Photoworks Festival Unboxing

The Photoworks team is delighted to invite you to the first unboxing of the Photoworks Festival on Friday 25 November, from 4-8pm. This unboxing event will mark the beginning of 10 months of activities, where you can get the first glimpse of Photoworks Festival: From Little Acorns…

Returning with our Festival in a Box format – we are pushing the concept further, using the Box as a research tool to challenge and revise what a future photography festival can be. We are inviting curators and creatives to open our new Festival in a Box for the first time at Brighton CCA to discover the artists inside and stage the work in their own imagining of the festival. The curated interpretations will take place in RESOLVE Collective’s installation Summer House.

Photoworks Festival in a Box is an experimental festival model designed to promote accessibility, sustainability, and agency where the audience becomes the curator. In 2020 the Box was created as a response to the pandemic and restrictions on movement. For this new festival edition, we are seeking to use the box as a live research initiative to learn how biennial festivals can embody accessibility, explore open-ended curatorial approaches, and embrace a multiplicity of readings. Over 10 months the new Photoworks Festival in a Box will be staged in galleries, homes, offices, and found spaces as we invite you to curate and stage your own photography festival around the globe.

Photoworks Festival: From Little Acorns…takes Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a dystopian climate fiction novel, set in the not-so-distant future of the 2020s, as inspiration and as a starting point to think about how and who can shape the future. From Little Acorns… presents ten international contemporary artists including Mohamad Abdouni, Antony Cairns, Felicity Hammond, Josèfa Ntjam, Johny Pitts, Ebun Sodipo, Harit Srikhao, Diana Tamane, Anshika Varma and Charlotte Yonga and internaitonla partnerships with FotoGarten Thailand and Yaounde Photo Network Cameroon.