International Discoveries V

Khaled Akil (Syria), Chris Bartlett (USA), Pedro David (Brazil), Roberto Fernández Ibáñez (Uruguay), Do-yeon Gwon (Korea), Jungho Jung (Korea), Hankoo Lee (Korea), Marcela Magno (Argentina), Hector Rene Membreno-Canales (Honduras/USA), Hosang Park (Korea), Sebastián Szyd (Argentina), TANG DeSheng (China)

Installation view of Hosang Park's photographs in the exhibition International Discoveries V at FotoFest. Photo courtesy of Nash Baker.

International Discoveries V is the fi fth in a series of exhibitions and programs presented by FotoFest International in Houston, Texas. Beginning in 2007 and organized between FotoFest Biennials, International Discoveries comprises a series of programs and art events centered around a public exhibition featuring a selection of
outstanding photographic artists selected by the FotoFest curatorial team from photography events and artist studio visits in Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Canada and the United States.

International Discoveries is about discovery and the launching of important art careers internationally. The exhibition and surrounding programs focus primarily on new and developing work from across the world and the international network of photography events which involve FotoFest. The Festival of Light network, which FotoFest helped initiate in 2000, has a membership of 23 photography festivals from 18 countries across the world.

In addition to the exhibition, FotoFest sponsors artist talks, artist and curator exhibition tours, educational activities in schools, collectors events and portfolio reviews with exhibiting artists. In addition to special exhibition tours for students, artists make presentations of their work in classrooms at Houston-area universities as well as public and private grade schools in the Houston Independent School District and surrounding school districts.

Worldwide, FotoFest disseminates artists’ works in the International Discoveries exhibition online, through its website and social media, to its exceptionally broad global network of art institutions, curators, art fairs and press. Through its international programming over the past 30 years and participation in photography festivals and commercial fairs around the world, FotoFest makes it possible for artists to have both local and global exposure for their work. With
the FotoFest exhibition in Houston, exhibiting artists have access to one of the most important museum photography programs and collections in the United States, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as well as commercial art galleries, universities and community-based photography organizations, such as the Houston Center for
Photography.

The International Discoveries events and exhibition are a major part of FotoFest’s year-round art programming between its large citywide international Biennials. International Discoveries is a key part of FotoFest’s mission – to discover and support artistic talent, strengthen international connections, and create a platform to bring
new photographic talent to broader audiences across the world, Houston and the U.S.

International Discoveries V gathers 12 artists from Argentina, Brazil, China, Syria, Honduras, South Korea, Uruguay and the United States for this 2015 edition of the series. They have been ‘discovered’ at the Encuentros Abiertos – Festival of Light 2014; the Daegu Photo Biennale 2014, South Korea; FestFotoPoa in Porto Alegre, Brazil;
Canal 5 Creative Campus, Changzhou, China; Photoville, New York; and at Paris Photo.

The works presented in International Discoveries V display an extraordinary range of ideas and utilization of the photographic medium, from classical realism to conceptual abstraction, from the poetry of landscape to the harsh brutalities of politics and war.

Steven Evans and Wendy Watriss, Curators

About the artists
Khaled Akil work focuses primarily on social, political, and sexual issues in the Middle East. He was born in 1986 in Aleppo, Syria, where his family has a long history. He has a bachelor’s degree in law and political science, which has enabled him to do his artistic investigations in the context of the social issues that he observes on a daily basis.
He has spent much of the current Syrian war in Aleppo. He is currently working on a temporary basis in Istanbul.

His interest in photography started as a hobby, but he has developed it into a professional career. His experience with political law and his knowledge of human rights play a major role in his work and have helped him find new and deeper perspectives on the social, political, and religious issues he sees in society. He established his own gallery in Aleppo, where he organized photography workshops and art exhibitions for other artists.

He has had solo exhibitions at Chalabi Art Gallery, Istanbul (2013); Lahd Gallery, London (2012); Karma Art Gallery, Aleppo (2011); Mustafa Ali Art Foundation, Damascus (2010); Sarmod Gallery, Aleppo (2009); and Le Pont Gallery, Aleppo (2009). His works are in the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, U.A.E.

