Tallinn Photomonth ‘23 announces the biennial main programme

Tallinn Photomonth international biennial of contemporary art is pleased to announce its 7th edition, which opens 6th October until 26rd November 2023. Featuring work across all disciplines, the biennial looks at developments in art and society in a world increasingly mediated by cameras, screens and images.

Tallinn Photomonth ‘23 names New York-based Ilari Laamanen as the curator of Trance, the biennale’s Main Exhibition, which this year takes place at Tallinn Art Hall’s Lasnamae Pavilion. The biennial will also include an Artists’ Film Programme curated by Piibe Kolka and Genevieve Yue and an extensive Satellite Programme across several of Tallinn’s most acclaimed institutions, galleries and cultural venues.

Art fair Foto Tallinn will continue to take place as a collaboration between the Estonian Union of Photography Artists (FOKU) and the Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center (ECADC) during the biennial off-years. The 11th edition of the fair is expected to take place at Kai Art Center in the Fall of 2024.

Trance

“Watching, spectating, following. Contemporary screen-dominated conditions can be described by many names. In digital interactions, notions between the living and nonliving or real and unreal continue to be destabilized. What was once understood as a reality is taking an unusual form. It has a texture that is unreal.

Trance explores how artworks can complicate and aid in examining sensory experience in a technologically mediated world. The exhibition is a swirl in time: a spiral moving between humane and mechanical, fantastical and factual, allure and absence. It aims to disorient and reorient the viewer and the viewing situation. Here, the act of watching itself is under scrutiny. The closer one gets to the real, the more imaginary it becomes.

Trance brings together local and international artists of many generations who work with various disciplines. The artists in the exhibition absorb, hack and reformat conventional means of (audio)visual presentation, through existing and newly commissioned work. They present idiosyncratic encounters between bodies and technologies and utilize glitch as a conceptual tool – a split in time, a gesture that by design requires a moment of remediation and reflection.” – Ilari Laanmanen, curator of Trance, Tallinn Photomonth’s main exhibition

Artists’ Film Programme

The film programme will explore co-creative methods, collective authorship and the theme of sociality in the practice of artists working with experimental film. Further details will be released in September.

For the first time the artists’ film programme of Tallinn Photomonth will be held in the frames of one of the largest and most distinctive film events in Northern Europe – the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) and their Expanded programme.

Tallinn Photomonth

Tallinn Photomonth is an international biennial of contemporary art, which features work that spans all disciplines and looks at developments in art and society in a world increasingly mediated by cameras, screens and images. While it was initiated by the Estonian Union of Photography Artists (FOKU) in 2011, which coordinates and supports collaboration between art institutions, galleries and artists, Photomonth seeks to broaden its focus beyond the means of photography.

In 2021, the largest contemporary art event in Estonia, Tallinn Photomonth (1.09—17.10.2021) presented an international group show with four off-site locations, a programme of artists’ films and the only art fair in Estonia, Foto Tallinn with 37 presentations. The biennial also included a satellite programme with a total of 15 exhibitions open during the period. Tallinn Photomonth managed to involve a record number of 813 participants with its bilingual educational programme. Altogether the 2021 biennial had more than 33,122 visitors, including many international guests and journalists coming in for the opening weekend of the biennial.