Landskrona Foto Festival 2024

Once every other year the little city of Landskrona in Skåne, is transformed, into a teeming metropolis of photography – Landskrona Foto Festival.

Overview

The art of photography becomes a part of the city environment; in the parks and the stores, while taking place in the cultural parlours. The love to the photography, the engagement and the investment in Landskrona as a City of Photography reaches its crescendo during the month of September. The festival has established itself as not only the most important national impact, but has also had an impact internationally.

The work of Ying Ang, Miriam Charlie, Odette England, and Lisa Sorgini is united by a shared exploration of place, family, care and mothering. Their images respond to recent personal and collective experiences, framed by the society, history, and unique landscape of Australia. While concentrating on intimate moments of tenderness, touch and connection, they confront wider concepts around the unseen or unacknowledged experiences of women, girls and mothers. 

Developed for Landskrona Foto Festival 2024, Where to Land the Eye proposes to explore the topic of land as natural environment and foundational to identity formation, as well as site of extraction that continues to be subject to contemporary forms of occupation stemming from colonial histories. The exhibition will also seek to reflect on how these affect the movement of people, and how migratory experiences are informed by arbitrary policies defining who is deemed acceptable from one territory to the other. The exhibition includes artists like Shiraz Bayjoo, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Joy Gregory, Miki Nitadori, Yvon Ngassam and Charlotte Yonga.

Throughout history, wine has been a source of nourishment, of work, of inebriation and of life. Wine is able to connect various worlds and to give coherence to human experience. The perfect metaphor of blood, it is able to sublimate moods and to provide the body with nutrients, as well as make us connect with the sacred in communion with nature. Its subsistence depends on a fragile equilibrium, on a latent tension between human desires and the designs of nature, which can be equally generous and destructive. Greta Alfaro explores these relationships in an exhibition in which grapes are confused with the figure of Christ, winegrowers become the major artistic landmarks of our civilization, and Dionysius gets drunk on the body of the Saviour. Menstruation, transfusion, crop growing, industry and civilization are addressed in The Blood of the Earth. This exhibition leads us from the roots of the vine to the sacred through wine and the many men and women who dedicate their lives to making this elixir that connects our bodies with the earth.

Two Ways to Carry a Cauliflower is Emma Sarpaniemi's performative photography series exploring women’s self-portraiture. To free the subject and the gaze from certain patriarchal ideals of femininity, the subject depicted in the images is portrayed playfully and tenderly as a woman who behaves, looks, and performs on her own terms and rules. Identity, reality, and imagination become blurred in the world formed by Sarpaniemi. She is not creating an alter-ego or distancing herself from the character; instead, she creates a representation of her identity in which the artist can recognize herself.

Exploring print culture, image circulation and questions of LGBT+ identity, Pacifico Silano’s work is entirely composed of repurposed fragments from gay pornographic magazines of the 1970s and 80s – an era connecting the progressive legacies of sexual revolution with the advent of the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis.

Among the exhibited artists are also Thierry Ardouin, Alfredo Blasquez, Federico Estol, Chloé Milos Azzopardi, Donja Nasseri, Giovanna Petrocchi, Sofia Runarsdotter, Clare Strand, Leonard Suryajaya and Chuxun Ran.

Since 2014, the Photobook Days have been a natural and important part of Landskrona Fotofestival. This year’s festival is no exception, with a solid programme of events at the festival centre on 6–8 September. The long-term goal with this focus is to give the photobook a higher status in Sweden and raise the frequency that the photobook appears in media – being reviewed and discussed. As well as giving the photo authors the same status as the literary authors. The Photobook Days includes three days with focus on photobooks, exhibitions, a photobook fair with Swedish and international publishers, book signings, Pecha Kucha, Landskrona Foto & Breadfield Dummy Award, international guest lecturers and publishers who present and talk about their work and more. In this way experience is exchanged between countries and networks are created. This ultimately enriches the discussion about the photobook as a phenomenon and helps to further the evolvement of the field.

The festival includes also portfolio reviews with experts such as Pierre Bessard, Nathalie Chapuis, Ilaria Campioli, Pål Henrik Ekern, Henna Harri, Pauline Koffi Vandet, Catlin Langford, Tanvi Mishra, NEVVEN, Amila Puzić, Arianna Rinaldo, Lisa Springer, Marta Szymanska, Anna Tellgren and Rasmus Vasli. In addition, during the festival’s opening weekend, visitors have the opportunity to be photographed using the wet plate technique by photographer Hans Jonsson and get a unique portrait of themselves to take home.