Chris Bartlett is a documentary human rights portrait photographer. His portraits of former Iraqi detainees first gained recognition as part of the Moving Walls 15 exhibition at the Open Society Foundation in New York in 2008. Most recently these works were featured at Photoville, one of the largest photography festivals in New York City. Bartlett was interviewed regarding the exhibition of these works by the British Broadcasting Company, National Public Radio, and Canadian Public Radio, among many other media. He recently traveled the country making portraits of military rape survivors and is currently working on a series of portraits of political dissidents and former political prisoners in Burma.

Bartlett is also a commercial still-life photographer working primarily in the fashion, beauty, and luxury goods industries. His work has been published in virtually all the major fashion publications, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. His commercial clients include Diane Von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, and Kate Spade, among many
others.

Pedro David was born in Brazil in 1977. He completed his B.A. in journalism at the Pontifi cal Catholic University of Minas Gerais State, Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 2001 and attended graduate school in contemporary fine arts at the Escola Guignard, Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais. He has dedicated himself to exploring the diverse relationships between people and their environment. He has published numerous books: Underwater Landscape (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2008); The Garden (Salvador, Brazil: Funceb, 2012); Route Root (Fortaleza, Brazil: Tempo d’Imagem, 2013); and Catharsis Phase (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: self-published,2014). His works are part of the collections of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris; the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; the Museu Nacional da República, Brasília, Brazil; and the Minas Gerais State Museum, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Pedro David’s latest work, 360 Square Meters, was awarded the Marc Ferrez Prize of Photography by the Brazilian Art Foundation (Funarte) in 2012. He has had a Photoquai Residency by the French Musée du quai Branly in 2012; and the first Nexo Foto Prize in Spain in 2014. He has participated in many group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad since 1999, including Noorderlicht Photofestival (2005, 2008 and 2009), The Netherlands; 5th International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts (2006), Liége, Belgium; Fotoseptiembre (2011), Mexico City; 00 Generation (2011), São Paulo; the Latin American artist exhibition Esquizofrenia tropical (2012) at PhotoEspaña, Madrid; Photoquai (2013), Paris; and the 1st International Photography Biennial of MASP (2013), São Paulo and Curitiba, Brazil.

Uruguayan artist Roberto Fernández Ibáñez has a degree in chemistry and is self-taught in photography. He prints his works using his own chemical formulas. He is interested in the frontier between the real and the imaginary, and in human behavior and the search for transcendence. He draws on mythology, symbolism, and metaphor as sources of expression in his work.

In addition to prints, he makes multidisciplinary artist books that include haiku, prose, drawing, photography, and mixed media. Fernández has exhibited his photographs in the United States at the Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States, Washington, D.C.; FotoFest International and the Institute of Hispanic Culture,
Houston, Texas; and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In Argentina, he has exhibited at Fotogalería Del Teatro San Martín and at Centro Cultural Recoleta, both in Buenos Aires. In Uruguay, he has shown work at the National Museum of Visual Arts; the Museum of Migrations; the Museum Municipal Historical Archive (Cabildo); and
the Ministry of Education and Culture. In Europe, he exhibited work at ABC Treehouse, Amsterdam, and Galerie Huit, Arles, France. In 2004 and 2014, he was the winner of the International Forum Portfolio Review in the Encuentros Abiertos – Festival of Light, Buenos Aires. He received the first prize of the Municipal Hall of Arts of Montevideo and
the Morosoli Award in Arts in recognition of his contribution to Uruguayan culture. His works have been published in books and magazines in the United States, Great Britain, China, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Do-yeon Gwon’s work reveals the unexpected worlds found in books, the shape of paper, and the interweaving of visual imagery with language. Populated with inanimate objects, books, and folded paper, his photographs search for their “place” in the universe as he explores ideas of memory. He is perhaps best known for the early photographic series he completed while still in graduate school: Traveler Novice (2011). The series features paper airplanes that take off, land, and travel through interior spaces. Later, he embarked upon the project Dictionary of Notion.

