If I Had a Hammer Fotofest Biennial 2022 Guide
Edited by Steven Evans and Max Fields
Schilt Publishing
English
Softcover
144 Pages
127 x 165 mm
2022
ISBN is not available
Welcome to the FotoFest Biennial 2022! It feels good to be gathering together again. I am delighted to invite you to explore all of the exceptional exhibitions, installations, programs, and events taking place in the Arts District Houston and throughout the City of Houston. I hope you find this year’s Biennial an especially inspiring and thought-provoking experience.
This year the FotoFest Biennial 2022 central exhibition is titled If | Had a Hammer and is co-curated by Amy Sadao, Max Fields, and me. The central exhibition is accompanied by African Cosmologies: Redux, a restaging of our 2020 central exhibition that was cut short two years ago by the pandemic; and Ten by Ten, our presentation of notable work drawn from FotoFest Meeting Place Portfolio reviews since 2020.
The exhibitions are on view at Silver Street Studios, Winter Street Studios, the Silos on Sawyer, and Spring Street Studios, located in the heart of Arts District Houston, as well as at partner venues The Menil Collection, Houston Museum of African American Culture, and The Alta Arts. With over one hundred Participating Spaces events and programs across Houston, we are convinced there is something for everyone to see, experience, and enjoy.
Since the inaugural FotoFest Biennial in 1986, FotoFest has offered Houstonians and visitors from around the world a deep dive into new photography and related media, creating cultural exchange, community engagement, intellectual and aesthetic stimulation, and opportunities for photographers. Through the Biennial, FotoFest helps transform the City of Houston into a landscape of amazing art experiences. Please visit the Biennial often and come say hello when you see us at one of the many FotoFest exhibitions and events.
(source is from the book)
About the Exhibition
If I Had a Hammer explores both artistic and activist interventions into the structures of contemporary image-production, calling attention to how these structures both reflect and inform our perception of the world, historical narratives, and the agency to engage in collective cultural discourse. The exhibition proposes that the systems and structures that support ideological formation such as historical archives, digital media networks, sociopolitical organising campaigns, and infrastructural and territorial developments, are inextricably linked to the history and development of photography and image technology. Through disparate approaches, the artists in If I Had a Hammer offer strategies to resist and replace legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic violence by exploiting the language and material of image-production and media circulation. In doing so, the artists show how images can be used to both support progressive movements as well as reinforce and bolster systemic inequities. The exhibition borrows its title from Pete Seegar and Lee Hays’s 1949 protest song of the same name, which was written as a response to growing ideological divides and violence against progressive artists and thinkers in the U.S. during the era of Red Scare McCarthyism. Throughout this period, artists, activists, authors, and musicians, including Seegar and Hays, were made to testify in broadcasted congressional hearings and defend their right to free speech and protest. This exhibition uses the historical context within which If I Had a Hammer was written as a starting point to explore how those who assert ideological supremacy often do so by employing the very tools used by the communities and individuals they hope to suppress. They use the tools of discursive circulation: broadcast media, text, song, art, and images. The scope of If I Had a Hammer is expansive, including international perspectives on ever-changing ideologies in relationship to the contemporary, global nature of media circulation and ideological development. At the heart of this interrogation is an examination of the methods artists employ to create archives that subvert the hegemonic anthropological and documentary gaze, play against traditional forms of photography, and imagine alternative political scenarios while resisting a singular, finished, final, or decisive image.
fotofest.org
(source: https://fotofest.org/fotofest-biennial-2022)
About the Festival
FotoFest is a Houston-based contemporary arts organisation co-founded by photojournalists Fredrick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss. FotoFest is dedicated to advancing photography and visual culture through the presentation of exhibitions, public programs, and publications. The examination of social, cultural, and political histories and contemporary life through the lens of photography and related media is central to FotoFest’s mission. In addition to the organisation’s year-round programming, FotoFest organises a city-wide biennial project in the form of large-scale central exhibitions, curated lectures, performances, a symposium, and film programs.
fotofest.org
(source: https://fotofest.org/about)
About the Publisher
Schilt Publishing and Schilt Gallery are respectively a publishing house specialised in high quality photography books, and a commercial gallery representing a wide range of top class artists from all over the world.
schiltpublishing.com
(source: https://www.levievandermeer.nl/project/schilt-publishing/)
