Author: BPFTest_Admin

Celebrating over twenty years of practice, internationally acclaimed Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi’s poetic images find beauty in the ordinary moments of the everyday. This works in this exhibition draws from images of Icelandic volcanoes and ice floes, Hokkaido’s snowy landscapes, and everyday home life from the COVID pandemic home life, inviting viewers to reconsider our connections as humans within nature. The exhibition includes four series from Kawauchi’s ouvre: Illuminance, Aila, Amesutchi and M/E.

About Rinko Kawuachi

Rinko Kawauchi (born 1972) is a renowned Japanese photographer lives and works in Chiba, Japan. She graduated from Seian University of Art and Design in 1993.

Kawauchi’s photographs often focus on finding beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life. Her work is characterised by a poetic, dreamlike quality that imbues mundane scenes and objects with a sense of wonder and transcendence.

She has had numerous solo exhibitions around the world, including shows at the Fotografiska in Stockholm (2024), Christophe Guye Galerie in Zurich (2022),Ametsuchi Illuminance Aila Utatane”, PRISKA PASQUER PARIS, Paris (2023) “M/E”, Photo Days, Fondazione Sozzani, Paris (2023) Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition, Somerset House, London (2023), Aperture Gallery in New York (2013), and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2012). Her work has been included in the Daegu Photo Biennale (2012) and Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2012).

Kawauchi’s publications include acclaimed photobooks such as Illuminance (2011), Ametsuchi (2013), Halo (2017), and M/E On this sphere Endlessly interlinking (2022). Her work is held in the collections of major institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

She has received prestigious honors such as the ICP Infinity Award for Art (2009), an Honorary Fellowship from The Royal Photographic Society (2012), and the Higashikawa Award Domestic Photographer Award (2013). Kawauchi recently received the Sony World Photography Award 2023 with a solo exhibition at Somerset House, London. rinkokawauchi.com.

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

Presented by Arnolfini in collaboration with BPF.

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: real and imagined, public and private, fact and fiction, public and private. 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’s new work is inspired by the Tiger Balm Mansion, a historic Hong-Kong building, built in 1953 and destroyed in 2004, that featured a series of dioramas depicting the punishment and torture that souls would receive within the Ten Halls of Judgement, as understood within Chinese and Buddhist mythology. Kwok will weave together historical photographs of the mansion’s sculpture garden with new images he has created, while also using AI as a tool to examine commonly-held  depictions of the afterlife. 

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.

Best known for creating slow documentary projects that study the ‘post-catastrophic’ aftermath of global histories and ideologies, Hashem Shakeri has spent recent months working in Afghanistan, documenting daily life as the country readjusts to the Taliban’s return to power. Through his images, Shakeri captures the uncertainty and ambiguity of this moment for Afghanistan, creating a poetic document of the current atmosphere within the country. This exhibition – Shakeri’s first in the UK – is produced in collaboration with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

About Hashem Shakeri:

Hashem Shakeri was born in Tehran, Iran in 1988. He is an artist, photographer and filmmaker who lives in Tehran. He began practicing photography in 2006 and started a professional career in documentary photography in 2010. Since then he has been working as a freelance photographer on arrange of commissions and private projects in Iran, Turkey, South Korea, Malaysia, France, Denmark and Germany. One of his major concerns is the psychological investigation of human relationships in the contemporary world. By capturing restlessness, perplexity and social struggle in the modern capitalist world, He records the optical unconsciousness of the society and provides a universal narrative form with a personal insight. He has been involved in many national and international festivals and received many awards.

Among them are the Ian Parry Scholarship 2015, the Lucas Dolega Award 2016, the POYi’s World Understanding Award in 2017 and UNICEF Photo of the Year 2018. He has held various exhibitions around the world, being shown in many museums, festivals and biennales. His latest group exhibition was at the 2017 Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, France and Paris Photo 2018. His works have been featured in numerous publications around the world such as Sunday Times, British Journal of Photography, New York Times, The New Yorker, Paris Match, Von Magazine, Reporters Without Borders, National Geographic, Wired, Courrier International, Gup Magazine and others.

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah will be in residence in Bristol’s Georgian House Museum, creating a new body of work in relation to the building’s colonial history. Built in the late 18th century, Georgian House is best known as the home of John Pinney (1740 – 1818), a wealthy sugar merchant and slave holder; yet was also home to Pero Jones (1753-1793) and Fanny Coker (1767-1820), both of whom were born into slavery and brought to Bristol by the Pinney family. Adu-Sanyah’s commission will respond to these histories. 

Best known for her original work examining the relationship between photography and memory, Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah is a German-Ghanaian artist based in Zürich, Switzerland. She has held exhibitions across europe, including: Centre Photographie Genéve (CH), Photoforum Pasquart (CH), Saarland Museum (DE), Foam Museum (NL). Her work is held in the permanent collections of both the city and canton of Zurich, Fotomuseum Winterthur and the city of Saarbrücken. In addition, she has been published by titles including: National Geographic, LUX Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Polka Magazine, Bloomberg, npr, DerBund, swissinfo and Tagesanzeiger.

