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Creative Conversations: Zana Briski with Johan Sjöström

October 1, 2022

Silos at Sawyer Yards

1502 Sawyer St, Houston, TX 77007

Artist Zana Briski will join Gothenburg Museum of Art curator Jöhan Sjöstrom for a conversation centered on Briski’s series Animalograms, which is presented in part in the Biennial 2022 exhibition Ten by Ten. Sjöstrom and Briski will discuss both the conceptual and technical aspects of Briski’s wildlife images, highlighting the ways the artist draws from photographic printing histories to create unique images that represent the majesty and fragility of the natural world.

About the speakers

Zana Briski is an Academy Award-winning director and photographic artist whose deepest love is the earth and her creatures. Led by passion and intuition, Briski has traveled to eighty countries. She spent ten years in the brothels of Calcutta, where she lived, photographed, filmed, and taught photography to the children of prostitutes. Her resulting film, Born into Brothels, won an Oscar, the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and thirty-three other awards. She founded Kids with Cameras (2000–03), a nonprofit organization which taught the art of photography to marginalized children around the world. She published a book of the children’s photographs, Kids with Cameras, and self-published a collector’s edition of her own photographs, Brothel. Her current project, Reverence is inspired by visions of a praying mantis. To create this work, Briski has spent fifteen years photographing and filming insects in the wild in over thirty countries. Presenting insects as individual sentient beings, Reverence is a traveling exhibit comprising large-scale photographic artworks, a film, and music housed in an egg pod designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect, Shigeru Ban. Reverence will travel to city parks around the world, inspiring wonder and awe and encouraging viewers to find a harmonious way to share the earth with other species.

Johan Sjöström is the curator of exhibitions at Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden. The museum is one of the most important institutions for art in Scandinavia. Its collections and temporary exhibitions range from Renaissance painting to international contemporary art, photography, and new media. Sjöström has also curated some forty museum and kunsthalle shows and published accompanying catalogues featuring the work of artists like Bruce Nauman, Laurie Simmons, Trine Søndergaard, Esko Männikkö, Isaac Julien, Julia Peirone, and Yto Barrada. He has been invited to curate exhibitions, review work, and lecture at numerous international photo events, including European Central Bank Annual Photography Award, Frankfurt, Germany; Rencontres d’Arles, France; FotoFest in Moscow, Russia; Fotofestiwal Lodz, Poland; Odense FotoTriennal, Denmark; Rhubarb-Rhubarb, Birmingham, UK; FotoBild, Berlin, Germany; Artphoto Image Festival, Bucharest, Romania; Bratislava Month of Photography, Slovakia; Skábmagovat, Inari, Finland; and FotoFest in Beijing, China. He has lectured on photography at Hunter College, New York; Umea University, Sweden; Hanoi Academy of Fine Arts, Vietnam; Chung-Ang University, South Korea; Gothenburg University, Sweden; and Åbo Akademi University, Finland.

FotoFest Biennial 2022 Media Sponsor:

Glasstire

Images: Daniel Ortiz