A Guide To December 2025 Photography Festivals & Exhibitions

Hans – or – Don’t Bury Me In The Grave Of My Father by Peter Pflügler at PhMuseum Lab, Foto/Industria, Harmattan - Togo Photo Festival 2025, and Atlas Of Echoes by Sarah van Rij at MEP are among the photography events to visit next month.

Hans – or – Don’t Bury Me In The Grave Of My Father by Peter Pflügler at PhMuseum Lab

Bologna, Italy / 28 November - 15 January

It all begins with a found archive. Over a thousand photographic negatives were left behind by Hans (1911–1997), the great-granduncle Austrian visual storyteller Peter Pflügler never truly knew. In this deeply personal project, the artist turns to these negatives to piece together the life of a man who remained a family mystery. Hans documented himself tirelessly: self-portraits spanning decades, showing a face that aged, uniforms and surroundings that changed, yet a gaze and a persistent shadow of emotional darkness remained constant. During his research Pflügler discovered that Hans endured violence at the hands of his father, a trauma that led to his lifelong marginalization, and ultimately to his dying wish—not to be buried in his father’s grave. Peter embarks on an investigative journey, combining archival research with his own newly made images. Through self-portraits and staged scenes, he weaves his own narrative into Hans’s, revealing resonances of intergenerational pain and silence.

The exhibition is structured around a three-channel video installation, where photographs and video loop in and out, allowing a dynamic exchange between Hans’s archival images and Pflügler’s new work. The backroom takes us behind the scenes, it becomes a mix between archival workspace and exhibition, emphasizing the project’s work-in-progress nature and blurring the line between living memory and documentation. At its heart, the project is about reparation: Pflügler plans to exhume Hans’s body and giving him the burial he longed for.

Foto/Industria 2025

Bologna, Italy / 7 November - 14 December

The new edition of the Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work is dedicated to the theme of the home under the artistic direction of Francesco Zanot. Spread across eleven exhibitions in various historic venues throughout Bologna, Foto/Industria 2025 approaches home as both a physical and symbolic space, exploring ideas of memory, labor, displacement, and belonging. Highlights include Jeff Wall’s major exhibition Living, Working, Surviving at MAST.Galleries, which presents 28 works spanning four decades, alongside notable projects by Alejandro Cartagena, Forensic Architecture, Julia Gaisbacher, Vuyo Mabheka, Matei Bejenaru, Kelly O’Brien, Mikael Olsson, Moira Ricci, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, and Sisto Sisti, each examining how personal and collective lives take shape within the places we inhabit.

Through a dialogue between contemporary practice and archival material, this edition offers a multifaceted portrait of domesticity and its social, political, and emotional dimensions. By inviting viewers to reconsider what constitutes a home: from rural borderlands and suburban areas to modernist architecture, company towns, and intimate family narratives, Foto/Industria provides a reflective and expansive journey into how we build, imagine, and remember the spaces that define us.

Learn more on their website.

Harmattan - Togo Photo Festival 2025

Lomé, Togo / 12 December - 30 December

Founded and directed by Ako Atikossie and Giulia Brivio, Harmattan - Togo Photo Festival aims to provide international visibility and create new opportunities for emerging photographers from Togo and West Africa. Now in its first edition, the festival seeks to rethink and expand the African imaginary, using photography as a tool to bridge cultural heritage and contemporary artistic expression. Its opening weekend will feature three collective exhibitions across Agnassan: Musée Paul Ahyi, Galerie Artemis, and Jardin Edith Equagoo, alongside workshops and masterclasses at the Palais de Lomé, bringing together fifteen Togolese and international artists.

Following its Lomé edition, Harmattan will continue to circulate its selected works internationally. In early 2026, the program will travel to Lugano/Paradiso at Focus Artphilein (February–April), then to Milan at Loro Milano (May), supported by a dedicated catalogue co-published by Artphilein Editions and Boîte Editions. Through these initiatives, the festival strengthens its mission to broaden representation, foster collaboration, and amplify West African photographic voices on a global stage.

Discover the full program on the festival's Instagram account.

Atlas Of Echoes by Sarah van Rij at MEP

Paris, France / 11 December - 25 January

The exhibition presents a poetic and cinematic vision of the urban street by Dutch artist Sarah van Rij. Through a selection of her series, van Rij weaves together cityscapes, self-portraits, and collages created from her own photographs to build a fragmented, enigmatic portrait of modern life.

Her images turn passers-by into actors in an urban theater, capturing fleeting moments: silhouettes in windows, shadows, and the details of hands and clothing in motion. Van Rij’s collages extend her exploration beyond photography, reassembling her own visual archive in a way that invites reflection on how we observe and interpret everyday life.

For more insights, go to MEP's website.

What's the Word? Johannesburg! at Fondation A Stichting

Brussels, Belgium / 11 September - 21 December

Johannesburg pulses with tension and hope. Curated by Emilie Demon, with the support and complicity of Rubis Mécénat, the exhibition channels the spirit of Gil Scott-Heron’s Brian Jackson’s 1975 song Johannesburg, exploring identity, resilience, and transformation through nine young South African photographers.