About Akosua-Viktoria Ady Sanyah:

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah is a German-Ghanaian visual artist and documentary photographer located in Zürich, Switzerland. She has exhibited and published her work abroad.

Her investigations into identity, family ties and insti- tutional structures combine a profound insight into human experience with an incisive critique of social ills. Akosua Vikto- ria Adu-Sanyah’s precisely conceived installation was complemented by a performative demonstration of the process of rinsing, by which chemical residues are removed from the photographs. In the casualness of its execution, this action was both moving and disturbing, underscoring the power of her artistic statement.

Her work has been published in National Geographic, LUX Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Polka Magazine, Bloomberg, npr, DerBund, swissinfo, Tagesanzeiger, Brytehall, and others. 

She has been recently received 2024 Swiss Art Award for her outstanding work, which is a fascinating synthesis of analogue and digital photography, including AI. Through her process-oriented approach, the artist explores deep-seated emotion- al and material layers and creates striking works of great resonance.

The archiving impulse is one that attempts to trace, document, and make sense of the world. In response 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. The exhibition will include some of the results of the BPF & IC Visual Lab educational project in collaboration with Prison Education working prisons in the South West. The exhibition and educational programme is supported by Weston College Group. 

About Nigel Poor

Nigel Poor lives and works in the Bay Area. 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. Her work can be found in many collections including the SFMOMA, the M.H. deYoung Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art.

For many years her work has explored the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. She is interested in forms of portraiture and explores this vastly mined photographic area through unconventional mean; using fingerprints and hands, objects people have thrown out, human hair, dirt, dryer lint and dead insects as indexical markers of human presence and experience. Her work explores the troubling question of how to document life and what is worthy of preservation.

In 2011 Nigel’s interest in investigating the marks people leave behind led her to San Quentin State Prison where she taught history of photography classes for the Prison University Project. This experience changed the focus of her practice and the visual presentation of her ideas. She has since moved away from being a solely visual artist working alone in the studio and now spends the majority of her “studio” time inside the prison working with a group of mostly lifers on photographic projects and producing radio stories about life inside. She is a Co-Founder and Co-Managing Producer of the San Quentin Prison Report Radio Project (SQPR). In 2014 SQPR was presented with an Award of Excellence from the Society for Professional Journalism for “highlighting the stories of a prison community that outsiders rarely hear, including stories not only told from within the prison, but also produced by inmates.” And in 2015 Nigel was the recipient of A Blade of Grass Fellowship for her work with the SQPR radio project.

Nigel Poor is a Professor of Photography at California State University, Sacramento, and a member of the Bay Area photo collective Library Candy.

Bandia Ribeira’s work stands as a historic record of agricultural production in the 21st century. Here she focuses on the often-invisible labourers of the vast network of greenhouses that dominate the landscape  of the agro-industrial region of Almería (Andalusia, Spain), known locally as ‘The Sea of Plastic’. It is an area dedicated to the production of out-of-season vegetables for export to northern European countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany,  where communities of workers form an often-invisible part of a system of ‘techno-agrarian’ capitalism, where lax labour and environmental regulations fuel cycles of exploitation and segregation. This exhibition is supported by The European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists in collaboration with Ffoco Festival (Spain) & Glazz Festival (France) and Accion Cultural Española.  

About Bandia Ribeira

Nigel Poor lives and works in the Bay Area. 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. Her work can be found in many collections including the SFMOMA, the M.H. deYoung Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art.

For many years her work has explored the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. She is interested in forms of portraiture and explores this vastly mined photographic area through unconventional mean; using fingerprints and hands, objects people have thrown out, human hair, dirt, dryer lint and dead insects as indexical markers of human presence and experience. Her work explores the troubling question of how to document life and what is worthy of preservation.

In 2011 Nigel’s interest in investigating the marks people leave behind led her to San Quentin State Prison where she taught history of photography classes for the Prison University Project. This experience changed the focus of her practice and the visual presentation of her ideas. She has since moved away from being a solely visual artist working alone in the studio and now spends the majority of her “studio” time inside the prison working with a group of mostly lifers on photographic projects and producing radio stories about life inside. She is a Co-Founder and Co-Managing Producer of the San Quentin Prison Report Radio Project (SQPR). In 2014 SQPR was presented with an Award of Excellence from the Society for Professional Journalism for “highlighting the stories of a prison community that outsiders rarely hear, including stories not only told from within the prison, but also produced by inmates.” And in 2015 Nigel was the recipient of A Blade of Grass Fellowship for her work with the SQPR radio project.

Nigel Poor is a Professor of Photography at California State University, Sacramento, and a member of the Bay Area photo collective Library Candy.

