Lundi 29 Septembre 2014 16:03:39 par actuphoto dans Festivals

The Tbilisi Photo Festival celebrates its fifth anniversary this year by maintaining its focus on urgent contemporary themes affecting the region while showcasing important historical rediscoveries.

Amid the continuing conflict in Ukraine, the festival presents new work by leading Polish documentary photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz – a series of powerful images of how life is lived surrounded by the current turmoil.

THE TBILISI PHOTO FESTIVAL brings the best of world photography to the heart of the Caucasus, the ancient crossroads of Europe and Asia. Continuing its tradition of creative diversity, on show this year is work from Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy and Belgium.

The festival also presents the best photography from the Caucasus and the surrounding region to the world. This year it has a distinct Polish flavour, with Justyna Mielnikiewicz’s new exhibition on Ukraine, a lecture on contemporary photography in Poland by leading Warsaw-based curator Adam Mazur, and the open-air projection of work by photographers from the renowned Poland-based Sputnik collective

Marking the 60th anniversary of Magnum co-founder Robert Capa’s death, the festival is proud to dis- play the remarkable photographs that Capa took during a his 1947 trip to Georgia with author John Steinbeck.
Also on show are Davide Monteleone’s pictures exploring post-war identity in Chechnya, and images from a hidden history of photography in Soviet-era Georgia by Rezo Kezeli and Boris Shaverdyan.

THE TBILISI PHOTO FESTIVAL brings the best of world photography to the heart of the Caucasus, the ancient crossroads of Europe and Asia. Continuing its tradition of creative diversity, on show this year is work from Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy and Belgium.

The festival also presents the best photography from the Caucasus and the surrounding region to the world. This year it has a distinct Polish flavour, with Justyna Mielnikiewicz’s new exhibition on Ukraine, a lecture on contemporary photography in Poland by leading Warsaw-based curator Adam Mazur, and the open-air projection of work by photographers from the renowned Poland-based Sputnik collective
Marking the 60th anniversary of Magnum co-founder Robert Capa’s death, the festival is proud to dis- play the remarkable photographs that Capa took during a his 1947 trip to Georgia with author John Steinbeck.
Also on show are Davide Monteleone’s pictures exploring post-war identity in Chechnya, and images from a hidden history of photography in Soviet-era Georgia by Rezo Kezeli and Boris Shaverdyan.
at the annual Night of Photography, the festival’s showpiece nocturnal event in Tbilisi’s atmospheric Old Town.

This is the Tbilisi Photo Festival’s second major event marking its fifth anniversary this year. In May, the month in which the festival was held in previous years, the exhibition The Real World by the renowned British Magnum photographer Martin Parr and Lithuanian Rimaldas Viksraitis, who won the Arles Festival discovery prize in 2009, was held in Tbilisi. It was the first time that Parr’s work has been exhibited in Georgia and was accompanied by workshops for people with disabilities mentored by Rimaldas Viksraitis.



A Ukraine Runs Through It by Justyna Mielnikiewicz
October 1-10

The crisis in Ukraine that began with mass demonstrations and the ousting of a president and intensified with the annexation of Crimea and armed clashes in the east of the country has left a mark on all its people’s lives, whichever side they are on. This year, Tbilisi-based Polish photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz made a series of visits to Ukraine to explore the human impact of these political and military conflicts that have left some 3,000 people dead. Using the Dniepr river that runs through the country as a symbolic dividing line between Ukraine’s east and west, she sought to investigate one of the crucial questions lying beneath the current dispute: what does it mean to be Ukrainian?


A Georgian Journal Robert Capa in Georgia. 1947
October 3-17

In 1947, the celebrated Hungarian photographer Robert Capa and American writer John Steinbeck were given permission to visit the Soviet Union and, unusually, to visit areas outside Moscow. They travelled to Ukraine but were most intrigued to visit Georgia after hearing Russians’ description of the Caucasus republic as a kind of Soviet paradise-on- earth of relative freedom and abundance. The images that Capa brought back of Tbilisi landscapes and markets, religious services, sporting events and Georgian social rituals illustrated Steinbeck’s book A Russian Journal. Offering a unique human insight into life in a corner of Moscow’s empire that was rarely seen in the west during communism, they also show how Georgian life at the time differed from the perceived image of Soviet severity and gloom during Stalin’s rule.

