Even though the whole world is burning

Guest Curators:
Dennese Victoria (Philippines) & Swastik Pal (India)

Projection Screening + Q&A with Curators & Artists
Live on Facebook:
Saturday, 28 Nov 2020 | 7.00pm (Cambodia +7GMT)
> Links for projection screening available on the 2020 Schedule

CURATORS’ NOTE

We were not able to bring him here, but someone from among the many we had met through this open call sent us photographs of his brother’s long-awaited wedding. I don’t know why, but I had never forgotten this. Nor had I forgotten that he had never seen snow in his life. Perhaps, and because he wrote that it was the most beautiful wedding he had witnessed in his life, something in me wanted to remember the sincere conviction of a young man believing his brother’s happiness must be seen by many, that his own happiness must become part of a festival.

We began the work of forming this selection by asking what has brought us here – why we’re still here, and why we take others along. We didn’t know what we were looking for but when the pieces came together, the picture that was looking back at us could not help but direct us to presence and to contact.

We were drawn to and missed people. We needed our faith in contact restored. We needed to regain trust in meeting, trust in our effect on each other, and in what we still have and can still bring.

We favored work where we felt the photographer as human, as someone really engaging with people; less interested in projects maybe, but favoring for feelings, fragility and tenderness, in attempts to come close and repair.

We could not look away from all that was burning, we could not deny fear, but we needed to know that there are places where it is still safe. We needed to know where to bring each other after the fires.

We connected to work, connected to artists whom we felt were still listening to the unfolding of the stories they were telling, or were at least open to being asked again. The feeling of a certain belonging, to one’s own body, within one’s home, within one’s community, and the innocence of the craft, which very often might not be so trendy, drew us.

In a way these works introspect the world they reside in, the world of the things they can still touch; works which try to establish empathetic conversations around their relations, and tend to look after each other as some sort of utopian community.

Be it a tender personal work, or a poetic visual introspection into rapid urbanisation and loss of ethnic communities, loss of what was once held as true, the common thread has been the will to pause, reflect and converse. To be present long enough to feel, to come back, or to grieve the inability to do so.

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Curator Biographies

Born in October 1991, Dennese Victoria is an artist living and working in the Philippines. Working across photography, moving image and installation, her work touches on truth, memory, personal history, and the exchanges that occur between herself and those that are reached by the forming and the sharing of her work.

Receiving a degree in Journalism from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila in 2012, she has since worked as an educator, cultural worker, and cinematographer, including filming for Shireen Seno’s second feature, Nervous Translation. She is currently a visiting faculty member at the Philippine High School for the Arts.

Born in 1991, Swastik Pal is a graduate from Calcutta University, India. After completing his post graduate diploma in mass communication from Jadavpur University, he received full scholarship to pursue Diploma in Photojournalism, at the Asian Center for Journalism, a World Press Photo partner organisation at Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. He is keenly interested in photography and filmmaking.

Presently he is an independent photographer based in Calcutta, working on long term projects. In 2015, he was the recipient of the National Foundation of IndiaNational Media Photography Fellowship for his project- The Hungry Tide. He was nominated for the Joop Swart World Press Masterclass in 2015, 2017 and 2018. He recently completed a Masters in Film Studies from Jadavpur University, Calcutta.

“Even though the whole world is burning” Showcase