Report on the 2018 Circulation(s) Festival

IMA, Vol. 24, Summer 2018

For IMA magazine’s “Report” column, I contributed a profile of the 2018 edition of the Circulation(s) festival organized by the Fetart collective at the Centquatre in Paris.

From the Paris Photo art fair, which has established itself as the most important event on the global photography calendar, to the hundreds of galleries and museums dedicated to photography, Paris is one of today’s great photographic cities.

Amidst all this activity it can be difficult to carve out a niche in what is already a busy and established photographic landscape. However, since it first started in 2011, the Circulation(s) festival has succeeded in doing just that. Whereas Paris is generally known for its focus on vintage work and the major figures of twentieth century photography, Circulation(s) has chosen to focus squarely on emerging photographers from all over Europe.

Created by the nonprofit organization Fetart, the festival aims to reach not just photography aficionados but the broadest audience possible. In order to achieve this aim, since 2014 the festival has been held at the CENTQUATRE space in the 19th arrondissement in Paris. This huge space—one of the largest art spaces in Paris, it boasts 25,000 square meters of exhibition space and can accommodate 5,000 visitors at a time—has become known as a key location for artistic collaboration, from dance performances to concerts, exhibitions, artistic residencies and community engagement initiatives.

In order to heighten the accessibility of the festival, some parts of the exhibitions are located in the outdoor spaces of the Aubervilliers hall of the CENTQUATRE, which are accessible to all visitors for free, while the rest of the works on display are located in a ticketed exhibition space.

The works presented at Circulation(s) are selected through a multi-part process. Firstly, a jury selects works from an open call for applications (in 2018, the jury selected 25 artists from a total of 800 applications). In addition to this, the festival partners up with a gallery or photographic institution to present the work of its artists; for this edition, Circulation(s) turned to the East and invited the Rodovid Gallery (Ukraine) and the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia (Russia) to present their artists and students. Finally, the English author and curator Susan Bright was invited to be a patron of the festival and made further selections of work to present. In total, 50 artists from across Europe participated this year.

The work presented in the 2018 edition deals with many of the major social questions facing Europe today while also reflecting the experimental nature of contemporary photographic practice, with many exhibitions involving installations rather than just images displayed on the wall.

Karin Crona’s series is a series of visual collages constructed from several issues of the short-lived Swedish women’s magazine Pénéla, through which she questions her own identity. In Identically Different, the Dutch photographer Judith Helmer, followed a pair of identical twins Laurens and Yentl through their process of self-discovery and the construction of their gender identities.

The issue of migration and refugees is also present in a number of series, from the Spanish photographer Almudena Romero’s wet collodion portraits of migrants in London to French photographer’s Lucile Boiron’s Young Adventurers in Paris series, which takes an unconventional look at the refugee encampments scattered across Paris. The Italian collective Defrost Studio also tackles the issue with a wry critique constructed by playing on the codes of real estate advertisement for their project ImmoRefugee, “the official real-estate manual for refugees in Calais.”