© ICP

 

Spasibo by Davide Monteleone
October 4-18

The disturbed and sometimes disturbing ‘normality’ of life after the wars in the Russian republic of Chechnya, with its atmosphere of fear, repression and suppressed violence, is the subject of Italian photographer Davide Monteleone’s portfolio Spasibo. Monteleone, whose work has won him numerous prestigious international prizes, including the 2013 Carmignac Gestion photojournalism award and three World Press Photo awards, has focused on Russia and its peoples for more than a decade. Spasibo looks at the complexities and tensions beneath the façade of local strongman ruler Ramzam Kadyrov regime’s ‘Chechenisation’ project and its mixture of traditional culture, Islam and professed fealty to Moscow, and questions what Chechen identity means after the republic’s battles for independence were defeated.

© Davide Monteleone
 

A Suitcase with Dad’s Negatives Boris Shaverdyan - Pioneer of Georgian Conceptual Photography
October 4-18

This exhibition of work by Boris Shaverdyan from the late 1980s, just before the collapse of the Soviet empire, explores a little-known but highly significant part of the history of Georgian photography. Conceptual photography at the time was a novel form of expression in the Soviet republics, and Shaverdyan became one of its pioneers. Born in Tbilisi in 1956, he combined images and text in a way that examined the role of the individual in the Communist state – an adventurous approach that few dared to attempt even in the final years of the Kremlin’s rule. On display at the festival as well as his photographs are seven of his idiosyncratic home-made albums of pictures and text.

© Boris Shaverdyan
 

Man with an Accordion Rezo Kezeli - A Free Spirit of Soviet Georgian Photography
October 5-21

In the early 1990s, a huge archive of some 4,000 old negatives that could have been lost forever was res- cued by a group of Georgian photographers. At first, no one knew who took them, but a few years ago they were found to be images by Rezo Kezeli dating from the 1940s to the 1970s. Kezeli (1925-1988) took pictures of the world around him: himself, his friends, how they lived and where they went. In doing so, he demonstrated a vision that was full of lightness and joy, totally free of the prevailing Communist dogmas of the time which demanded that art be in service to state ideology. His work is an outstanding discovery that shows how Soviet-era Georgian photography, despite being under pressure to serve the needs of propaganda, could also sometimes nurture creative eyewitnesses who transcended the norms of their time.

© Rezo Kezeli

 

Night of Photography
October 4

The highlight of the fifth edition of the festival, as in previous years, is the Night of Photography, when the streets and squares of Tbilisi’s Old Town are lit up after dark with some of the most inspired and intriguing images from around the world projected on giant screens on café terraces. The festival’s partnership with National Geographic Georgia continues this year with work from some of the world’s most important photographers and agencies, including this year’s World Press Photo prize winner John Stanmeyer from VII Agency, Putin’s Party by Thomas Dworzak of Magnum and Damascus: War and Peace by Andrea Bruce of Noor. Ukrainian photographers also offer their reflections on the crisis in their homeland, including Andrei Lomakin’s Maidan series and Oksana Yushko’s pictures from Yalta (Butterfly Effect), alongside images that will be sent direct to the festival from eastern Ukraine by Roman Pilipey and talented Russian photographer Maria Tourchenkova with her slideshow People’s Republic of Chaos. From the photo agency Metrography, Iraqi photographers show their projects on the recent dramatic events in Kurdistan. There is also Misha Friedman from Cosmos Agency with his recent project about Russians’ everyday experience of graft, Is Corruption in Russia’s DNA?, and a special focus on young German documentary photographers including Andreas Meichsner, Uwe H. Martin, Merlin Nadj-Torma and Wolfgang Müller. For the first time this year, the festival will feature a selection from Cambodia’s Ang- kor Photo Festival, including work by Moises Saman from Magnum documenting Syrian refugees and Agence VU’s Gael Turine on India’s ‘Fence of Shame’ to prevent illegal immigration. And finally, as always, there will be selections by young emerging photog- raphers from Georgia and the South Caucasus.