Born in 1980 in Seoul, Do-yeon Gwon received his B.F.A. in literature from Hanyang University and completed his M.A. in photography at Sangmyung University. His work was featured in the 2014 Seoul Lunar Photo Fest and the 2011 Seoul Photo Festival. His work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Ryugaheon Gallery, Seoul, and at Nuda
Gallery, Daejeon, South Korea. His series Dictionary of Notion received the Korean Photographer’s Fellowship Artist of the Year prize at KT&G Sangsang Madang in 2014. He was the winner of the portfolio review at the 2014 Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea., and was awarded portfolio prizes at the Seoul Photo Festival and at the 12th Sajin Bipyong Awards at Photospace, Seoul, in 2011.

Jungho Jung was born in Seoul in 1981. He completed his M.A. in fine art photography at Hongik University and in mass communication at Konkuk University, both in South Korea. He photographs different aspects of landscape and the ambiguous shapes of water, snow, and ice to explore how visual impressions bring about changes in human
sensibility and thought. In his series White Utterance, he has tried to figure out “the true nature of white” by photographing in white landscapes covered with snow.

He is a recipient of residencies at the Art Council of Korea’s Nomadic Residency Program in Iran in 2014 and at Bogong Centre for Sound Culture in Australia in 2015. Recent exhibitions showing his work include Five Senses of Iran (2014) at the Iranian Academy of Arts, Iran; International Young Photographers (2012) at Bongsan Cultural Center, Daegu, South Korea; and Circulation (2011), Pingyao International Photography Festival, China. His works will appear in a solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP), Paddington, NSW, in August 2015. He has won many awards
including the National Geographic International Photo Award (2007) from National Geographic Korea; the Korean Air Photo Award (2008) from Korean Air Lines; the Magnum Korea Award (2007) from the Hankyoreh Media Company; the Art Preview and Portfolio Award (2012) from the Korea Art Education Promotion Association; and the New Discourse Artist Award (2013) from the Cyart Research Institute in South Korea.

As a member of The Truth, a documentary photography group, and as a photographer for Men and Mountain, a monthly photo magazine, Hankoo Lee has traveled to over a thousand villages in Korea. He has climbed many major mountain ranges in the world, including the Korean mountain chains of Baekdudaegan, Honam-jeongmaek, and Nangnamjeongmaek; Khan Tengri of the Tian Shan mountains in China; and the southwest wall of Mt. Everest. From the vertical heights and horizontal expanses of the Korean Peninsula and beyond, he has built his own photo world.

His photographs have been shown in solo exhibitions including Military Use (2012), Ryugaheon’s Mainly Photographs Gallery, and Microlandscape (2011), Canon Plex Gallery, both in Seoul. He has participated in numerous group shows in Seoul including Go Out in 18 years (2004), Yechong Gallery; Korea – Japan Mountain Photo Exhibition (2000), Japanese Culture Center, Korean Embassy; and Korean Mountain Photographs (2000), Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.

Argentine artist Marcela Magno completed her degree in pedagogy at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain, in 1993. She is currently working as a photographer and freelance graphic designer. Her photographs have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Italy.

In 2007, her photographic work was given the first prize award by the Government of the Province of Santa Cruz for the heritage of Santa Cruz Province. In Buenos Aires, she received first prize in visual arts at the Expotrastiendas 2008, an art fair organized by the Argentina Association of Art Galleries (AWMA). In 2014, she received a special mention for her series Land, which was exhibited in the Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, Buenos Aires. Also in 2014, her work was selected as one of three top-rated portfolios by an international jury of curators at the Encuentros Abiertos – Festival of Light in Buenos Aires.

Hector Rene Membreno-Canales was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras then immigrated to the United States. After serving in the recent Iraq war, he used the G.I. Bill to move to New York City and study photography at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). While at SVA, he interned at The Museum of Modern Art, the Magnum Foundation, Hank Willis Thomas’ studio, and Stephen Mallon Films.

He has been invited to study public affairs and journalism at the Pentagon’s Defense Information School, Fort Meade, Maryland. His work has been featured in The New York Times, L’Oeil de la Photographie, and The Ottowa Citizen. His work explores national identity, patriotism, and the military-industrial complex.

