2024 Program

The Centre de la photographie Genève joins forces with the Black Movie Festival to present in Geneva an exceptional, never-before-seen exhibition by Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, devoted entirely to the series of films Walker, which all follow a monk, played by Lee Kang-sheng, the director’s favourite actor, walking slowly through a crowd. The series, now made up of 9 medium-length films, takes the monk through various cities in Asia and Europe. Walking in slow motion through streets, squares and theatres, the walker confronts a lifestyle of urbanity, speed and emptiness. His wanderings continue the artist’s exploration of the relationship between image, body and space. Five films are shown in the exhibition space. A recording of the theatrical performance The Monk from Tang Dynasty and an installation combining traces of the performance, drawings and sketches by Tsai Ming-Liang complete the exhibition.

An exhibition produced by the Black Movie Festival in collaboration with the Centre de la photographie Genève and Centre culturel de Taïwan in Paris.

As a preview of the group exhibition Making Light of Every Thing, the Centre de la photographie Genève presents three artists at artgenève: Sara de Brito Faustino, Peter Hauser and Martin Widmer. The works brought together are almost entirely produced for the exhibition and are being presented in Geneva as a world premiere. They explore notions of the construction of an image through the lens of the intimate space, the relation with one’s home or the artist’s studio, or with familiar and surrounding nature. Playing on the different ways in which a photograph is made and the ambiguity of the resulting images, the artists propose images that are at once familiar and disturbing, vaguely disquieting and inviting us to dissect what makes a place intimate and safe from its surroundings.

Intimacy is a concept that is often difficult to define, intangible and elusive. It can be found in a childhood memory, in the interior of one’s home, in the gestures exchanged with loved ones or in the attachment to an object. How can photography express a relationship with this feeling, its fleeting, impalpable nature? Through elaborate processes of image construction and manipulation, the artists in this exhibition make visible multiple forms of intimacy. Whether they are made with coloured paper, generated by artificial intelligence or created entirely in the photographic laboratory, their images reveal the complex mechanisms by which we apprehend the world, bearing subtle and delicate witness to the manifestation of our individual subjectivities.

With Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah, Jessica Backhaus, Emma Bedos, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Sara De Brito Faustino, Charlie Engman, Alina Frieske, Peter Hauser, Moritz Jekat, Leigh Merrill, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Martin Widmer.

The Centre de la photographie Genève hosts the second edition of the biennale PIPAS (Photo et Image Pour l’Apprentissage Scolaire), produced for and by students from the canton of Geneva, from primary to upper secondary school. Accompanied by their teachers and a dozen Geneva-based photographers, some forty classes will each conceptualise and produce a photographic project, which will then be exhibited at the Centre de la photographie Genève and in the eco-neighbourhood La Jonction. The project aims to showcase the school as a creative and cultural player in the area in which it is based, and to offer pupils a space in which to approach the image in an active, creative and thoughtful way, in a society where it is more ubiquitous than ever. The theme of this second edition of PIPAS is Everyday Life is Elsewhere, a deliberately enigmatic and poetic phrase that everyone is free to interpret and appropriate. Everyday, elsewhere, two words designed to guide or open up horizons.

The PIPAS steering committee is a multidisciplinary team of teachers from all levels of the Canton’s public schools (DIP) and its media department (SEM), in collaboration with the teaching and evaluation department (SEE) and the Geneva-based association Freeze.

Relever la nuit [Surveying the Night] examines the light that forms the basis of photography, and the impact of our contemporary lifestyles on ecosystems. On moonless nights, the artist exposes photosensitive paper for the same length of time, taking readings of light pollution. The result are monochromatic images, with different shades of grey resulting from the emanations of artificial light on the outskirts of towns and villages. In Switzerland, it is no longer possible to observe the natural darkness of the night. The artist’s work echoes a study carried out in 2019 by the University of Geneva on light pollution in the Geneva basin, based on aerial photographs taken at night, which led to a map of the region’s nocturnal ecological network. In this project, the artist combines the role of photography as an aid to science with the notion of proof and imprint usually associated with photography. She records the disappearance of night, noting that darkness no longer exists, masked by endless light, and that it is through the clarity of the image that night is revealed, a paradox of the inversion inherent in the photographic process.

This project was awarded the 2022 Grant for a Documentary Photographic Project by the City of Geneva.

Bringing together the work of around twenty artists and photographers from Geneva, Switzerland and abroad, this exhibition attempts to answer a question that might be formulated as follows: in what ways can images be an integral part of a practice of caring for oneself or for others? Without claiming to be exhaustive, or to attribute autonomous healing powers to the image, this project highlights artistic practices in which photography’s capacity to make visible, represent and tell a story can be associated to self-care practices – for oneself, one’s loved ones, one’s community or for others. It addresses themes such as grief and bereavement, family relationships, and community and political activism. By exploring the many ways in which images can be used to care for oneself and others, the exhibition affirms the power of the photographic image as a tool for autonomy and emancipation, of asserting one’s agency over one’s own situation, identity, history and destiny.

Palonegro is the most recent project by Colombian artist Luis Carlos Tovar, and the result of several years of research between Colombia and Switzerland. It explores a precise chapter in the history of violence in Colombia: its ninth civil war, the Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902), of which the bloody Battle of Palonegro (11-25 May 1900) was part. For Palonegro, the artist researched and unearthed lesser known archives from a wide range of Swiss and Colombian private and public sources, including those of the Red Cross, the Bibliothèque de Genève and decommissioned military files from the Colombian Ministry of War. Through his work, he aims to revise and resignify these photographic archives, which he considers bodies to be healed. With this approach, he hopes to envisage by extension the possibility of healing individual and collective memory from the traumas and wounds of Colombian history.

The Centre de la photographie Genève is delighted to be working with the Cerebral Genève association on the Spots project. Cerebral Genève offers leisure activities for people living with cerebral palsy, as well as support, information and advice for families and friends. Spots is a collaborative project in which disabled participants are photographed in places that they enjoy and like to visit (the famous “spots”!). The aim of the project is to showcase these inclusive places, and to demonstrate how the accessibility of public places is evolving. Although it is still far from ideal today, it is gradually improving, largely thanks to the efforts of associations. The Spots exhibition will be held outdoors on the Plainpalais plain.