Shaped by a legacy of apartheid and social inequality, the city’s trauma and contradictions become a backdrop for raw, deeply personal work. Featuring artists such as Sibusiso Bheka, Jabulani Dhlamini, Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Vuyo Mabheka, Alice Mann, Dimakatso Mathopa, Xolani Ngubeni, Motlhoki Nono, and Zwelibanzi Zwane, images navigate themes of family, spirituality, love, fatherhood, and inherited pain. Together, the photographers offer a layered, hopeful portrait of Johannesburg—not just as a site of struggle, but as a place of reinvention and belonging.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Abitare Il Tempo by Taysir Batniji at Palazzina dei Giardini

Modena, Italy / 21 November - 15 February

Taysir Batniji, a significant Palestinian diaspora artist, uses diverse media (photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation) to explore themes of exile, identity, memory, presence, and absence, deeply influenced by the conflict and struggles of his homeland. His work engages in a continuous dialogue between cultures, transforming ordinary objects into poignant reflections—such as the glass keys or photographs of watchtowers—that poetically combine the public and private spheres. Employing strategies like shifting meaning, abstraction, and irony, Batniji’s practice creates works characterized by impermanence and fragility, which, while seeking a universal dimension, remain inseparable from the collective Palestinian tragedy, allowing him to "inhabit time" in response to the inability to fully inhabit space. Curated by Daniele De Luigi, the exhibition path in the Palazzina dei Giardini Ducali, his first solo show in an Italian institution, recounts the different ways in which the artist confronts his obsession with everyday objects and traces, attempting to mend pain and trauma.

Viewfinders by Matteo Girola at Studiofaganel

Gorizia, Italy / 15 November - 16 January

Founded on a long investigation into old camera manuals, Viewfinders by Matteo Girola explores the curious images of people looking through the viewfinder, often holding their camera upside down, turning them into “finders of new views.” The exhibition presents eight large risograph portraits floating on neutral backgrounds, printed on the same paper used in Girola's self‑published photobook.

In addition to these portraits, the artist also shows two earlier series: Luce dei miei occhi, which maps his own eyes using ophthalmological slides and a sculptural installation; and Just a Souvenir, drawn from thousands of early mobile phone images collected from the internet. Through this work, he reflects on the ambiguity of images, the tension between archive and personal production, and the beauty of discovering alternative perspectives.

Explore further at Studiofaganel's website.

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Also open this month:

Photo Phnom Penh Festival 2025 / Phnom Penh, Cambodia / 19 November - 19 December

Photo Phnom Penh is a leading photography festival in Southeast Asia, organized by the non‑profit Photo Phnom Penh Association to promote artistic exchange, technical skill, and youth engagement. The festival spans multiple cultural venues across Phnom Penh, showcasing both historical and contemporary works from European and Asian photographers. It features exhibitions, screenings, talks, workshops, portfolio reviews, and the Photo Is Your Memory initiative, which offers free scanning, restoration, and printing of personal photographs. The festival highlights photography’s power to explore memory, identity, and social transformation.

Ici, Là by Massao Mascaro at Centre De La Photographie Genève / Geneva, Switzerland / 30 September - 9 January

Curated by Danaé Panchaud, the exhibition Ici, Là [Here, There] brings together two series of photographs, taken in Geneva and Brussels over several years, expressing two distinct relationships with time. Along the banks of the Rhône in Geneva, Mascaro captures the river’s shifting light and reflections, creating fluid, poetic images that blur contours and evoke the passage of time. In contrast, his Brussels series focuses on the intimate space of a kitchen table after meals, documenting the quiet traces of everyday life. Through these black-and-white analogue images, Mascaro transforms the mundane into moments of reflection, exploring the dialogue between movement and stillness, exterior and interior, and the subtle beauty embedded in routine and memory.

Performing The Invisible by Hoda Afshar at Musée du Quai Branly / Paris, France / 30 September - 25 January

Through a work that is both poetic and political, Hoda Afshar explores the history of established perspectives and makes photography a tool of revelation and resistance, through themes of marginality, gender identity, and exile. Her first monographic exhibition in France features two major installations: The Fold, an unprecedented work reinterpreting colonial-era photographs of Moroccan subjects shot by psychiatrist Gaëtan de Clérambault to deconstruct how photography can conceal or shape the representation of bodies for a dominant power; and Speak The Wind, a visual essay focusing on the winds, beliefs, and rituals of the islands in the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran. The overall exhibition, which combines photographs, drawings, mirrors, videos, and sound installations, invites viewers to reflect on their relationship with images and the narratives they construct.

Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive by Destiny Mata at Abrons Arts Center / New York, United States / 17 October - 4 January

The Lower East Side Yearbook is an archive started by photographer Destiny Mata about Lower East Side public housing residents and the importance of community memory. The exhibition brings together Mata’s portraits and family photographs contributed by local residents, creating a collective photo-yearbook that documents life, resilience, and belonging in the neighborhood. Curated by Ali Rosa‑Salas with exhibition design by Anzia Anderson, the show functions as a living archive, celebrating the enduring strength and shared histories of a rapidly changing community.