The twenty-ninth edition of the well established international Month of Photography festival in Bratislava presents international stars, such as AES + F and Joan Fountcouberta; the extensive retrospective of Vladimír Židlický will be an experience as well. Thematically, the current year of the festival will be a part of another major November event – the 30th Anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, the second, well established theme of the festival will be contemporary photography in the Central and Eastern European area. Overall, the festival will present about 25 individual and collective exhibitions.
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, we decided to include, as the main theme of the festival, a selection of photographs reflecting the events of November 1989, and those authors who were opposed to communist power in the then Eastern bloc. “However, it will not be a tour of historical photographs,” says the Month of the Photography festival director, Prof. Václav Macek.
Joan Fontcuberta, who uses the medium of photography as the basis of his conceptual creation, will be an intensely glowing star of the festival. As a photographer, as a writer, editor and curator, he is most intensively devoted to the subject of photography and truthfulness. He will present his works titled Gastropoda and Trauma in Bratislava. In both cases, the author approaches photography as a living organism. “Photographs are subject to organic metabolism: they are born, grow, reproduce, and die to re-launch the life cycle,” says the author. In the Gastropoda project, he deals with “photo metabolism”, in Trauma he observes what happens when a photograph stops showing reality due to degradation of light sensitive chemicals.
The great driver of this year’s festival will be the French photographer Cédric Delsaux. He is an artist who often raises concern in the viewer through his work. For example, his futuristic – apocalyptic series of photographs, Dark Lens, is famous, which even the director of Star Wars, George Lucas, appreciated.
From the collective exhibitions, the presentation of the Laureats of Oscar Barnack Prize, which is annually announced by Leica, will be the most appealing. You will see a selection of the most interesting series, nominated for this prestigious award for the year 2019. This year’s LOBA winners will be highlighted among the individual exhibitions.
Vladimír Židlický, a Czech photographer of world importance, who is famous for his experiments with the heritage of classical art disciplines, will bring to Bratislava a large retrospective mapping his work over the past 50 years. Židlický also uses photography as a starting point for placing his fine-art and visual ideas in layers, creating attractive, multi-layered works. You will see up to 100 of these works at the festival.
You can look forward to individual and collective exhibitions by authors such as: Maija Laurinen, Tomáš Pospěch, who will bring a breeze of retro from the period of collectivization of agriculture, the Polish art group Sputnik, and Martin Kochan, whose photography is part of this year’s festival poster, and many others. The most interesting of the festival’s accompanying events will be a Masterclass by Joan Fontcuberta and Peeter Linnap, a conference on Slovak photography from the 1920s to the 1960s, and, of course, a commented presentation of the newest books on photography.