A Information to December 2025 Photography Festivals & Exhibitions

Hans – or – Don’t Bury Me In The Grave Of My Father by Peter Pflügler at PhMuseum Lab, Foto/Industria, Harmattan – Togo Photo Festival 2025, and Atlas Of Echoes by Sarah van Rij at MEP are among the many pictures occasions to go to subsequent month.

Bologna, Italy / 28 November – 15 January

It all begins with a discovered archive. Over a thousand photographic negatives had been left behind by Hans (1911–1997), the great-granduncle Austrian visible storyteller Peter Pflügler by no means really knew. In this deeply private undertaking, the artist turns to those negatives to piece collectively the lifetime of a person who remained a household thriller. Hans documented himself tirelessly: self-portraits spanning many years, displaying a face that aged, uniforms and environment that modified, but a gaze and a persistent shadow of emotional darkness remained fixed. During his analysis Pflügler found that Hans endured violence by the hands of his father, a trauma that led to his lifelong marginalization, and in the end to his dying want—to not be buried in his father’s grave. Peter embarks on an investigative journey, combining archival analysis along with his personal newly made pictures. Through self-portraits and staged scenes, he weaves his personal narrative into Hans’s, revealing resonances of intergenerational ache and silence.

The exhibition is structured round a three-channel video set up, the place pictures and video loop out and in, permitting a dynamic trade between Hans’s archival pictures and Pflügler’s new work. The backroom takes us behind the scenes, it turns into a combination between archival workspace and exhibition, emphasizing the undertaking’s work-in-progress nature and blurring the road between residing reminiscence and documentation. At its coronary heart, the undertaking is about reparation: Pflügler plans to exhume Hans’s physique and giving him the burial he longed for.

Read extra on PhMuseum’s website.

Bologna, Italy / 7 November – 14 December

The new version of the Biennial of Photography on Industry and Work is devoted to the theme of the house beneath the inventive route of Francesco Zanot. Spread throughout eleven exhibitions in varied historic venues all through Bologna, Foto/Industria 2025 approaches dwelling as each a bodily and symbolic house, exploring concepts of reminiscence, labor, displacement, and belonging. Highlights embrace Jeff Wall’s main exhibition Living, Working, Surviving at MAST.Galleries, which presents 28 works spanning 4 many years, alongside notable initiatives by Alejandro Cartagena, Forensic Architecture, Julia Gaisbacher, Vuyo Mabheka, Matei Bejenaru, Kelly O’Brien, Mikael Olsson, Moira Ricci, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, and Sisto Sisti, every analyzing how private and collective lives take form inside the locations we inhabit.

Through a dialogue between modern apply and archival materials, this version provides a multifaceted portrait of domesticity and its social, political, and emotional dimensions. By inviting viewers to rethink what constitutes a house: from rural borderlands and suburban areas to modernist structure, firm cities, and intimate household narratives, Foto/Industria offers a reflective and expansive journey into how we construct, think about, and keep in mind the areas that outline us.

Learn extra on their website.

Lomé, Togo / 12 December – 30 December

Founded and directed by Ako Atikossie and Giulia Brivio, Harmattan – Togo Photo Festival goals to offer worldwide visibility and create new alternatives for rising photographers from Togo and West Africa. Now in its first version, the competition seeks to rethink and broaden the African imaginary, utilizing pictures as a device to bridge cultural heritage and modern inventive expression. Its opening weekend will function three collective exhibitions throughout Agnassan: Musée Paul Ahyi, Galerie Artemis, and Jardin Edith Equagoo, alongside workshops and masterclasses on the Palais de Lomé, bringing collectively fifteen Togolese and worldwide artists.

Following its Lomé version, Harmattan will proceed to flow into its chosen works internationally. In early 2026, this system will journey to Lugano/Paradiso at Focus Artphilein (February–April), then to Milan at Loro Milano (May), supported by a devoted catalogue co-published by Artphilein Editions and Boîte Editions. Through these initiatives, the competition strengthens its mission to broaden illustration, foster collaboration, and amplify West African photographic voices on a worldwide stage.

Discover the total program on the competition’s Instagram account.

Paris, France / 11 December – 25 January

The exhibition presents a poetic and cinematic imaginative and prescient of the city avenue by Dutch artist Sarah van Rij. Through a collection of her sequence, van Rij weaves collectively cityscapes, self-portraits, and collages created from her personal pictures to construct a fragmented, enigmatic portrait of contemporary life.

Her pictures flip passers-by into actors in an city theater, capturing fleeting moments: silhouettes in home windows, shadows, and the main points of palms and clothes in movement. Van Rij’s collages lengthen her exploration past pictures, reassembling her personal visible archive in a method that invitations reflection on how we observe and interpret on a regular basis life.

For extra insights, go to MEP’s website.

Brussels, Belgium / 11 September – 21 December

Johannesburg pulses with rigidity and hope. Curated by Emilie Demon, with the help and complicity of Rubis Mécénat, the exhibition channels the spirit of Gil Scott-Heron’s Brian Jackson’s 1975 tune Johannesburg, exploring id, resilience, and transformation by 9 younger South African photographers.

