FotoFocus Biennial 2024 to Illuminate Backstories
The largest photography and video biennial in the U.S. will urge audiences to consider what lies beyond the frame.
Ming Smith, Womb (1992). Archival pigment print. 60.96 x 91.44 cm. Part of FotoFocus Biennial exhibition, Ming Smith: Wind Chime at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (22 September 2024–5 January 2025). Courtesy Ming Smith Studio.
FotoFocus Biennial will host its largest edition yet, with 107 projects exhibited at 86 venues across Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky throughout October.
'Following a fantastic Biennial in 2022, attracting over 180,000 visitors thanks to the partners who created exceptional projects, we are thrilled to invite back our community,' says Executive Director FotoFocus, Katherine Ryckman Siegwarth.
This year's theme, backstories, refers to stories within photographs that are not readily understood.
Exhibiting artists, including Francis Alÿs, Dawoud Bey, Rashid Johnson, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul will look to history and investigate the photograph's capacity to record memory, identity, and experiences of place.
Bey, who has documented former plantation sites along the Mississippi River, among other things, will join panel conversations and social interactions inside and beyond the gallery at The Wexner Center for the Arts from 24 to 25 October.
'I like to think we've all become more savvy about disinformation these past few years,' says FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator, Kevin Moore. 'We no longer take information at face value—spoken, written, or visual. It is important to know the backstories.'
During the opening weekend, Kathy Ryan, former director of photography at The New York Times Magazine, will deliver a keynote speech on the intersection of art and photojournalism at the Biennale Symposium on 28 September.
Elsewhere, a survey of the 25-year output of German photographer Barbara Probst, Subjective Evidence, interrogates a single image's capacity to define a moment at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center (27 September 2024–5 February 2025).
American photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams' early career is illuminated across 80 works and archival objects—letters, tools, belongings—at Cincinnati Art Museum as part of Discovering Ansel Adams (27 September 2024–19 January 2025). —[O]
