ФotoFUTURA 2024: Invisible​

Aleksandar Kostić,

Art Director of the Festival

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"Open your eyes. Travel with us. To a new light."

(Laibach)

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ФotoFUTURA

a festival of photography and expanded photographic media, was founded by leading educational facilities in this field in Serbia, Faculty of Dramatic Arts and Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. 

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Photography

Photography is now established as an important cultural, artistic and social domain, and a significant communicational and media field that is constantly evolving.
Contemporary photography has changed its nature, is freed from conventions of the craft by new technological and conceptual tools, and has become a created intermediate image of vast possibilities of expression. At the same time, it keeps the former context of Talbot’s "pencil of nature".
With its personal and daily relation towards reality, but also its manipulation and creation, with a special emphasis on self-presentation and self-notation, contemporary photographic image is a potential perceptive extension in perceiving the world for every individual today, as an indispensable tool of visual communication and as an indirect and personal instrument of self-knowledge. 
Photography is a dominant media in contemporary art. The Artfacts website states ten artists that were exhibited the most during the previous year. Half of them, though not declared as photographers, use photography in their work and photography is probably the most represented mutual media of contemporary art.

The Task of the Festival
The task of the festival is to bring together students and creative young people, artists and established authors, professional and interested audience, to promote all classical and new forms of photography, to evaluate and educate, to set and promote standards, to defend art and culture in times when they are endangered and under threat.
We live in an epoch of deranged values, glorification of shund and trivial, priority of low interest, bribery and corruption, ignorance and primitivism, a rule of blind political and economic power devoid of humanity and moral. The Balkans have besides an extremity of vitality and wisdom, often been a place where the straps of civilization were firstly manifested, both east and west, a litmus of hidden and public tendencies of the world and the world order. There is  no doubt that the moment we are living in is dramatic on both micro and macro levels, that it demands consciousness, conscience, responsibility and action, and ask the final question of belief in humanity, its maturity, and survival, as well as the survival of nature that surrounds it.

Invisible
Photography is dealing with visible and invisible in the same manner. It is often that the guessed, thought upgraded content and meaning is the element that touch us when viewing an image. The content of the image equally speaks of that which is absent from the image or is outside the frame. The invisible is an integral part of the visible.

In its third edition, the festival will gather a far larger number of participant universities, students and professors from various countries and present two new areas, photo-book and moving image in the context of still image. Still, it has remained invisible to the state, the ministry, boards and sponsors. Educational, artistic, international, professional or innovational character of the festival has not been recognized.

While writing this, in Germany it is the right wing that has won the election, there is a raging war in Ukraine, innocent people are dying in Gaza, and the ominous shadow of Rio Tinto is leaning over Serbia.
Invisible, we continue towards where we are headed.
 
ФotoFUTURA!