s self-taught abilities, the individual and the public attribution to big data, as well as the deviation from truth and illusion.

Lau Wai will present The Memories of Tomorrow (2018) which examines Hollywood’s often orientalist depiction of Hong Kong, from the 1950s to the present day. The work combines film stills alongside travel postcards, historical photographs and computer generated imagery, to reveal the tensions of a city held between both fiction and reality. 

Jay Lau grew up surrounded by memories, photographs and stories of old Hong Kong all of which occurred before he was born. Here, Lau has created woodblocks from overlooked, everyday images within the archives, such as building and construction work, and crowds of everyday citizens, and produced printed fabrics. He shows Hong Kong and its community always in flux, reflecting his own sense of detachment from its monumental histories, returning the digitally stored archival images to the physical realm.

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In 2011, artist Nigel Poor started volunteering at San Quentin State Prison teaching a history of photography class through the Prison University Project. This led to a long-term collaboration, working with a group of men to explore and respond to San Quentin’s prison archive. Through her images and accompanying stories, viewers are led on a journey that unpacks both the long history of San Quentin Prison, as well as the challenges of representation in relation to incarcerated communities. 

Alongside this exhibition, Bristol Photo Festival has been developing a long-term collaborative project in prisons across the region. Some of the outcomes of this project will be on display as part of the exhibition. 

About Nigel Poor 

Nigel Poor is an artist living and working in the Bay Area, California. For many years her work has explored the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. Her work has been shown at many institutions including, The San Jose Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, Friends of Photography, SF Camerawork, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Since 2011 she has been working on creative projects with incarcerated collaborators at San Quentin Prison, including the internationally-acclaimed podcast Ear Hustle (now downloaded over 75 million times). Poor is also a Professor of Photography at California State University.

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The agro-industrial region of Almería (Andalusia, Spain) is known locally as ‘The Sea of Plastic’ due to the vast network of greenhouses that dominate the landscape. It is an area dedicated to the production of out-of-season vegetables, often exported to northern European countries, including the United Kingdom. Bandia Ribeira’s work focuses on the often-invisible communities of workers who find themselves caught in a system where lax labour and environmental regulations fuel cycles of exploitation and segregation. 

About Bandia Ribeira

Bandia Ribeira is a key emerging figure within Spanish photography, best known for her long-term, research-led approach. She has produced exhibitions at a number of festivals across Spain, including Ffoco (Festival de Fotografia da Coruña), Bienal de Lalín Pintor Laxeiro, Encuentro de Creación Fotográfica de Andalucía & Festival Internacional de Cine Curtocircuito. In 2023, Ribeira received a Fulbright fellowship to conduct research in the U.S.A, investigating the Farm Security Administration photographic collection at the Library of Congress. This period informed her long-term research of people and places shaped by agricultural industries. In 2024, Ribeira was selected by the British Journal of Photography for their influential ‘Ones to Watch’ list.

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Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Shergold operated a commercial photography studio in Bristol, using glass plate negatives – an unusually antiquated technique popular in the 1910s – to create highly stylised portraits of actors as well as of his local community. In Shergold’s studio, Bristol’s working class residents were styled to appear as Hollywood film stars. Yet little is known of Shergold. After his death, his images largely disappeared from view, falling into the possession of private collectors in the U.S., The Netherlands, as well as Bristol. From the latter collection, curator and photo historian Hedy van Erp has curated the first known exhibition of Shergold’s work. This exhibition takes place close to the site of his original studio and is supported by Marcel Brent (Vintage Photographs) and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

About Hedy Van Erp

Hedy van Erp is a Dutch photo historian, author and curator of photography and video art. She develops exhibitions and concepts for museums, galleries and photo festivals. She has curated exhibitions for, among others, the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam; Photo Museum The Hague, the English National Media Museum; the Science Museum, London; the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Museum Kranenburgh, the National Maritime Museum and the Hermitage in Amsterdam. Supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Van Erp researched Dutch photo archives in private collections in 2023.

