Get Familiar With The PhMuseum Days 2024 International Photography Festival Exhibition Program

How does our perception of things change when we look carefully or from a different perspective? Sixteen exhibitions will address CLOSER, the theme of this fourth edition about to inaugurate in Bologna, Italy.

CLOSER is an invitation to stop and observe, to reflect on what happens when we examine the details closely and begin to lose the whole picture. Centered on this theme, the fourth edition of PhMuseum Days, an international photography festival curated and organized by PhMuseum, returns to Bologna on September 12-15 at DumBO's Spazio Bianco and other venues around the city. The program offers an itinerary of exhibitions, talks, guided tours, workshops, book presentations and screenings.

Looking is the basis of our information gathering, our reasoning, our growth as individuals and as a society. Moved by the urgency to understand the nature of things, the authors on display at PhMuseum Days 2024 approach a polluted river, the fall of a regime, their own bodies, their own cultural backgrounds, and much more. Their gaze does not seek neutrality, but accepts the partiality due to proximity and the nature of the language of the image, which is as universal as it is ambiguous and open to free interpretation; they make intimacy their strength: in interpersonal relationships as much as in their relationship with territory, history, and living beings. 

The festival program is preceded by the exhibition Anatomy Of An Oyster, a solo show by Rita Puig-Serra (Spain, 1985) that opened last June and runs until September 15th at the PhMuseum Lab in Bologna. The Catalan photographer's work is a  journey into the past that traces a story of courage and personal reworking of the abuse she suffered in her family as a child. A cathartic exercise that, through the metaphor of the oyster and its removal, allows one to delve into a painful experience told to a now absent mother.

Personal experience is also at the center of Trajectories by Beatriz de Souza Lima (Brazil, 1998), which addresses the themes of care and interdependence from the observation of the hospital she often visited and the botanical garden she encountered on the way. Focusing on the similarities between the two spaces, the images in Trajectories  bring them so close that they become inextricable. Their physical proximity becomes conceptual. Both are places in which the feeling of being foreign coexists with a positive tension: the way living beings, whether plants or humans, strive to seek stability and create bonds in vulnerable situations.  

Only In Good Taste by Kush Kukreja (India, 1994) also begins with a habitual journey: in the city of Delhi, Kukreja crosses the Yamuna River daily, learning to read it in a much more layered and complex way than traditional photographs that have sculpted it as “the polluted river.” Thus, Only In Good Taste deconstructs a symbol of the Anthropocene and offers possible new paths for its representation. Somewhere between the investigation of a surveyor, a chemist, and a performer, Kukreja's work at its center houses the collaboration between the photographer and the river: the Yamuna is not a passive object of research, but an active part of a narrative. 

Octopus's Diary by Matylda Niżegorodcew (Poland, 2001) uses performance to closely observe the stories of others. The Polish artist lives other people's lives for 48 hours, documenting the entire process together with the subjects involved in an attempt to answer one question: what does it feel like to be someone else? An experiment that takes on added significance given Niżegorodcew's young age and our relationship with social media that constantly puts us in front of the supposed happiness of others. 

The Skeptics by David De Beyter (France,1985) expresses an attempt to look closely at something extremely distant. Starting with a series of documented UFO sightings in the Canary Islands, De Beyter delves into the studies of a community of amateur ufologists. At the intersection of pseudo-science and magical thinking, The Skeptics analyzes the culture surrounding UFOs as nothing more than a history of images made possible by their ambiguity. De Beyter thus offers a reflection on post-truth, the obsolescence of beliefs, and the end of utopias. 

It will also be possible to observe contemporary Albania thanks to Grande Padre (Great Father), a work by Camilla de Maffei (Italy, 1981) who - in collaboration with journalist Christian Elia - explores the aftermath of the rise and fall of Hoxha's communist regime by highlighting the scars left in society, examining architecture, gestures and symbols of the past and present. Inspired by photographs taken by intelligence services and videos of citizen trials, de Maffei's images show the obsessive tics of surveillance and power.

Disruptions by Taysir Batniji (Palestine, 1966), on the other hand, takes us into the  experience of war with a series of screenshots taken by the artist between 2015 and 2017 during video calls with his family in Gaza: the images, rendered almost unreadable by pixels when communication is skipped, it visualizes how relationships and everyday life are compromised by conflict, control, and surveillance, showing the infiltration of colonial violence into what remains of intimacy.

