PhEST - International Festival of Photography and Art
9th edition
Theme: THE DREAM
Main exhibition of the 9th edition
Man Ray - “The Revolution of the Gaze”
International Photography
Nariman Darbandi - César Dezfuli - Bruce Eesly - Ismail Ferdous
Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad - Matthias Jung - Michalina Kacperak - Natalie Karpushenko
Polina Kostanda - Peter Menzel - Richard Sharum - Lisa Sorgini - Serifa
Valentina Vannicola - Paolo Ventura - Guillem Vidal - Jan von Holleben
Contemporary Art
Pier Alfeo - Fabrizio Cicero - Davide Monaldi
Music line-up
Mary Gehnyei - C'mon Tigre - Protopapa
Rome, August 2, 2024 - PhEST, the international festival of photography and art known for its ability to integrate different worlds and visions, returns to fascinate the public with an imaginative program centered on the theme of THE DREAM, the key theme of this ninth edition with a retrospective dedicated to MAN RAY on the centenary of the Surrealism Manifesto. 33 exhibitions and installations by international artists, a rich colophon of partnerships and collaborations, a new music line-up, an authoritative presence of lecturers and experts in the sector, an international artist residency, workshops and guided tours with artists exploring contemporary themes and global perspectives. From August 30 to November 3, 2024, the Apulian city of Monopoli will become a place of intercultural dialogue and its streets, squares, historic palaces, and ancient churches will offer visitors and enthusiasts an immersive and dreamlike experience.
The Dream is the central theme of the 9th edition of PhEST. In the year of the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, whose first manifesto was written in 1924 by André Breton, the 2024 edition of PhEST celebrates the omnipotence of the dream, the disinterested play of thought, and explores it in all its forms. On this occasion, PhEST wants to pay tribute to Man Ray, one of the greatest interpreters of surrealist poetics and author of a photographic proposal capable of revolutionizing the use of the medium through constant technical experimentation and innovative aesthetic breakthroughs that will forever change the history of photography. In collaboration with the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts of La Biennale di Venezia, PhEST exhibits a selection of original photographs from the exhibition “Man Ray, testimony through photography” presented at the Venice Biennale in 1976. The selection of works from the anthological exhibition “The Revolution of the Gaze”, curated by Roberto Lacarbonara and Giovanni Troilo, is a small compendium of the vast exploration of the photographic medium, from studies on the face, body, and forms, to darkroom printing techniques of which Man Ray was a pioneer, such as solarization and rayography. "The streets are full of admirable artisans, but few practical dreamers" said Man Ray, but this year we practical dreamers from all over the world will fill the streets of Monopoli. Thus declares the Artistic Director Giovanni Troilo.
The exhibition will be hosted in the prestigious Castle Carlo V, but the whole city will be involved in the event. Exhibitions and installations are expected at Palazzo Martinelli, in Casa Santa and its Stables, in the Church of SS. Pietro and Paolo, and in the Church of Sant’Angelo in Borgo, a new entry of the edition freshly restored. At Palazzo Palmieri, the festival's headquarters, the Warka Tower will be installed. Designed by architect Arturo Vittori and presented at the Venice Biennale in 2012, the Warka Tower is a structure about 10 meters high that collects water from the air through condensation. Built with natural materials such as bamboo and polypropylene net, it can collect up to 100 liters per day without electricity, offering a sustainable solution for communities in arid regions.
Exhibitions curated by Arianna Rinaldo for photography and installations curated by Roberto Lacarbonara for contemporary art will be set up in the streets and squares.
For photography, exhibitions by Nariman Darbandi, César Dezfuli, Bruce Eesly, Ismail Ferdous, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Matthias Jung, Michalina Kacperak, Natalie Karpushenko, Polina Kostanda, Peter Menzel, Serifa, Richard Sharum, Lisa Sorgini, Valentina Vannicola, Paolo Ventura, Guillem Vidal, and Jan von Holleben in artist residency will be proposed. Many photographers will be present on opening days for guided tours by the artists.
Contemporary art will be represented by the works of some of the most interesting Italian artists, including Pier Alfeo, Fabrizio Cicero, and Davide Monaldi.
