12 highlights from Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography 2017
Selected by David Drake, Festival Director
Amak Mahmoodian Shenasnameh
Iranian artist Amak Mahmoodian’s project Shenasnameh offers new insights into Persian women’s identity against a backdrop of state censorship and control. Subtle differences in appearance are discernible in these found passport photographs, but in some images eyes and foreheads are obscured by the authorities due to the subject wearing too much mascara or revealing too much of the face.
Marcelo Brodsky 1968 – The Fire of Ideas
Marcelo Brodsky is an Argentine artist and human rights activist, working with images and documents of specific events to investigate broader social, political and historical issues. In 1968 – the Fire of Ideas Brodsky features archival images of student and worker demonstrations around the world, carefully annotated by hand in order to deconstruct what lay behind worldwide social turbulence in the late 1960s.
John Hoppy Hopkins Taking Liberties
Allen Ginsberg by John Hoppy Hopkins
Between 1960 and 1966 John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins captured the vibrancy of discontent and the emerging counter-culture in Britain, which was expressed through activism, poetic expression and art. The Taking Liberties exhibition for Diffusion brings together a selection of images never seen before from the photographers archive alongside others included in the very few public exhibitions of his work to date. This includes the Beat Poets, William Burroughs, Malcolm X, The Beatles and those involved in the pioneering underground newspaper International Times.
Paolo Ciregia Perestrojka
Paolo Ciregia is an Italian photographer whose project Perestrojka focuses on the Kiev uprising in Ukraine. With the reportage photographs from his private archives, shot over four years to document the Ukrainian war – from the riots in Maidan Square to the parting of the Crimea, and to the war in Donbass – he reconstructs such events with overlaps, cuts and corrosions. The aim is to create a different iconographic repertoire, to revise and to change the way to tell the war, without erasing the historical and cultural roots of such events.
Diane Meyer Berlin
American artist Diane Meyer combines medium format film images with intricate hand sewn embroidery. In the Berlin series she has reimagined the entire 104 circumference of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic divide between the communist East and capitalist West during the Cold War. By having the embroidery take the form of digital pixels, she makes a connection between the porous nature of memory and digital file corruption, suggesting that photography transforms history into nostalgic objects that obscure our understanding of the past.
Manuel Bougot Chandigarh
In the 20th Century the Modernist movement in architecture and urban design became and continues to be a global phenomenon. Chandigarh was one of the early planned cities in the post-independence India with the whole design and construction of the city being true to Le Corbusier’s radical modernist vision. In Chandigarh French photographer Manuel Bougot forensically explores through photography how Le Corbusier’s philosophy and approach was realised in this unique city that has come to represent Modern India.
Bojan Radovič The Icon/The Star
In The Icon/The Star, Slovenian artist Bojan Radovič examines how the five-pointed star as a revolutionary symbol is appropriated and re-used in a contemporary globalised world. With the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of communism in Europe, the red star is progressively emptied of its ‘original’ meaning. Today, as time passes, the star symbol simply floats around different countries and brands, in various advertising and consumer contexts. Radovič points to this shifting of the meaning of the star as the consequence of the capitalist process of re-branding, which slowly and steadily divests the red star of its historical and revolutionary power.
Danila Tkachenko Lost Horizon
Danila Tkachenko is a Russian artist whose latest project Lost Horizon focuses on the futurist and utopian pursuit of space travel by the Soviet Cosmonauts. Tkachenko isolates iconic images of the Soviet space race against the background of The Black Square by Kasimir Malevich. Being a revolutionary art piece, Malevich’s The Black Square represented a formal image of the political revolution of 1917.
Vanley Burke No Time for Flowers
Jamaican born Vanley Burke played a key role in documenting protest in 1970s and 80s Birmingham, including Anti-Nazi League demonstrations and the Handsworth uprising. He also photographed life in South Africa in the 1990s, as the Apartheid system crumbled, including the Sharpeville demonstration and Nelson Mandela’s birthday party. We’re honoured to present a selection from both bodies of work in a special exhibition at Diffusion.
Catrine Val Katmandu Girl
We are delighted to welcome back German artist Catrine Val, whose work we presented at Diffusion 2013. As a result of this, she was commissioned by the Manic Street Preachers and provided the cover image for their last album Futurology. Her latest project, Katmandu Girl, employs her fashion sensibility to full effect in an exploration of feminine identity and gender fluidity in contemporary Nepal, challenging our preconceptions about Indian women.
Laís Pontes Born Nowhere/Born Now Here
Laís Pontes is a London-based Brazilian artist exploring the manifold ways that characters are developed and constructed on social media platforms. Inspired by the multiculturalism of her home country Brazil, Pontes investigates the notion of social media as an extension of the self and the fluidity of identity in contemporary society. To this end, the artist uses her own body and life to stage experiments on various social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram and OkCupid. Her process allows others to directly contribute to the creation of the work, encouraging viewers to develop a critical view of social media and its effects on our everyday lives.
Kennardphillipps State of the Nations
My final highlight is State of the Nations, a special commission for Diffusion by Peter Kennard, without doubt Britain’s most important political artist, and Cat Phillipps, with whom he has been collaborating with since 2003. In State of the Nations, resistance to the status quo is embedded in their deconstruction of news images and narratives built from everyday materials, photomontage and text. kennardphillipps dig into the surface of words and images, remixing earlier work and creating new artwork addressing contemporary issues relating to Trump, Brexit, the refugee and migrant crisis and nuclear proliferation.
David Drake
Diffusion Festival Director
Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography, Various venues around Cardiff, Mon 1 – Wed 31 May. Info: www.diffusionfestival.org