Cultural Development Consulting

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While portraiture is currently in focus at Sydney’s Head On festival and competition, a halfway around the globe in southern Russia Photovisa has announced that this year’s festival theme is ‘the face’.

Scheduled for late October 2012 and based in Krasnodar just inland from the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, Photovisa is preparing for its fourth manifestation. Already in the bag are exhibitions from Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, the Ukraine and, of course, Russia.

Photovisa also runs a competition in three categories. The first is for a portfolio of images or a photo series that addresses the face in one of two sub-themes: images of poetic creativity and images that document societal relationships. The second section is for a multimedia project (essentially a video clip) with either a fictional or documentary approach.

The third, more unusually, is for curators (or curatorial groups) to propose an innovative photomedia exhibition. And by innovative exhibition they mean the whole shebang. Not just the artists and the images, but the sequencing, installation, lighting and even the architecture of the space. (In the interests of realism, one wonders why they don’t also ask for the funding strategy, but there you go, this is, after all, a hypothetical.) The exhibition proposals are to be submitted as 3D CGI files and the finalists will be screened at the festival.

This, then, is an opportunity to let the curatorial imagination rip, free of the usual constrains that so often shackle innovation (OK, so now we know why there’s no funding strategy). It’s a pretty innovative idea in itself and, while I do wonder how many photo-curators are proficient with CGI, maybe learning wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

To find out more and to participate online visit the Photovisa site at:

Photovisa (English language)                                                   Русский язык сайта

The deadline for entries is 30 August 2012.

Further posts on Photovisa:

Physiognomy in the Caucasus (12 October 2012) 

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