Photographers, beginners, and mid-career, will have the opportunity to participate in Portfolio Reviews to showcase their work and meet some of the most recognized experts in the fields of photography, art, and publishing. Already confirmed to be present are Sarah Gilbert from The Guardian; Francesca Marani from PhotoVogue; Louise Fedotov-Clements from Brighton Photoworks; Maysa Moroni from Internazionale; Carol Korting from Leica Fotografie Internazionale; Michela Frontino from Il Fotografo; Wiktoria Michalkiewicz from Rezo.pl.
Meanwhile, on the theme of THE DREAM, the 4th edition of the PhEST Pop Up Open Call, the international contest promoted in collaboration with LensCulture, has just successfully concluded with 759 projects submitted from 62 countries. The International Prize and the Prize reserved for an artist residing in Puglia will be announced at the PhEST press conference and will be realized through two exhibitions set up during the event.
The opening of PhEST is on August 30 in Piazza Palmieri with the DJ set by Mary Gehnyei, which will kick off a series of musical events that will bring C’mon Tigre (August 31) and Protopapa (September 1) to the stage and console.
Trenitalia Puglia Region once again confirms, this year too, as the official carrier of the 9th edition of the exhibition, offering many travel solutions. The initiative is part of the activities promoted by Trenitalia Regionale in Puglia to encourage the use of the train for tourism, leisure, and culture reasons. Those who reach the Adriatic city on board the regional trains of Trenitalia to visit the exhibition are entitled to a reduced entrance fee.
Here are the international photographers who have accepted the invitation to participate in the 9th edition of PhEST:
Nariman Darbandi - “Desolated Dreams”
The Iraqi visual artist Nariman Darbandi creates stunning but melancholic 3D images and videos inspired by Western cinema clichés. His main source of inspiration is the American atmosphere seen in movies and TV shows. His goal is to evoke a sense of nostalgia, wonder, and curiosity in viewers: transporting them to different times and places, eliciting memories, and inspiring them to imagine new stories. Ultimately, creating a deep emotional connection that resonates and lingers with the viewer.
César Dezfuli - “Passengers”
World Press Photo Award winner in 2023, César Dezfuli is a Spanish-Iranian journalist and documentary photographer specialized in migration and human rights on an international scale. In 2017 PhEST presents the portraits that Dezfuli made the year before by photographing 118 people who were rescued from a drifting raft 20 nautical miles off the Libyan coast. Now, in “Passengers”, Dezfuli tracks down many of the 118 passengers to find out why they left their countries, what they experienced along the migrant route, and how they have continued to live after being rescued at sea.
Bruce Eesly - “New Farmer”
Bruce Eesly, a visual artist and gardener, lives and works in Germany on photographs, archives, and artificially generated images. His work blends reality and fiction to distort commonly accepted historical narratives. He is interested in the status of photography in the era of artificial intelligence and its role in shaping our relationship with the natural world. “New Farmer” presents a collection of documentary photographs from the 1960s that seem to reaffirm the success story of the Green Revolution: genetic manipulation creates new crop varieties that result in larger and better yields. However, as the story unfolds, inconsistencies are perceived, and the images become absurd.
Ismail Ferdous - “Sea Beach”
Winner of the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2023, Ismail Ferdous is a Bangladeshi photographer living in New York. As a child, he spent holidays with his family on Cox's Bazar Beach in the Bay of Bengal. With “Sea Beach”, he returns to those places and for four years captures images that evoke his memories and investigate the current issues of consumerism and climate change.
Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad - “Fields of Sight”
Gauri Gill is an Indian photographer who uses photography as a practice of memory. Rajesh Vangad is an heir to the Warli painting style and is known for his works at the Craft Museum in New Delhi and at the Tata Memorial Hospital and Mumbai International Airport. In “Fields of Sight”, Gill's photographs, inscribed by Vangad's drawings, reconfigure landscapes suggesting vital aspects of what was not evident to the eye.
