Staring into the Abyss © Hashem Shakeri
After its inaugural event was curtailed by the pandemic, Bristol Photo Festival returns with a second edition that is both locally rooted and outward looking
Bristol Photo Festival is back, presenting 16 exhibitions featuring photographers from across the world, including Rinko Kawauchi (Japan), Hashem Shakeri (Iran) and Trent Parke (Australia), plus a schedule of talks and events, and educational and outreach projects. Themed ‘The World a Wave’, the festival consciously takes the previous edition’s focus on ‘A Sense of Place’ in a more dynamic direction.
“We were loosely inspired by Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and the idea of movement at the forefront of life,” explains festival director Alejandro Acín. “The movement of people on things. Movements of solidarity or kinship. The idea of being ‘moved’ by photography. And finally, traces of history – how historical narratives move from the past to the present and the future.”
Discussions of imperialism and migration run through many of the exhibitions. Andrew Jackson’s Across the Sea is a Shore explores the intergenerational Caribbean diasporic experiences from Jamaica to Birmingham and back, touching on belonging and identity; Trent Parke’s Monument looks at the circulation of people and the cycle of time in Sydney, Australia. Sarker Protick’s Spaces of Separation documents the colonial architecture in Bangladesh.
“A photography festival needs to support artists’ careers at the same time as providing a cultural event for the general public”
The economic currents shaping our highly globalised contemporary world animate Ritual Inhabitual’s Oro Verde, which considers the trade in avocados. A Gen Z staple in the Global North, avocados have become big business for the drug cartels of Mexico – the country that supplies 45 per cent of the fruit worldwide. Meanwhile, BJP One to Watch Bandia Ribeira’s Not a Home Without Fire portrays intensive high-tech farming of out-of- season vegetables in Spain, which are sold to the UK and other northern European markets.
There are two debut UK solo shows; for Hashem Shakeri and Inuuteq Storch, the latter the first artist from Greenland to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale. Bristol Photo also encompasses a major Rinko Kawauchi retrospective, which runs until February 2025 at Arnolfini. Community projects are once again an important element of the festival, with an exhibition of Nigel Poor’s The San Quentin Project in nearby Weston-super- Mare; IC Visual Lab and Prison Education are also creating ‘Prison Mobile Library’ in which inmates at local institutions can share their stories.
“We wanted the festival to be very internationally focused, but locally grounded,” says Acín. “So artists and projects are talking to themes, ideas, and histories of the city.” Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah’s residency commission The House is a Body unpacks the colonial history of The Georgian House, an 18th-century townhouse in Bristol now open to the public; The Weight of Witness, a collaboration between Billy HC Kwok, Jay Lau and Lau Wai at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), responds to Hong Kong’s photographic archives held at University of Bristol and the University of Hong Kong.
When Bristol Photo launched in 2021, the UK was slowly feeling its way out of the coronavirus pandemic. The programme ended up being stretched over 12 months, and many events took place outdoors or online due to continued government restrictions. Despite the limitations posed by Covid-19, the first edition welcomed more than 200,000 visitors, a quarter of them from outside the city. “It was challenging, but also rewarding because people were eager to come,” says Acín.
Even so, he remembers feeling “frustrated that the work we put into the festival couldn’t be celebrated in an event because the social elements of the programme were removed,” adding: “They’re what a festival experience is about.” The team hopes to build on past successes, while promising a more sociable offering. The opening week will be packed with parties.
This year is the first one with IC Visual Lab at the helm, taking the reins from Tracy Marshall-Grant. A nonprofit Acín co-founded 10 years ago, ICVL runs socially engaged visual arts projects, and this ethos has imbued the approach to the festival. The exhibitions are taking place across the city, at established institutions such as Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Arnolfini, Watershed, Martin Parr Foundation and the RPS, but also in pop-ups in unusual locations, run via partnerships with local and regional organisations. “We want to nurture relationships between independent groups and institutions, using the festival as this platform to support the photography scene,” Acín explains.
Among the venues this year is ICVL’s own new public space in the Old Market area of Bristol, which will host a series of drawings made by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. The sketches show archival images found at the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, which were made during the Palestinian Nakba; Azoulay was forbidden from photographically reproducing them, on the grounds of ‘political neutrality’. “It’s never been exhibited in the UK and feels very relevant,” says Acín, pointing to the contrast between these absent images and the reportage that has emerged from Gaza over the past year.
Although the RPS gallery is set to close in 2025, Bristol embodies an ever-evolving photography hub outside the UK capital. And on 19–20 October, the popular BOP (Books on Photography) takes place in the city. Acín and team are keen to nurture this environment and they hope to make a lasting impact with the festival, both by encouraging unusual venues and partners, and by paying exhibitors for their contribution. “We know we are limited but we wanted to treat exhibitions with independence and autonomy so every exhibition feels looked after,” says Acín. “A photography festival needs to support artists’ careers at the same time as providing a cultural event for the general public. That’s something we really want to get right.”
