PHotoEspaña 2013 – Madrid

Our favorite annual European photographic festival hast just started… PHotoEspaña 2013, 16th edition of the International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts is taking place until the end of July.

2013 will see 74 exhibitions with works by 328 artists from 42 countries and an ample selection of public and professional activities. Lanzarote, Zaragoza and Prague are added to Madrid, Cuenca, Alcalá de Henares, and Alcobendas as venues of the festival.

This year will also be the last one for Gerardo Mosquera as general curator and he’s gone for an exhibition program that revolves around the theme, “Body. Eros and Politics” which looks at the diversity with which photography has approached one of its major themes: the human body.

It could be argued that photography emerged from a passion for sexuality, expressed in the nude. PHE13 delves this year into eroticism but it also explores the erotic vision without a body, directed towards the world around us. Conversely, it shows non-erotic photographic creation whose protagonist is the human body. Beyond that which is erotic, the body and images thereof have been instrumental in the fights for gender liberation and vindication, sexual orientation and the battle against discrimination. PHE will focus on these and other body politics as well as in the artistic practices in which the body is a cultural ground.

As well as operating as an instrument of subjective affirmation and individual and collective confrontation in culture and society, the body constructs itself. Photography has documented the aggressions against the body, and while on occasion it might have fed a morbid voyeurism, it has also played a crucial role in exposing and condemning violence on a global scale. All these subjects have been touched upon by the art included in the festival, which appropriates this highly relevant aphorism: “the body is a battlefield.”

The themed program of PHE13 follows the paths developed over the past two years: looking at photography freely as the base of modern image making; decentralized and purposeful curatorship; access to wider audiences and diversification of cultural and geographic material, which includes a significant presence in Eastern Europe.

PHE will, like every year, be hosted in a large number of venues starting with the Círculo de Bellas Artes and for example the expo hosted in the Goya hall “He, She, It”. Dialogues between Harry Callahan and Edward Weston, an approximation to nude photography from two great North American photographers through 80 photographs that evidence a vision filled with subjectivity and affection.

Another usual “must” in central Madrid is the Espacio Fundación Telefónica with the Written on the Body expo, bringing together the aspects explored by Shirin Neshat’s work in relation to the body, and will include recent works, such as the series she has produced using the classic Persian Book of Kings and the short OverRuled as starting points.

2 expos from a total of 74 and many more parallel activities like OpenPHoto, the program of exhibitions proposed by embassies and foreign cultural institutions,or Festival Off taking place over 33 art galleries in Madrid to promote the development of the photography market.

2 months for photography lovers’ delight which we’ve already started savoring this weekend. More info this way.