Matthias Jung - “Esperanto” (selected among participants in the PHMuseum Grant)
Matthias Jung is a German photographer who tells the story of a small region in Belgium that, just before the First World War, wanted to establish itself as an independent state and make Esperanto its national language. Today, on the border between the French-speaking and Flemish-speaking parts, in an area belonging to Prussia, the German Empire, Belgium, and France, there is a special German-speaking area with its own government and broad autonomy.
Michalina Kacperak
The Polish artist Michalina Kacperak, in her photographic practice, works both as a documentarian and as an artist. The most important part of her work is dedicated to personal and complex stories dealing with themes related to childhood, memory, social exclusion, and identity. “Soft Spot” is a personal story that tells the story of many others. Michalina is the oldest of four daughters of an alcoholic father, currently sober. Their childhood was a constant struggle against loneliness, instability, lack of intimacy, and a perpetual sense of guilt. Soft Spot is a collaborative project, started with her little sister, sixteen years younger.
Natalie Karpushenko - “Where Dreams May Come”
Artist, photographer, and environmentalist, Natalie Karpushenko, born in Kazakhstan, works on two major themes: nature and the human element. For the first time in Italy, Natalie Karpushenko's dreamy images are exhibited as a symbol of their connection. In her images, the fluid harmony of light that illuminates the beauty, depth, and power of the sea is perceived.
Polina Kostanda - “Polly in Wonderland”
Polina Kostanda, a Ukrainian artist, has embraced the power of artificial intelligence to create visually stimulating art that expands the mind. The resulting artworks are not simple digital images. They are portals to new realms of perception that invite viewers to question their understanding of reality and embrace the unlimited possibilities of human imagination.
Peter Menzel - “Material World: A Global Family Portrait”
In the early 1990s, photojournalist Peter Menzel began photographing 12 families in different countries around the world to document and compare their average lifestyles and visually reveal everything they owned. The project, which included another 18 families photographed by fellow photojournalists, became the book “Material World: A Global Family Portrait”.
Serifa - “Every Day Art”
The mutant and metamorphic portraits, produced in self-generating environments and using post-photographic models, draw on an underground and hip-hop imagery, alluding to Japanese culture without neglecting the forms of classical statuary and Renaissance painting, while also acknowledging the origin from the brutalism of wild figuration by authors like Baselitz or Lüpertz. A collision between different models that feed artificial intelligence and lead to completely unpredictable, imperfect, deformed, incomplete, and ruinous outcomes.
Richard Sharum - “Of Thee I Sing. An American Series”
The Texan editorial and documentary photographer Richard Sharum focuses on the images of three projects. “American Spine” focuses on a geographical area of the United States, known as the “fly-over zone”, in an attempt to offer a key to better understand the unifying elements of the American people. “American Homicide” and “American Avenue” shed light on the more violent aspects of American society and on the issues of poverty and homelessness.
Lisa Sorgini - “Mother Earth”
Lisa Sorgini, known for her research on motherhood stories and images, focuses on roles related to care, maternal and family relationships, and investigates society's perceptions and constructs, often in stark contrast to lived experience. The Australian photographer finds warrior mothers at Tamburi, the toughest and most ruthless neighborhood in Taranto, in front of her, nurturing and protecting, living the moment, making it more laden with love, security, and sweetness possible, and beyond the “poisoned hills” they know how to look. She establishes a powerful and deep connection with these steel flowers, adheres to their heartbeat, delivers the reality she has seen, delivers it intact, vivid, indomitable. Her photographs are like tattoos of the mothers at Tamburi, they imprint on the flesh and never go away.
Valentina Vannicola - “The Mystic Procession”
Valentina Vannicola graduated with a thesis in Film Studies from the University La Sapienza in Rome and later received a diploma from the Scuola Romana di Fotografia. Her entire artistic practice is attributable to the genre of staged photography. “The Mystic Procession” is a photographic work inspired by the procession described by Dante in the XXIX Canto of Purgatory. The work, whose original is 7 meters long and was acquired by the MAXXI Museum in Rome, was created by Valentina Vannicola inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.
