Openings:
January 21-22, 2009
Seminar:
January 23-24, 2009
Helsinki, Finland
Mark your calendars for the 2009 edition of the Helsinki Photography Festival opening January 21-24 in Helsinki, Finland. The four-day opening of the festival includes two main exhibitions, a two-day seminar, as well as other exhibitions and happenings at various venues in the Helsinki metropolitan area.
Aletheia – Positions in Contemporary Photographies (January 23 – March 22), presented at Meilahti Art Museum, revisits and reexamines fundamental questions regarding photographic practices and the photographic medium – including the very possibility of a medium – and their roles and impact within contemporary culture.
Many concerns regarding photography were put on hold as the shift from silver-halide processes to digital technologies took place, with the then wide-spread estimation that the rules of the game had changed dramatically and that photography would no longer be able to lay any special claims regarding its relationship to the realities it would depict and represent. Yet, acknowledging that the digital shift is final, conclusive and irreversible, it is surprisingly clear that the fundamentals of photography have not always been challenged in the ways imagined at the onslaught of the digital revolution. Photographic media continue to pursue or attempt mimetic persuasion and photography’s descriptive or epistemological powers, even when aimed at the imaginary, remain decisive. Not to mention that we are still seduced, alarmed, enticed and moved by photographs. Furthermore, photographic practices insist in very particular yet changing concerns regarding the nature and representation of time, space and memory.
Participating artists include Renaud August-Dormeil, Francois Bücher, Maria Hedlund, Nanna Hänninen, Emily-Jane Major, Oscar Muñoz, Chino Otsuka, Liisa Lounila, Marja Pirilä, Jari Silomäki, Michael Wesely, Richard Whitlock and Kimiko Yoshida.
Aletheia – Positions in Contemporary Photographies is curated by Jan-Erik Lundström, director of Bildmuseet (Umeå University, Sweden) and Elina Heikka, director of the Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki, Finland).
Tense Territories – Contemporary Aspects on Territorial Behaviors (January 22 – May 24) is a set of four personal exhibitions at The Finnish Museum of Photography.
Territory and dominance are basic, primitive and developmental twins that are profoundly connected. Human behavior and everyday life is questioned and interpreted by searching and finding the answer in oneself and others. Individuals maintain a multiplicity of territorial belongings that tend to push the traditional forms of identity into the background. Tense Territories elaborates on the issues of territorial relations, shedding light on the importance of individual identities in comparison with those shared. In the fragile, fragmented societies of the present, the importance of defining and knowing oneself has become more important than the feeling of belonging to a nation, culture or society at large. The exhibition asks whether there is something imperative about territory.
Participating artists are Mohamed Bourouissa (Courtesy Gallery Les filles du calvaire, Paris/Brussels), Sini Pelkki, Carrie Schneider and Sauli Sirviö.
Tense Territories – Contemporary Aspects on Territorial Behaviors is curated by Aura Seikkula (Helsinki, Finland)
Knowing Photography/Photographic Knowledge, the seminar January 23-24, sets out from the context of post-medium and post-analogue 21st century photography. With the gaze as a particular backdrop and the combined platforms of post-colonial and gender studies, the seminar focuses on questioning current photographic practices and methodologies in their double-take on time and space, fact and fiction, unity and fragment, friction and correlation. What do we know with (or without) photographs? Is there a photographic knowledge?
For detailed information on the festival, press information and other enquiries please visit the website: www.hpf.fi
Organizers:
The Helsinki Photography Festival 2009 is organized by the Union of Artist Photographers in Finland/Photographic Gallery Hippolyte (www.hippolyte.fi) in collaboration with Helsinki City Art Museum/Meilahti Art Museum and The Finnish Museum of Photography.
The Helsinki Photography Festival 2009 has been generously supported by: Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Ministry of Education, National Council for Photographic Art, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, Swedish-Finnish Cultural Foundation, Centre culturel français.