Other info:

The art of slow photography, from Almería to California

The global surge in demand for avocados has driven drug cartels across Mexico to become heavily involved in the trade. In response, in 2011 a group of women from the community of Cherán (Michoacán state) took a stand against the local cartel and succeeded in establishing a new government based on long-standing Purépecha indigenous principles. For five years, the collective Ritual Inhabitual documented Cherán’s struggle through a blend of documentary and fictional photography, collaborating with local artists to create a polyphonic narrative. Their project, Oro Verde, represents a form of ‘mytho-documentary’ symbolising key events in Cherán’s reclamation of communal autonomy. This exhibition – their first in the UK – is co-curated by Rosi Huaroco and Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo.

About Ritual Inhabitual

Ritual Inhabitual is an artist collective. Our work relates to the worldview we share; understanding that vegetables, minerals and animals appear to exist within a series of correlations.

The notions of collective and ritual procedures inspire our work while being manifested through it. By using scientific codes we transit anatomies, cultures and spiritual practices embodied in the creative process.

A ritual is the repetition of a series of gestures in a precise order with a beginning and an end. Allowing us to release the mind and target the action, we feel that precisely in this operation we can access an alternative knowledge that is present in the interconnections that join the different elements- dead or alive- encompassing nature.

Their artwork have been acquired by the Rothschild Foundation in Switzerland, the Fonds d’Art Contemporain de Seine-Saint-Denis in France and important private collections in Chile and Venezuela, as the Fernando Eseverri (C & FE) collection and the Carvajal Sauma (Ca.Sa) collection.  They are currently preparing the release of their first book, a photographic essay on the Mapuche culture and their environmental conflicts.

We are working with Sarker Protick to produce his first solo exhibition in the UK. The exhibition will bring together multiple bodies of work, including Spaces of Separation (2016-ongoing), a long-term study of the colonial architectural remains that can be found across Bangladesh and West Bengal. Our aim is to create an exhibition that listens to history, contemplating the ever-evolving story of Bangladesh as a place and nation. 

Working with photography, video and sound, Sarker Protick’s works are built on long-term surveys of Bangladesh. He is drawn to themes such as time passing, the alteration of land and borders, as well as traces of both personal and political histories. Protick is a lecturer at the South Asian Media Institute Pathshala, and co-curator of Chobi Mela, the longest running international photography festival in Asia. As an artist he has received multiple awards and fellowships, including Joop Swart Masterclass, Foam Talent, Light Work Residency, Magnum Foundation Fund and the World Press Photo Award. He is represented by Shrine Empire, Delhi. 

About Sarker Protick:

Sarker Protick’s work frequently build the narrative around the trope of change; momentary stillness, fleeting light, elemental origins of a place and a lost home. To make the decaying memory tangible, to define disappearing history of a place without confining it, Protick’s often minimal, suspended and atmospheric visuals are coherently open with vast and solemn distance.

Working with Photography, Video and Sound, Protick’s works are built on long-term surveys rooted in Bangladesh. The form and materiality of his works often morph into the physicality of time; its raptures and our inability to grasp or hold time, the process of image-making as the way to expand time, to make space for more subdued moments, or more hints of an embodied life. Here we don’t experience time as moving in a linear direction, rather, we experience it slowing down, recurring, having dips and curves, sometimes changing in a constant flux.

Protick studied at the South Asian Media Institute – Pathshala in Dhaka, where he is also teaching for the last ten years. Protick is a co-curator of Chobi Mela, the longest running International Photography Festival in Asia. His work has received several recognition and fellowships, including Joop Swart Masterclass, Foam Talent, Light Work Residency, Magnum Foundation Fund, World Press Photo Award etc.

Protick is represented by Shrine Empire in Delhi.

Supported by:

In this new work commissioned by Multistory, premiering at the festival, Bristol-based artist Amak Mahmoodian examines the experience of dreaming for individuals living in exile. Working with 16 collaborators, all of whom are exiled from their native countries, Mahmoodian uses photography, poetry, drawing and video to explore the new lives created through dreams, as well as the ways in which dreaming enables individuals to return to a past that cannot be reached while awake. The title, One Hundred & Twenty Minutes, refers to the average time a person spends dreaming each night.

About Amak Mahmoodian:

An award-winning multidisciplinary artist and educator from Iran. Amak began her career as a research-based photographer at the Art University of Tehran in Iran in 2003. Since 2007, she has been living in the UK where she practices as a visual artist and lecturer in Photography. In 2015, she completed a practice-based doctorate in photography at the University of South Wales.

Working with photography, text, video, drawing and archives at the intersection of conceptual and documentary photography, Amak’s artistic practice explores the presentation of gender, identity and displacement, bridging a space between the personal and political.

Amak’s projects are produced across platforms, such as installations, books and films. Her work has been shown extensively and won numerous awards. She has published two books, Shenasnameh (RRB- ICV Lab, 2016), which was shortlisted for The First Author book award Rencontres Arles, and Zanjir (RRB, 2019), which was the winner of The Best Photo Text  book award Rencontres Arles. 

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 US, 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 (The Hague, 1966) 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.
https://hedyvanerp.nl/