Paolo Ventura - “Short Stories”
Paolo Ventura was born in Milan where he established himself as a fashion, design, and landscape photographer. He then decided to leave commercial photography behind and, in a small studio in Brooklyn, began to reconstruct dioramas on World War II based on stories told by his maternal grandmother. The “Short Stories” are a cycle of timeless works created in his studio in Anghiari, Tuscany, where the artist built a small stage to stage short and poetic stories through images. A “theatrical” work: stories of war, magic, abandonment. For PhEST, Ventura has also built life-size silhouettes of some characters from the stories and will exhibit the original backdrops, costumes, and some preparatory sketches.
Guillem Vidal - “Forgotten Playground”
Guillem Vidal uses the language of photography to develop his personal work, which is mainly in the field of landscape. It shows human intervention in the natural environment as a generator of the landscape and, above all, the struggle of nature to reverse this intervention. Abandoned playgrounds are a metaphor for oblivion: that characteristic inability of the adult phase of human life, where play remains only as a memory. These abandoned playgrounds, for children or adults, are invaded by nature in the slow process of transformation into ruin.
Jan von Holleben - “All Humans Be Cats”, PhEST 2024 Artist Residency
PhEST will tell the dreams and aspirations of the children of Monopoli with the project All Humans Be Cats, created in an artist residency by Jan von Holleben, an internationally renowned German photographer dedicated to the concept of “homo ludens”, a mix of pedagogical theory and personal childhood play experiences and memories. The residency project involved 800 children from the 4 Comprehensive Institutes of Monopoli who have proposed their dreams in recent months and then transformed them into fun and allegorical photographic shots with the children as protagonists. The photographic project will be exhibited at the Porto Vecchio in Monopoli for the entire duration of the festival. Also, the 800 drawings of the boys and girls of Monopoli will be presented to the public. Born in 1977 and raised in the countryside of southern Germany, Jan von Holleben spent much of his youth in an alternative commune. At the age of 13, he began his photographic career experimenting with all kinds of “magic tricks” and developing his imagination. After studying for teaching children with disabilities at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Freiburg, he moved to London, immersing himself in the London photographic scene, where he worked as an art director and director of photography. In 2007, he moved to Berlin. Much of his photographic work focuses on the concept of “homo ludens” - the man who learns through play. Jan von Holleben's work has been exhibited internationally. He has lived and worked in Paris since 2022.
The Contemporary Art will be represented by the works of some of the most interesting Italian artists:
Pier Alfeo - “LAPSE [The time during which something continues]”
Thanks to the collaboration with the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, the work LAPSE has real-time access to signals from hydrophones of a powerful underwater neutrino telescope installed off the coast of Portopalo di Capo Passero in the southernmost region of Sicily. Focusing on the massive phenomenon of anthropogenic noise pollution - a cause of extreme discomfort and devastation in marine ecosystems - the video installation translates underwater acoustic signals into “digital matter”, returning flows of points in a three-dimensional environment that react to the stimuli of underwater soundscapes.
Fabrizio Cicero - “All is completed”
The residency conducted by the artist in the spaces of the Church of Sant'Angelo leads to the creation of a site-specific intervention in which the forms of folklore of popular culture, symbols, rituals, costumes, and social conventions recur. Through the use of luminaries, invariably present in the decorative apparatus of streets and squares in the South, the artist rewrites the codes of the festivity, avoiding the use of the object in terms of decoration, writing, or design – as often happens in the context of contemporary art – and reflecting instead on the idea of excess, massification, or alteration of ritual. Inspired by a case of collapses and serious damage to patronal illuminations – which really happened in Salento in 2023 during a violent storm – Cicero prefers an illegible form of the installation apparatus, a pure formless cluster of modules distributed in the central space of the building, alluding on the one hand to a collective and widespread feeling of precariousness and uncertainty, on the other to the need to establish a new order in chaos and multiplicity, starting from the recovery of forms and identity traditions.
Davide Monaldi - “Skyland”
In Monaldi's glazed ceramic sculptures - elaborated on panels and tablets in the manner of Roman reliefs, classical sarcophagi, and Michelangelan centaury lines; or as ornamental friezes on the surface of high ovoid vases - there are subjects depicted with soft and stylized lines, halfway between comics and children's drawing, an inheritance of an
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