Shaped by a legacy of apartheid and social inequality, town’s trauma and contradictions develop into a backdrop for uncooked, deeply private work. Featuring artists equivalent to Sibusiso Bheka, Jabulani Dhlamini, Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Vuyo Mabheka, Alice Mann, Dimakatso Mathopa, Xolani Ngubeni, Motlhoki Nono, and Zwelibanzi Zwane, pictures navigate themes of household, spirituality, love, fatherhood, and inherited ache. Together, the photographers provide a layered, hopeful portrait of Johannesburg—not simply as a website of wrestle, however as a spot of reinvention and belonging.

Learn extra concerning the exhibition here.

Modena, Italy / 21 November – 15 February

Taysir Batniji, a major Palestinian diaspora artist, makes use of various media (pictures, video, drawing, sculpture, and set up) to discover themes of exile, id, reminiscence, presence, and absence, deeply influenced by the battle and struggles of his homeland. His work engages in a steady dialogue between cultures, reworking extraordinary objects into poignant reflections—such because the glass keys or pictures of watchtowers—that poetically mix the private and non-private spheres. Employing methods like shifting that means, abstraction, and irony, Batniji’s apply creates works characterised by impermanence and fragility, which, whereas looking for a common dimension, stay inseparable from the collective Palestinian tragedy, permitting him to “inhabit time” in response to the lack to completely inhabit house. Curated by Daniele De Luigi, the exhibition path within the Palazzina dei Giardini Ducali, his first solo present in an Italian establishment, recounts the other ways through which the artist confronts his obsession with on a regular basis objects and traces, trying to fix ache and trauma.

Read extra on their website.

Gorizia, Italy / 15 November – 16 January

Founded on an extended investigation into outdated digital camera manuals, Viewfinders by Matteo Girola explores the curious pictures of individuals wanting by the viewfinder, typically holding their digital camera the wrong way up, turning them into “finders of new views.” The exhibition presents eight massive risograph portraits floating on impartial backgrounds, printed on the identical paper utilized in Girola’s self‑revealed photobook.

In addition to those portraits, the artist additionally reveals two earlier sequence: Luce dei miei occhi, which maps his personal eyes utilizing ophthalmological slides and a sculptural set up; and Just a Souvenir, drawn from hundreds of early cell phone pictures collected from the web. Through this work, he displays on the anomaly of pictures, the strain between archive and private manufacturing, and the fantastic thing about discovering various views.

Explore additional at Studiofaganel’s website.

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Also open this month:

Photo Phnom Penh Festival 2025 / Phnom Penh, Cambodia / 19 November – 19 December

Photo Phnom Penh is a number one pictures competition in Southeast Asia, organized by the non‑revenue Photo Phnom Penh Association to advertise inventive trade, technical talent, and youth engagement. The competition spans a number of cultural venues throughout Phnom Penh, showcasing each historic and modern works from European and Asian photographers. It options exhibitions, screenings, talks, workshops, portfolio evaluations, and the Photo Is Your Memory initiative, which provides free scanning, restoration, and printing of non-public pictures. The competition highlights pictures’s energy to discover reminiscence, id, and social transformation.

Ici, Là by Massao Mascaro at Maison De L’enfance Et De L’adolescence / Geneva, Switzerland / 30 September – 9 January

The exhibition Ici, Là [Here, There] brings collectively two sequence of pictures, taken in Geneva and Brussels over a number of years, expressing two distinct relationships with time. Along the banks of the Rhône in Geneva, Mascaro captures the river’s shifting gentle and reflections, creating fluid, poetic pictures that blur contours and evoke the passage of time. In distinction, his Brussels sequence focuses on the intimate house of a kitchen desk after meals, documenting the quiet traces of on a regular basis life. Through these black-and-white analogue pictures, Mascaro transforms the mundane into moments of reflection, exploring the dialogue between motion and stillness, exterior and inside, and the refined magnificence embedded in routine and reminiscence.

Performing The Invisible by Hoda Afshar at Musée du Quai Branly / Paris, France / 30 September – 25 January

Through a piece that’s each poetic and political, Hoda Afshar explores the historical past of established views and makes pictures a device of revelation and resistance, by themes of marginality, gender id, and exile. Her first monographic exhibition in France options two main installations: The Fold, an unprecedented work reinterpreting colonial-era pictures of Moroccan topics shot by psychiatrist Gaëtan de Clérambault to deconstruct how pictures can conceal or form the illustration of our bodies for a dominant energy; and Speak The Wind, a visible essay specializing in the winds, beliefs, and rituals of the islands within the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran. The general exhibition, which mixes pictures, drawings, mirrors, movies, and sound installations, invitations viewers to replicate on their relationship with pictures and the narratives they assemble.

Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive by Destiny Mata at Abrons Arts Center / 17 October – 4 January

The Lower East Side Yearbook is an archive began by photographer Destiny Mata about Lower East Side public housing residents and the significance of neighborhood reminiscence. The exhibition brings collectively Mata’s portraits and household pictures contributed by native residents, making a collective photo-yearbook that paperwork life, resilience, and belonging within the neighborhood. Curated by Ali Rosa‑Salas with exhibition design by Anzia Anderson, the present features as a residing archive, celebrating the enduring energy and shared histories of a quickly altering neighborhood.