Art / Bristol Photo Festival

Bristol Photo Festival announces second edition: ‘The World on a Wave’

By Sarski Anderson  Friday May 10, 2024

Bristol Photo Festival have announced their second edition: The World on a Wave, which will open in October 2024 and run throughout the autumn in venues across the city.

Selected images will explore the theme of movement from varying perspectives: social and political to environmental, and personal to collective.

The programme will encompass exhibitions, talks and artist events in major arts institutions as well as a range of independent and more unusual spaces.

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The Magic Money Tree – photo: Kirsty Mackay
Mackay is a Bristol-based photographer who has worked collaboratively with groups and individuals from across England to explore the impact of the cost-of-living crisis and what poverty looks like in the world’s 6th richest economy.

The House is a Body – photo: Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah
Adu-Sanya is known for her work examining the relationship between photography and memory, particularly in relation to her own family history – will be in residence at the Georgian House Museum, creating a new body of work relating to the building’s colonial history.

The first participating artists to be confirmed are Kirsty Mackay, Trent Parke, Hashem Shakeri, Akosua Viktoria Adu Sanyah, and Amak Mahmoodian.

Alejandro Acin is the Bristol Photo Festival director. “I believe in photography as a tool to experience the world anew,” he says. “In a time of multiple crises, we need photography more than ever.

One Hundred & Twenty Minutes – photo: Amak Mahmoodian
Premiering at 17 Midland Road as part of the festival – in collaboration with Multistory – Bristol-based artist Mahmoodian’s new project uses images, poems, archives and video to explore the dreams experienced by those in exile. The work was produced collaboratively with communities of refugees and asylum seekers across the UK.

Monument – photo: Trent Parke
This dystopian project, to be exhibited outside Australia for the first time (at Martin Parr Foundation), extends the metaphor of the moth drawn to a flame to city life and beyond. Photographs taken throughout Parke’s career are edited to create a vision of humanity engrossed by and drawn to an inescapable light.

“I want the festival to be a space full of nuanced and unexpected stories that foster greater understanding of our shared world.”

In conjunction with the event, the festival will be creating a community archive with local residents and port workers in Avonmouth, as well as a collaboration with Prison Education on an educational photography project across three south west sites.

Space of Separation – photo: Sarker Protick
Protick is a Bangladeshi artist who has been commissioned by the festival to produce his first solo exhibition in the UK (at St John’s Crypt). Bringing together multiple bodies of his work incorporating photography, video and sound, the exhibition will draw upon the history of and contemplate the ever-evolving story of Bangladesh.

Staring Into the Abyss – photo: Hashem Shakeri
Iranian visual artist Shakeri has been documenting daily life in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of British and American military forces and the consequent arrival to power of the Taliban. This work will be shown in the UK for the first time (at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery) as part of the festival and accompanied by an engagement programme in collaboration with the Afghan community in Bristol.

Bristol Photo Festival second edition: The World on a Wave will have its opening week on October 16-20, and will then be at venues across Bristol this autumn. For more information, visit www.bristolphotofestival.org. The full programme will be announced in July 2024.

Main photo: Amak Mahmoodian

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