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QUEER HERITAGE SOUTH TAKES PART IN PHOTOWORKS FESTIVAL
The first Photoworks Festival, Propositions For Alternative Narratives, takes place across Sussex till Sunday, October 25, with a collaborative project between Queer Heritage South and Photoworks displayed for the first time.
The first Photoworks Festival, Propositions for Alternative Narratives takes place from Thur, Sept 24–Sun, Oct 25 and has 11 international artists coming together to exhibit work for audiences to engage with in real life and online.
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Photoworks Festival is the reshaping of one of the UK’s longest running photography festivals - Brighton Photo Biennial - and asks what a photography festival can be and who it is for. The 2020 edition can be experienced by audiences in three ways – via a printed Festival in a Box, through a major presentation of outdoor exhibitions on billboards across Brighton & Hove, Worthing, and the University of Sussex campus, and in an online series of events.
Every Man Needs a Woman to Keep Him On Track.2008
Pixy Liao
“Our inaugural festival rethinks both the form and content of traditional festivals,” said Photoworks Director, Shoair Mavlian. “We look forward to presenting the festival across these three formats, allowing a wide range of audiences to engage with what a photography festival is and could be and enabling a global audience to access our festival for the first time and Sussex audiences to see our work in a new way.”
Works will be installed in locations, including: Brighton Laines, Trafalgar Street, North Road, Portland Road in Hove, and George Street in Kemptown, along with Brighton & Hove railway stations. A partnership with the University of Sussex and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA) has enabled works to be shown at ACCA and on the Sussex campus, outside the university’s student union. The programme of works to be seen outdoors in Sussex ranges from the dazzling Afrofuturist-inspired works of Alberta Whittle, to Ivar Gravlejs poetic compositions of the everyday captured in supermarket checkoutlines, and Farah Al Qasimi’s brightly-coloured observations of post-colonial 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 ongoing conflict in India, which flies largely under the radar of the global media.
Alix Marie 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 examines movement and its properties and oscillates between investigative, documentary and autobiographical.
A map is available at www.photoworks.org.uk and the posters will have QR codes so audiences can learn more about the artists as they come across the works. Digital tours will also be available through this link.
© ALBERTA WHITTLE, MAPS OF PRECARITY II : SINKING WORLDS, FROM BUSINESS AS USUAL SERIES, 2019
ARCHIVING YOUR LIFE
Archiving Your Life is led by Brighton-based LGBTQ+ youth group Queer History Now, which is dedicated to preserving queer archives and enabling the queer community to take control of the stories and narratives that are told about their lives. The group has been looking at the Tommie and Betty archive, a set of photos and mementoes first found discarded in Sussex, and
now partially on show at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, to create their own responses to queer history. These responses will also be part of the Festival In A Box as a queer manifesto and represented in the online festival.
FESTIVAL IN A BOX
Referencing Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-En-Valise (Box In A Suitcase) and inspired by Dayanita Singh’s innovative book-objects, Festival In A Box is a portable photography festival for which each audience member becomes the curator and can choose how to install the festival at home or in their own community space. Designed by artists Giliane Cachin and Joshua Schenkel, this unique limited-edition object includes a combination of different textures, shapes and forms to experiment with at home, along with posters made by the festival artists and texts by Julia Bunnemann, Simon Baker, Pamila Gupta, Shoair Mavlian, Lucy Soutter and Queer History Now. Galleries, shops, cafes and community groups have collaborated with Photoworks to bring a Festival In A Box to their own spaces.
www.photoworks.org.uk/shop/photoworksfriend/
MORE INFO
A series of learning resources to coincide with the Photoworks Festival will be available online during the festival.
For the full programme, visit:
www.photoworks.org.uk/festival2020/
Queer Heritage South (formerly Queer In Brighton) produces and develops heritage learning projects across the region to support LGBTQ+ communities to reclaim, preserve, and celebrate their histories.
For more info, visit:
