PHotoESPAÑA 2024

Under the new direction of María Santoyo, PHotoESPAÑA seeks to showcase the creativity and diversity of visual artistic practice consolidated since the beginning of the millennium both within and beyond our borders.

Overview

Society is inherent in the photographic fact: making and viewing images responds to a collective impulse. Photography is no longer limited to representing the environment, but rather constructs and deconstructs it; it is capable of projecting potential futures. The appropriate question today is not what is photography, but rather what it can become.

PHotoESPAÑA aims to answer that question with one possible response: Perpetuum mobile. Photography, like that utopian machine of infinite energy conceived by both Renaissance alchemists and modern engineers, is a dynamic, fluid, inexhaustible medium in constant transformation. In this new cycle, the festival wants to pay special attention to new practices, formats, and channels of creation and production; to emerging figures on the international scene, who today rediscover and emphasize identities and collectives considered peripheral in the last century due to their gender, origin, or sexual orientation; to the freedom and transdisciplinarity of the generation of artists born in democratic Spain, but also and of course, to the great names of previous decades who have made visual expression a timeless art.

The festival involves Madrid and other cities such as Santander and Cantabria, as well as Alcalá de Henares, Córdoba, Alcalá de Henares, Alcobendas, Barcelona, Valladolid, Huete, and Zaragoza. The main program includes exhibited artists like Rehab Eldalil, Seif Kousmate, Amina Kadous, Nadia Bseiso, Wafaa Samir, Marcos Rico, Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg, Edward Burtynsky, Fina Miralles, Anastasia Samoylova and more. The festival also includes a series of exhibitions as part of the OFF program, in addition to two shows held in the metaverso.