The visiting exhibition by the Kranj Foto Fest festival features the works of four authors, selected in the 2024 festival competition.
Imane Djamil (MA), Slow Days in the Fortunate Isle
Imane Djamil is a Moroccan storyteller and documentary photographer. Djamil engages viewers in photographic projects imbued with the style of docudramas. Her works straddle the realistic and phantasmagoric. Slow Days in the Fortunate Isle is a story about the migratory relationship between Tarfaya, Morocco and Fuerteventura, Canary Islands. It takes place in a small, personal, kingdom split into a historically fallen east and a chimerical, illusory west. It’s both the shape of a triangle and a broken heart, cracked in the middle by the notorious winds and waves of the Atlantic, but also and mostly by exclusionary policies much stronger than any ocean.
Blaž Gutman (SI) Seventy Years Ago Was Seven Minutes Ago
Blaž Gutman is a Slovenian photographer whose work focuses on the palimpsest of time in both commercial and personal projects. Seventy Years Ago Was Seven Minutes Ago is a series of photographs made over seven years of a quiet, tender, and contemplative man, whose life and perception of time is slowly but steadily turning upside down. Janez, Gutman’s stepfather, is facing a terrible illness. Dementia is taking a toll on his memory and his daily routines are starting to look alike and repetitive. Using various non-linear and fragmented visual strategies, such as photography, drawings, and writings, the author is giving a voice and visuals to Janez, a voice that would otherwise not be heard.
Marieke van der Velden & Philip Brink, Children of the Labyrinth
Marieke van der Velden (photographer) and Philip Brink (filmmaker) are an Amsterdam-based Dutch filmmaking couple. In addition to their assignments for companies and NGOs, they make self-initiated projects. In this, their aim is to show the daily news in the personal perspective of the people it affects. Currently, more than 110 million people are displaced worldwide, including millions of parents with their children. In Children of the Labyrinth, eight of these parents have written intimate letters to their child. This project is created in close collaboration with the parents and driven by every parent’s most universal desire – that of a better future for your child.
About the open call
This year, the Kranj Foto Fest open call had an open theme for the first time, which encouraged photographers to submit their projects without any thematic restrictions. The open call received 1,014 applications from photographers of almost 100 different nationalities from six continents.
After several weeks of careful consideration of all submitted works, the jury selected 20 projects, including one winner and 19 shortlisted artists who had the opportunity to work closely with the curatorial team in planning their festival exhibitions.
The annual Kranj Foto Fest festival of contemporary photography was founded in 2021 with the aim to make Kranj a hub for photography in this part of Europe and to establish an international platform for connecting photographers, students, curators, educators and the local community.
Cover photo: Imane Djamil, from Slow Days in the Fortunate Isle
Organisation: Kranj Foto Fest and Kino Šiška.
Free admission.
21. 8.–7. 9. 2024