Hosang Park was born in 1977 and now lives and works in Seoul. In 2004, he received his B.A. from the fine art photography department at Sangmyung University in Cheonan, South Korea, and in 2009 he received his M.F.A. from the fine art photography department at Sangmyung University’s Graduate School of Art and Design. He has focused on creating works that depict spaces representing particular Korean characteristics that are sometimes deemed too ordinary to be noticed by people. Recently working with a large eight-by-ten format camera, he has been exploring the relationship between creation and destruction in urban spaces.

He has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions in a wide variety of galleries and institutions. Solo shows include A Square (2009), Jen Bekman Gallery, New York City; Scenery in a Small Park (2008), Hyundai Department Store, Gallery H, Seoul; and A Square (2007), Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul. Recent group exhibitions include
Animism (2013), Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul; and Korea Power – Design and Identity (2013), Museum für angewandte Kunst Frankfurt, Germany.

Sebastián Szyd was born in 1974 in Buenos Aires. In 1994, he took the first of many trips throughout Latin America. Three years later, he traveled to India for the first time, an experience that confirmed his interest in photography. Upon his return in 1996, Szyd began an extensive collaboration with the principal media agencies in Argentina. In
1999, he decided to go back to his travels in order to photograph without the restraints of his editorial work. For the next three years, he focused on the photographic essay De la tierra [From the Land], a meditation on families and childhood in rural areas of Argentina, receiving a National Fund for the Arts Grant for this project in 2004.

Szyd had begun in 2003 to photograph the life and customs of Andean communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, and La Azotea Editorial Fotográfica published these images in América (2010), his first monograph. In 2009, he commenced Las flores y las piedras [Flowers and Stones], a series that he continued to develop until the end of 2013 and for which he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2010. Szyd returned to India in December 2011, an opportunity that enabled him to photograph the works in Ofrenda [Offering], a
formal and spiritual reflection on his journeys, published by Antennae Collection in 2013. Szyd’s work has been exhibited and published in numerous individual and group contexts, and his images are part of public and private collections in Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Japan.

Born in 1947, TANG DeSheng started his career in the Chinese army, where he was a photographer during his military service in 1965-1969. From 1969-1979, he photographed the zhiqing (“educated youth”), who were sent away from the cities in China to live and work in the countryside during the “Up to the Mountain and Down to the Countryside Movement” of the 1960s and 1970s. The 6,000 photos he took of this period in Chinese history constitute the only long-term photographic documentation that is known of this movement. These works were shown in public for the first time in 2012 at Canal 5 Visual Arts Center in Changzhou, China.

TANG DeSheng has continued to work in China as a freelance photographer since 1979. He works with the Changzhou Photographers’ Association and independently for the Wujin County Photography Association. He holds official positions in both organizations. In recent years, he has done work on The Grand Canal and the onetime
the practice of bound feet.

During the 2014 Mois de la Photo in Paris, a solo exhibition of his Educated Youth work was held at the SPÉOS Paris London Photographic Institute His Educated Youth work has been published in Educated Youth: The Weight of Images Passing Through Time (Changzhou, China: Canal 5 Visual Arts Center with Thinking Hands,2012) and Educated Youth: A Fading Living Evidence (China: self-published, 2014).

INTERNATIONAL DISCOVERIES V EXHIBITION SPONSORS
Kenneth Anderson and Andreanne Vachon; Allen and Jenny Craig; James and Sherry Kempner; Frazier King; Carol Liff man; James Edward Maloney; Joan Morgenstern; Gregory and Lisa Spier; and Eliane Thweatt

FOTOFEST 2014-2015 ART PROGRAM SEASON SPONSORS
Houston Endowment Inc; City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance; National Endowment for the Arts; Texas Commission on the Arts; The Wortham Foundation; FotoFest Board of Directors; Judith and Gamble Baldwin; Robert Gerry III; William and Rosalie Hitchcock; HexaGroup; Houston Public Media; and iLand Internet Solutions; and
Silver Street Studios

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