Editorial

The Circulation(s) festival has been promoting the creativity of contemporary European photography for eight years now. Our main ambition is to widen the range of perceptions and experiences and, to do so, the festival brings together 50 artists from all over the continent. The building of the program starts with a call for candidates worldwide and with teaming up with one gallery and one school. This year, 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. This year’s edition gives carte blanche to our patron Susan Bright, an English author and curator. The artists you are about to be introduced to will tell you about their stories through a plurality of forms that makes the specificity of our festival. The artists took possession of the CENTQUATRE-PARIS to explore and experience this diversity of media. Plastic photography, documentary photography, archive images, video, art installation, collage, self-publishing, and thermodynamic images were gathered. Through this festival, we are carrying on with our commitment towards young artists and are hoisting high their sense of creativity and the plurality and parity of this year’s selection – an even number of male and female photographers!

The 8th edition of the festival displays many different takes on the world. The festival travels and takes us along: from rainy Colombian lands to urbanised India, from the Northernmost city on Earth to the post-wars scarred Lebanon. As for Europe, the festival leads a reflection on this continent of porous borders, to the edges of Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey. Circulation(s) addresses major modern issues on which the artists give their own take, either off-the-wall or truly concerned. Prison life, gender, urbanisation, mass tourism, the migration crisis, and ecology are the main focuses of this year’s edition. The series respond to one another: images showing an empty former gulag in Russia echo with photographs of a new Russia turning its back to the past and looking towards the future. Intimacy as a theme punctuates the exhibition through the staging of siblings’ stories. Once again, it is important to us that contemporary photography is present all throughout Île-de-France (the Parisian region) with our Hors-les-murs program that encapsulates galleries, institutions, partner locations, and public spaces. Once again, Circulation(s) settles inside 13 stations of the metro and the RER (the Parisian suburban train), and exhibits on the metal gates of Gare de l’Est (one of the main Parisian train stations). Little Circulation(s) is our exhibit conceived for children and family times. And the Studio Photo are back! Come and have your photo taken and autographed!