European Photo Exhibition Award 03: Shifting boundaries

Works by Arianna Arcara (Italy), Pierfrancesco Celada (Italy), Marthe Aune Eriksen (Norway), Jakob Ganslmeier (Germany), Margarida Gouveia (Portugal), Marie Hald (Denmark), Dominic Hawgood (UK), Robin Hinsch (Germany), Eivind H. Natvig (Norway), Ildikó Péter (Hungary), Marie Sommer (France) and Christina Werner (Austria)

Curators: Rune Eraker, Sérgio Mah, Enrico Stefanelli, Ingo Taubhorn

The exhibition European Photo Exhibition Award 03 (epea03) presents the work of 12 young European artists who have been invited to focus on the theme “Shifting boundaries. Landscapes of Ideals and Realities in Europe” within the framework of the third edition of the European Photo Exhibition Award. A first line of approach can naturally be identified in a sphere that is essentially geographical, in the sense that the notion of boundary tends to refer to lines of separation, physical divisions and distances within a determined territory, or between territories. The experience and consideration of landscape, issues relating to nature and ecology, dissonances and connections between the rural and the urban, the anthropology of places, relationships between the “local” and the “global,” and cultural, historical and political confrontations associated with territorial conflicts (at a regional or national level) are among the topics which inevitably arise when addressing the impact of issues of boundaries upon reality.

Looking beyond these geographical connotations, however, it is also important to consider the notion of boundary in a more social sense; in other words, in relation to the discrepancies, connections and tensions in various individual and collective spheres of identity, taking into particular account themes which suggest changing distinctions at the level of gender, sexuality, social class, age, education, work, religion, family structures, forms of sociability, and migrations, which in this context can be understood as symptoms of a new cultural and social topology, as signs of a new horizon of world views.

To sum up, we challenge the artists of epea03 to reveal and consider these boundary zones—with their identifiable signs of change, reformulation, adjustment, tension, and rupture…—with the additional aim of emphasising the active role that image-based practices can and do play in this perceptive and analytic process.

The epea (European Photo Exhibition Award) is a project that is co-organised by four European foundations: the Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca (Italy), the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian (France), the Institusjonen Fritt Ord (Norway) and the Körber-Stiftung (Germany). Its aim is to shed light on the young generation of photographers in Europe and to set up an intra-European dialogue around topical subjects. The photographs will be shown between 2016 and 2017 in several exhibition spaces, including venues in Oslo, Lucca, Paris and Hamburg.