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© Hicham Benohoud
© Hicham Benohoud

Cristina de Middel invites us to “play” with her Carte Blanche for PHotoESPAÑA 2018

[Photo © Hicham Benohoud]

PHotoESPAÑA 2018 will take place from 6 June to 26 August. The international photography and visual arts festival, which hosted its first edition in 1998, is now immersed in the celebration of its twenty years of life. The festivities begin last year with the twentieth edition of the festival and will continue until December 2018, year in which PHotoESPAÑA turns twenty. Because of its importance, this anniversary has been declared an Event of Exceptional Public Interest.

The Festival will develop a programme with diverse central concepts including portraiture, the importance of art collecting, and Spanish photography from the 20th century to the present. Also in the context of PHotoESPAÑA, TransEurope will be launched, a formative programme that aims to promote the exchange between European photography and visual arts professionals. Furthermore, the Festival will celebrate the tenth anniversary of Trasatlántica, a photography and visual arts programme that promotes the creation of meeting places and professional networks, while favouring the international reach of photography and visual arts exhibitions.

Cristina de Middel invites us to “play” with photography with her Carte Blanche programme Players

The Festival will again this year feature a Carte Blanche programme that has been commissioned on this occasion to the recent winner of the National Photography Award Cristina de Middel. The photographer from Alicante has chosen the theme Players to bring together a selection of artists who have ventured to explore the boundaries of the photographic medium, sometimes even combining photography with other disciplines like cinema, painting, or sculpture.

In her words: “In order to depart from the veneration and the norm that has marked the rhythm of the poor development of photography since its creation, we need playful transgression, inventiveness, and unrestrained flirtation. In recent years, with new generations and new schools, we have seen the budding of artists of a different sort that transgresses the norms without vindicating anything, just out of curiosity, to mix it up in the lab in search of new materials. The selection of authors and exhibitions proposed for PHotoESPAÑA 2018 aims to bring together a maximum of games with which artists from all continents have experimented, thus demonstrating that this is not only a western tendency but a true change of paradigm.”

The Carte Blanche programme includes an anthological exhibition of the photographer from Cameron Samuel Fosso – which will bring together some of his most widely known series, including
African Spirits, Emperor of Africa, Allonzenfans, and Black Pope. Players will also feature the collective exhibition Grand World Final in which six representatives from six continents “all show us how the game manages to place visual culture where it deserves: on the edge of a precipice”, in the words of Cristina de Middel. The artists that will participate in this exhibition are Jason Fulford, Miguel Calderón, Anna Hell, Zhao Renhui, Prue Stent, Honey Long and Hicham Benohoud.

Portraiture, Spanish photography, and art collecting in PHotoESPAÑA 2018

PHotoESPAÑA 2018 proposes a programme with different central concepts. Portraiture will be the protagonist of the exhibition Myths by the British photographer Cecil Beaton. This show presents a survey of the history of photography during the 20th-century hand in hand with an artist that portrayed a variety of subjects, from the British aristocracy to the glamour of fashion; from the protagonists of the Golden Age of Hollywood to the great cultural and political icons.

PHotoESPAÑA will offer a panorama of Spanish photography through the work by artists of different generations. From the photographic pictorialism of Tomás de Acillona to the photographic interventions by the conceptual artist Carmen Calvo; an anthological exhibition featuring works from the 80s to the present by Carlos Cánovas; the most representative photographic series by Montserrat Soto, and the photographic reflections on the Levante region by Ricardo Cases.

During its 20th Anniversary, PHotoESPAÑA will also give special attention to art collecting with the anthological photography exhibition about the Russian avant-garde, The Soviet Century. Russian Photography from the Lafuente Archive. The show, curated by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, features original works by Alexander Rodchenko and Giorgi Zelma, among others.

TransEurope is born, a new European forum for photography and the visual arts

TransEurope was launched in the autumn, an initiative consisting in photography workshops, portfolio reviews, professional meeting places, collective exhibitions and the publication of a magazine that aims to favour the exchange, mobility, and visibility among artists residing in Scandinavia, to the east and west of the Mediterranean, and the Balkans. The project is sponsored by the Creative Europe programme and is the fruit of a collaboration with the Finish Museum of Photography and EuroMare in Greece.

Trasatlántica celebrates 10 years

PHotoESPAÑA 2108 will celebrate the tenth anniversary of Trasatlántica. This forum, which began in 2008 hand in hand with PHotoESPAÑA, has brought together photographers, researchers, critics and curators of Ibero-American art to participate in programmes that include symposiums, editing workshops, portfolio reviews, exhibitions, and competitions. After ten years, actives have been organised in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Spain, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Senegal.

The most recent edition of Trasatlántica organised portfolio reviews in Brazil, Morocco, and the Philippines. To celebrate the programme´s ten years, PHotoESPAÑA has allied with Casa América, Casa Árabe, and Casa Asia, venues that will each present a selection of works from the reviews.

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