Organ Vida announce open call with high-profile judges for 'Revelations' theme

Organ Vida is a two-week international photography festival that takes place every September in Zagreb. In its eighth year, the festival has become the largest annual photographic event in Southeast Europe, showcasing a new generation of photographers from Croatia and the Baltic region alongside more high-profile international photographers.

The top ten projects will be presented at the festival’s main exhibition in Zagreb’s Francuski paviljon, while a further other ten commended projects will be shown on large projections in public areas.

As well as the Francuski paviljon, Organ Vida exhibits at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts, ORIS house of architecture, Galleries Kranjčar and Greta, Dokukino KIC, Kinoklub Zagreb and in numerous open public spaces.

The international panel of judges will host lectures and workshops and show their work at the festival.

Lea Vene, Croatian art historian, cultural anthropologist, fashion theorist and a curator in the Miroslav Kraljević gallery, will act as one of the judges. She writes of the festival:

“Organ Vida is interested in how authors through the medium of photography face the unknown, unrecorded and unspoken transformative and everyday experiences, personal and others fates, social and intimate battles or life knowledge.

“Organ Vida invites interested authors to focus their attention on the personal interpretation of the process of revelation and how they recognize it, become aware of it and document it through their own photographic practice.

“At this year’s festival, we turn to the photographers who dismantle their own ways of seeing, who question experience and representation of authenticity and construction of visual truth.

“With the theme Revelations, we infringe directly into the politics of views, opening questions about disciplining subjects – but also of the viewer, in whose view, expectations and reactions are written. With which intentions and with what language do we approach them?”

The international panel of judges are:

Louise Clements, curator and the artistic director of  QUAD in Derby and the director of the International Photography Festival FORMAT.

Simon Norfolk, the revered documentary and conflict photographer whose work has been exhibited in the galleries including The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Getty in Los Angeles and the Tate Modern in London.

Phillip Toledano, an American-British photographer, publisher of several books, who had a retrospective of his career as an image-maker at the Triennale der Photographie Hamburg last year.

Gillian Wearing, the English photographer and video artist. “By using photography and video to record the confessions of ordinary people, explores the disparities between public and private life, between individual and collective experience,” the festival said in a statement.

Donald Weber, a Canadian photographer who has won two World Press Photo Awards. He is a member of the VII Photo Agency and a professor on the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts.

The festival is supported by the City of Zagreb Office for Culture, Education and Sports; the City of Zagreb Tourist Board, and the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia.

Organ Vida will be held from the 13th to 24th of September 2016. More information available here.

Tom Seymour

Tom Seymour is an Associate Editor at The Art Newspaper and an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication. His words have been published in The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wallpaper* and The Telegraph. He has won Writer of the Year and Specialist Writer of the year on three separate occassions at the PPA Awards for his work with The Royal Photographic Society.