Check out Photobook Week Aarhus 2022: Off Balance, the ninth edition of our festival, 27–30 October 2022 in Aarhus, Denmark.
Off Balance is an attempt to cope with the imbalance of our contemporary condition. Climate change pressuring a possible catastrophe for humanity, the unsustainable gap between rich and poor, plastic pollution and the drastic decrease of biodiversity, and the first pandemic in over a century. These are examples of a world with complicated issues that need to be addressed but are constantly confronted with political divisions and economic interests.
This edition of the festival will bring the important photobook medium directly into the twisted realities of our current context. Besides the central theme, the festival will also showcase other themes such as Books on Books on Books, which have shaped an often-critiqued canon of publications. Our regional focus will be on Canada, as a Nordic country, with guest curator Louis Perreault, and a particular focus on the books and films of Edward Burtynsky, who has been working on environmental issues for more than three decades. Another expedition on the geographical axis shall take us to the south-west Pacific, via an online talk by curators Megan Tamati-Quennell and Athol MacCredie of the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum in New Zealand.
This year we also present a special focus with an exhibition about photobooks from Ukraine curated by Kateryna Radchenko. We wish to highlight the country’s art and culture in order to provide insight into a country that is currently at the centre of global politics, but which has not been widely explored or discussed in these terms.
A highlight of the festival will be the showcasing of the NO!art Movement, and its three founding members, Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. With the generous support of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation New York, Photobook Week Aarhus will show key works from these three artists, as well as the legendary NO BOX, a multiple by the German Edition Hundertmark, published in 1996. This exhibition at the satellite venue HEART Museum will be on show until November 30 and will be accompanied by a catalog, with unpublished manifestos and texts from the early times of the NO!art Movement.
“Earth, air, water, and fire. The four essential elements that were once believed to make up the entire universe are also still the basis of our economic principles: digging, burning, melting, evaporating, in order to fill the pockets of the 1% with money, at the expense of the planet and those other 99% of us who inhabit it, the people who have no ambition or way of leaving” says Moritz Neumüller, PWA Chief Curator since its beginning.
Photobook Week Aarhus will draw on the poetic cycle of life and death in the Anthropocene as the background for considerations of the multiple crises that we are facing, the necessary changes, and possible ways forward into the uncertain times that await us.
The small team of international curators, specialists and book lovers envisions Photobook Week Aarhus 2022 as an open and inclusive event that underlines the urgency for action, and the roles that art might play in the process of acceptance, grief, and collaborative action in the most important issues of our time.
About the festival
Photobook Week Aarhus is a collaborative effort by Galleri Image and the Aarhus School of Architecture, with support from the City of Aarhus, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Dreyers Fond, and Nordea Fonden, as well as our exhibition and communication partners. It was founded in 2014 and has shown works of major artists that work with and around the book medium, be it as photographers, designers, writers or self-publishers.
More details at
THE CURATOR SHIP 