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Since 2008, Andrew Jackson has been developing an ongoing trilogy of projects exploring the intergenerational experience of Britain’s Caribbean diaspora. Divided into three chapters with questions of family, community and inheritance at its core, it begins with Jackson’s own reflection on his parents’ story, who arrived in England as part of the Windrush generation. Next, it follows a group of young men from Handsworth, Birmingham, from the 2008 financial crash to the hostile environment of post-Brexit Britain. The final chapter will see Jackson return to Jamaica, exploring the psychological impact of migration, home and belonging. 

About Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson is a British/Canadian photographer and artist based between Montréal, Canada and the UK. His practice focuses on notions of family, transnational migration, displacement, trauma, war, and collective memory. He is an Associate Lecturer at the London College of Communication and has previously served on the board of the Photo Ethics Centre. In 2018, he was selected to be the Light Work / Autograph ABP artist-in-residence in Syracuse, New York. His works are held in multiple permanent collections, including: the United Kingdom Government Art Collection, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, New Walsall Art Gallery, Rugby Museum & Art Gallery, Cadbury Trust, Autograph ABP, and Light Work Collection, New York.

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In 2009, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay visited the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, to view archival photographs of Palestine, taken between 1947 and 1950. The images document the forced displacement of the Palestinian population – an event commonly known as the ‘Nakba’. Azoulay was instructed that the archival images could not be reproduced or exhibited unless strict conditions were met, limiting the free interpretation of the material and ultimately of history itself. In response, Azoulay decided to draw the photographs, creating a record that exists beyond the control of official narratives and archives.

About Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay holds a dual appointment in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is a film essayist and independent curator of archives and exhibitions. Her research and recent book, Potential History (Verso, 2019), concern key political concepts/institutions: archive, sovereignty, plunder, art, human rights, return and repair. Potential history, a concept and an approach she has developed over the last decade, has far-reaching implications for the fields of political theory, archival formations, and photography studies as well as for the reversal of imperial violence. 

Azoulay studied at the Université Paris VIII and received her DEA from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and PhD from Tel Aviv University’s Cohn Institute. Her books include Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and (with Adi Ophir) The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford, 2012). Among her films are Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012). Her exhibitions include Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016), and Act of State 1967-2007, (Centre Pompidou, 2016; Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa Fotográfico, 2020).

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For his first solo exhibition in the UK, Inuuteq Storch will present two bodies of work. Firstly, Porcelain Souls, a collection of photographs and letters created by his parents during a period of geographic separation; his father in Sisimiut, Greenland, and mother in Aarhus, Denmark. And secondly, Keepers of the Ocean, a delicate and diaristic portrait of Sisimiut, Storch’s hometown. Through his work, Storch aims to present a living, breathing history of Greenland, as told through the eyes of Greenland’s people, rather than defined by others.

About Inuuteq Storch

Inuuteq Storch is a photographic artist living and working in Sisimiut, Greenland. While diverse in approach, his work draws connections between past and present, personal and national identity.

Storch studied photography at the International Center of Photography, New York, and at Fatamorgana School of Photography, Copenhagen. He is the author of multiple books, including: Keepers of the Ocean (2022, Disko Bay), John Møller – Mirrored, Portraits of Good Hope (2021, Roulette Russe), Flesh (2019, Disko Bay) and Porcelain Souls (2018, Konnotation). His work has been exhibited across Scandinavia, the U.S.A and Canada. In 2024 he became the first artist from Greenland to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale.

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For this year’s event, Bristol Photo Festival has invited a group of photographers, all with strong ties to the city, to develop new projects across Bristol’s historic high streets and neighbourhoods. They have collaborated with groups both young and old, including a local church brass band; a stitching group; a men’s social club; a food bank; and an elders acting club. In collaboration with Bristol City Council and Historic England – who co-produced the original project – the outcomes of this project will be exhibited, bringing together work by photographers including: Khali Ackford; Michael Alberry; Kelly O’Brien; Sebastian Bruno; Esther May Campbell; Jade Carr-Daley; Jessie Edwards Thomas; Yuko Edwards; Mohamed Hassan; Chris Hoare; Kirsty Mackay; Lua Ribeira; Clementine Schneidermann; and Mikael Techane. 

More info: highstreets.bristolphotofestival.org

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