For the seventh edition of the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend, more than 40 institutions, galleries and off-spaces will be presenting a wide-ranging program around the medium of photography.
Current trends in contemporary photography will be considered, questions concerning the change of meaning, regarding image culture and society, will be reflected in photography and its cultural history.Relevant terms, which relate to the contemporary photographic discourse, such as contemporary witnesses, the photographic archive, the content of reality, narration and abstraction are referred to in the exhibitions, showing the wide range of the photographic image.
Positions from the Middle East will form a thematic focus of the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend 2018.
The Haus der Universität (House of the University) will present works by Sonja Hamad, Christoph Bangert and Hosam Katan, all showing the reality of war from different perspectives. Christoph Bangert is one of the most important German documentary photographers and best known for his book War Porn. 23-year-old Syrian Hosam Katan began working as a photographer for the Aleppo Media Center at the age of 18. He left Syria at the end of 2015. Since 2016 he is studying photo journalism at the University of Hanover. Born in Damascus, Sonja Hamad immigrated to Germany with her Kurdish family in 1990. Her work Women, Life, Freedom is a portrait of young Kurdish women fighting against the IS in Syria and Iraq. Versatile lectures on photography, discussions and film screenings will complete the programme at the House of the University.
The K21 will show the exhibition Against Photography. An annotated story of the Arab Image Foundationby Akram Zaatari . His video installations, films and photographic objects revolve around a reflection of the photographic.
Two new series will from now on complement the thematic focuses of Duesseldorf Photo Weekend: With exhibitions from international art colleges, #FRESH gives an insight into the young photography scene. In 2018, artists from the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) will present their works at a large exhibtion at the Stilwerk. In Ontology of Encounter, the curator Václav Janoščík assembles student positions that oscillate between expressive and intimate photography; the deep and the superficial, the serious and the ephemeral.
Under the title Neighborhood, a whole district of Düsseldorf and its art scene, this year the Worringer Platz with its lively off-scene, will be focused on. Introducing this new series, there will be a group exhibition in 2018, which deals with the topic of Neighborhood and which will feature works by Toby Binder, Matt Hulse Giya Makando-Willis, Lucia Tollens and Adriano Vannini.
The exhibition ETERNITY at the Johanneskirche Düsseldorf will present photographs by Benedict J. Fernandez and Jürgen Wassmuth , showing pictures from the last years in the life of Martin Luther King.
In June 2017, the Julia Stoschek Collection celebrated its 10th anniversary. As part of the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend, the exhibition GENERATION LOSS showcases the entire spectrum of the works in the collection. In addition, the Stoschek Collection presents a film screening by Tobias Zielony for Duesseldorf Photo Weekend.
Alix Marie , winner of the Portfolio Review 2017 and Foam Talent 2017, will be represented in the historical building Ratinger Tor with the exhibition Hippolyta. Her photographic installations, which take on the structure of the human skin, are surprising and radical. They translate photography into a sculptural dimension, thereby transferring it into a tangible reality.
The Polish Institute will show photographs by Anna Grzelewska and Zuza Krajewska in the exhibition Imago. In their documentary works, both artists focus on the moment of change in the lives of young people, full of experiments, mistakes and indecisiveness.
The Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf will dedicate an exhibition to the artist Horst Adameit (*1937-2010). With Polaroid cameras, analogue and digital photography, he documented his immediate environment for forty years, which he saw influenced by cold rays. It was not until 2008 that his extensive work was discovered.
The work series THE HERITAGE OF THE TIMES, light collages / photographs by Bernard Langerock , will show 12 commemorative portraits at the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte, which are the result of an intensive discourse with contemporary witnesses of the National Socialist era.
At Grisebach the exhibition fotoform/subjective photography will show works by the fotoform group, which was founded in 1949 by photographers Wolfgang Reisewitz » , Ludwig Windstosser » , Toni Schneiders » , Otto Steinert » , Peter Keetman » and Siegfried Lauterwasser .
The focus of the Middle East is also reflected in some gallery exhibitions:
Under the title Mesopotamia, Galerie Breckner will show photographs by Mohamad Al Roumi . The Syrian, born in Aleppo in 1945, portrays the cultural landscape of his homeland before the war in his works from the 80s and 90s.
In contrast, the works of Caravane Culturelle Syrienne with Tammam Azzam, Sulafa Hijazi, Ammar Abd Rabo, Dino Ahmad Alo, Jaber Al Azmel and Muaffar Salman show a war-torn generation of artists. They express themselves through an art of pain and suffering, which is also a global symbol of hope and captures the essence of today’s life.
I SEE, I AM at the Setareh Gallery gives an insight into the work of three artists, who form the Iranian canon of video art. Shirin Abedinirad, Samira Eskandarfar and Mandana Moghaddam depict patterns, changes and developments in contemporary Iranian video art.
A special exhibition with works by Israeli and Palestinian photographers can be seen at the Galerie Lausberg. Oh Jerusalem is concerned with the daily lives of communities living side by side in Jerusalem and the need for dialogue between these two sides, given by the current tensions.
Under the title Picturing Realities: Constructed, Cropped and Reassembled students and graduates of the class Joachim Brohm from the HGB Leipzig will meet the current photographic discourse in a specific way: At the exhibition space of the Galerie Beck & Eggeling, thoughts, ideas, images and objects will create resonances, which reflect on our reality and make it more tangible. In another exhibition, the gallery will present Portrait Sittings, showing photographs of famous artist personalities by Michael Dannenmann .
Galerie Clara Maria Sels will show works of photographer Andrej Krementschouk . In his exhibition infinite he outlines the contradictions of Russia with its impressive landscape and its social abysses. His debut novel Tisch” (Osburg Verlag), will also be published in time for the Duesseldorf Photo Weekend.
Fictitious Reality is the name of the exhibition, which will be presented at the Galerie Shia Bender, showing the large-scale installations, conceptual and built spaces by Annett Zinsmeister . Zinsmeister’s works challenge our perception and question everyday habits and the antagonism of utopian ideas and built reality.
Works of the Dutch street photographer Otto Snoek will be seen with his exhibition JUST PEOPLE! at the d / d contemporary art gallery. using a ‘hit-and-run’style of photography he is a past master at blending humor and irony with skepticism and gloom – leaving a space or gap between them that obliges the viewer to determine his own position and emotional response.
The Burkhard Eikelmann Galerie will show internationally recognized photographers Petar Grubor, Gary Gunderson, Corinna Holthusen , whose topics are physicality as materiality and consciousness.
Karsten Kronas refers to Roland Barthes’ punctum in his work Eternal Error. Engelage & Lieder will exhibit experiments with faulty footage, in which the artist focuses entirely on light, color and chemistry.
The surreal landscapes of Sandra Senn will be shown at Galerie Voss. The mainly brittle, archaic seeming stone figures in a coastal landscape, take us into a lyrical world between two seas.
At the exhibtion at the Galerie Lausberg we will also look at two different landscapes. David Burdeny ‘s work Salt shows abstract colored structures of a landscape from a bird’s eye view. The Metro cycle confronts us with the opulent interior design of Moscow subway stations.