For its sixteenth edition, the Circulation(s) festival asserts more than ever its collective and multiple perspective. With three new members in the art-direction team, seven visions – all feminine – now come together to question the mutations in the world and the contemporary expressions of young European creation.
This plurality is reflected in the exhibited projects, which are marked by a claimed transversality between photography and other artistic practices. The hybridisation that runs through creation comes forth today with a new intensity: the artworks outgrow the frame, break free from the walls and use a range of supports. The boundaries between techniques fade, giving way to open and moving visual stories.
Faced with an unstable world, riddled with uncertainty and a sense of loss of control, artists are choosing to embrace theatricality. By offering microcosms, fictions or stagings of reality, they use the imagination like a space for resistance and for reclaiming narrative and perspective. Although the bright colours, humour and playful shapes often dominate the work, this apparent lightness serves deeper purposes: behind the pop, the political; behind the aesthetics, the radical.
Whether dealing with memory – family, collective or national, archival work or reflections on transmission, the works bear witness to multiple, shifting and fragmented identities that are constantly being recomposed. Our focus is therefore on Ireland, whose insularity and dualities accurately crystallise these contemporary tensions.
Finally, ecological concerns with a perspective set on the living also run through this edition. Faced with the anxiety of an uninhabitable future, artists are crafting makeshift refuges that connect them to the Earth. Through rituals, repetitive gestures and sustained attention to the insignificant, sources of meaning and resistance, they sketch out other ways of inhabiting our world.
The Fetart collective
Creator and artistic director of the Circulation(s) festival
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