Thomas Mailaender (France, 1979) opens a reflection on how the history of our modernity is also the story of how we take photographs. His Decalcomania celebrates the history of images, but he does not show a single one: the focus is not on the final product – the image – but on the mechanisms, materials, and supports that make it  possible. Collecting stickers celebrating the photographic brands of the 1970s and  1980s, Mailaender writes an hymn to technique and its fetishes, to amateurism and  photo-mania, pop and vernacular.

The Studio by Tara Laure Claire Sood (India/France, 1995) is an homage to the photographic studios found in the villages of India before cameras became commonplace. In the intimacy of the studio, fantasies and aspirations became approachable: through props, backgrounds and costumes, images not only recorded a memory, but expanded the horizons of the possible. For Sood, The Studio is also a  reflection on cultural representations and an attempt at faithfully narrating her country of origin, keeping Western stereotypes away. 

Pacifico Silano's (USA, 1986) research focuses on celebrating another visual tradition. The American artist photographs fragments of gay erotic magazines from the 1970s-80s, by magnifying and isolating details. In Close-up's photographs, tenderness, eroticism and romance are shadowed by the lack, melancholy and loss associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Printed on fabric, floating and out of scale, the images become textural objects, revealing the structure of photography: grids of dots, but also malleable meanings that change according to context. For the first time in this exhibition, Silano is also showing a series of shots taken on the floor of his studio, a window into the process and relationship with the magazine archive. 

Utu-Tuuli Jussila (Finland, 1985), on the other hand, looks at a photographic technique pervasive in the contemporary landscape – the surveillance camera – and reverses its meaning. Härmä / Hoar collects a series of images from the security camera installed in the garden of their 94-year-old grandmother who, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, lived alone in the countryside. Instead of recording the presence of potential strangers, the camera photographs the grandmother's everyday life and her absence from events. These photographs born never to be looked at turn into an archive for Jussila to dig into, a final ground of contact, as intimate as it is unexpected. 

As in the previous edition, PhMuseum Days confirms its presence in the Courtyard of the Archiginnasio Library with the group exhibition Closer, a special set-up to present the 40 photos of international artists selected through the festival’s open call exploring the theme of this edition. Instead, the affixed bulletin boards in Via dell'Abbadia curated by CHEAP will host Existential Boner by Mahalia Taje Giotto (Switzerland, 1992). Initiated in conjunction  with the hormone therapy of Taje, a trans and non-binary artist, the project is a tireless  documentation of their transition. Bringing the self-portrait tradition of the last century  closer to a time of webcams and front-facing phone cameras, the images tell of an  obsessive relationship with the body and its representation, but also of how photography can become a tool of identity re-appropriation.

PhMuseum Days 2024 will then continue beyond national borders with an exhibition in  Mexico next November and an exhibition in Sweden in spring 2025. In fact, for the fourth consecutive year, the collaboration with Portofino Dry Gin continues, and this year it invited artist Carolina Pimenta (Portugal, 1988) to engage with the PhMuseum Days theme using Portofino as the set for her research. The images in High Seas, High Hopes that will be exhibited in November in Mexico City reflect a Portofino of sharp contrasts, in which ultra-glamour is mirrored and collides with human, imperfect, accessible gestures and elements. His photographs invite us to reflect on how we construct and de-construct the idea of a place. 

Also scheduled for spring 2025 at the Gothenburg (Sweden) branch of NEVVEN Gallery is Two Ways To Carry A Cauliflower by Emma Sarpaniemi (Finland, 1993), an exploration of female self portraiture through performance and play. In order to liberate the subject and the gaze from a patriarchal conception of femininity, Emma Sarpaniemi portrays herself wittily and tenderly, shaping an honest representation of herself and the reality in which she identifies.

An exhibition space will also be dedicated to the publishing projects produced during FOLIO 2024, the PhMuseum's online masterclass dedicated to the photo-book that involved 13 artists internationally between October 2023 and May 2024. 

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PhMuseum Days 2024 is organized by PhMuseum, a Bologna-based digital platform  that has been promoting contemporary photography since 2012. The festival is realized with the support of the Municipality of Bologna and is part of  Bologna Estate 2024, the program of activities promoted and coordinated by the  Municipality of Bologna and the Metropolitan City of Bologna - Bologna-Modena Tourist Territory. 

Find tickets and the complete program on https://phmuseumdays.com

Festival Main Exhibition Venue:
Spazio Bianco, DumBO
Via Camillo Casarini 19
40131 Bologna

Opening Hours:
Thursday 12.09 to Sunday 15.09
Thu 3pm to 9pm
Fri-Sun 10am to 9pm