BIENNIAL 2022 EXHIBITIONS
Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Sunday / 11AM–6PM
If I Had a Hammer
Silver Street Studios and Winter Street Studios
On view: September 24–November 6
African Cosmologies: Redux
Spring Street Studios
On view: September 24–November 6
The Alta Arts
On view: September 24–October 29
Houston Museum of African American Culture
On view: September 24–October 29
The Menil Collection
On view: August 5–January 15
Ten by Ten: Ten Reviewers Select Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2020-21
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
On view: September 24–November 6
Chow and Lin, 2020:06:13, 13:31:23, 2020. From the series I want to bring you around the world, 2020–22. Archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artists.
The FotoFest Biennial 2022 central exhibition, If I Had a Hammer, considers the ways artists utilize images to explore the formation of historical narratives, political ideology, and agency. The artists featured in If I Had a Hammer question the role of images in the construction, depiction, reception, and repression of global social movements and political ideologies, and represent a diverse range of image-makers, including photo-documentarians, activists, research-based artists and collectives, filmmakers, performance artists, and artists working in social practice.
If I Had a Hammer explores both artistic and activist interventions into the structures of contemporary image-production, calling attention to how these structures both reflect and inform our perception of the world, historical narratives, and the agency to engage in collective cultural discourse. The exhibition proposes that the systems and structures that support ideological formation such as historical archives, digital media networks, sociopolitical organizing campaigns, and infrastructural and territorial developments, are inextricably linked to the history and development of photography and image technology. Through disparate approaches, the artists in If I Had a Hammer offer strategies to resist and replace legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic violence by exploiting the language and material of image-production and media circulation. In doing so, the artists show how images can be used to both support progressive movements as well as reinforce and bolster systemic inequities.
The exhibition borrows its title from Pete Seegar and Lee Hays’s 1949 protest song of the same name, which was written as a response to growing ideological divides and violence against progressive artists and thinkers in the U.S. during the era of Red Scare McCarthyism. Throughout this period, artists, activists, authors, and musicians, including Seegar and Hays, were made to testify in broadcasted congressional hearings and defend their right to free speech and protest. This exhibition uses the historical context within which “If I Had a Hammer” was written as a starting point to explore how those who assert ideological supremacy often do so by employing the very tools used by the communities and individuals they hope to suppress. They use the tools of discursive circulation: broadcast media, text, song, art, and images.
The scope of If I Had a Hammer is expansive, including international perspectives on ever-changing ideologies in relationship to the contemporary, global nature of media circulation and ideological development. At the heart of this interrogation is an examination of the methods artists employ to create archives that subvert the hegemonic anthropological and documentary gaze, play against traditional forms of photography, and imagine alternative political scenarios while resisting a singular, finished, final, or decisive image.
The artists and collectives featured in the FotoFest Biennial 2022 central exhibition include:
Laura Aguilar
Mónica Alcázar-Duarte
Chow and Lin
Forensic Architecture
Elaine W. Ho
Ho Rui An
Jibade-Khalil Huffman
David Kelley
Yazan Khalili
Ryan Patrick Krueger
Dorothea Lange
Dionne Lee
Toyo Miyatake
Delilah Montoya
Reynier Leyva Novo
Lorraine O'Grady
Mike Osborne
Liz Rodda
Keisha Scarville
Ines Schaber
Fred Schmidt-Arenales (in collaboration with David Ramírez Cotón, Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Camilla Juárez, and Jorge de León)
Jonathan David Smyth
Bruce Yonemoto
The FotoFest Biennial 2022 takes place September 24–November 6, 2022 in Houston, Texas at Sawyer Yards in Arts District Houston and throughout the city of Houston. The exhibition and its related public programs are co-curated and organized by Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Amy Sadao with curatorial advisory support from Julie Ault, Nora N. Khan, and Jeanne Vaccaro.
FOTOFEST BIENNIAL 2022 SPONSORS
FotoFest Biennial 2022 Major Institutional and Individual Sponsors
Houston Endowment, The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation, The Powell Foundation, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Wortham Foundation, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation, Susan Vaughan Foundation, Judith and Gamble Baldwin, Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, David and Martha Moore, FotoFest Board of Directors.
Additional FotoFest Biennial 2022 Support provided by
The Alta Arts, Arts District Houston, Aurora Picture Show, Bonhams, Deal Company, Foto Relevance, Foundation for a Civil Society, Glasstire, Heidi Vaughan Fine Art, Houston Cinema Arts Society, Houston Museum of African American Culture, iLand Cloud Services, Institut d'Estudis Baleàrics, The Menil Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Photography, Seoul, Musiqa, PaperCity Magazine, Precision Camera, River Oaks District, Saint Arnold Brewery, Sawyer Yards, Silver Street Studios, Villa Albertine and the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, The Whitehall Houston, WYNG Foundation.
Funding for Ines Schaber’s presentation in the FotoFest Biennial 2022 exhibition, If I Had a Hammer, is provided, in-part, by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
For further questions please contact:
Brandon Harris, FotoFest Manager of Engagement and Communications
T 713.223.5522 ext.21 / press@fotofest.org
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