“The ‘festival’ dimension has always been part of the spirit of Unseen,” says Damarice Amao, curator of photography at Centre Pompidou in Paris and this year’s guest curator of Unbound. “The exhibition is an attempt to put into perspective the issues of current photographic production and to weave between various projects – formal, conceptual, theoretical narratives that the structure of a fair, with its organisation and its commercial obligations, does not allow.”
The 12 chosen projects in Unbound each explore the space in which photography crosses into other visual mediums. Digital art, installations, performance art, sculpture, virtual reality and video art will be represented. “For Unbound, I selected projects without having any prior guidelines. The mastery of the mediums used in each case, their aesthetic and experimental issues, were important criteria,” Amao explains. “The result is a selection of projects that are formally very different from each other, but which carry a strong vision of the current challenges of photographic creation. Those projects are also anchored, at various scales, in the questions of our contemporary lives.”