Critical Geography

The FotoFest Biennial 2024 central exhibition, Critical Geography, features works by more than 20 international artists and collectives. The exhibition explores how space, place, and communities are influenced by social, economic, and political forces.

FotoFest announces new artist commissions and site-specific installations for its 20th international biennial exhibition, Critical Geography. The FotoFest Biennial 2024 takes place March 9–April 21, 2024, at FotoFest’s Sawyer Yards campus and venues throughout Houston. The exhibition is curated by Steven Evans, executive director of FotoFest. 

The exhibition features newly commissioned projects and site-specific installations by artists Mark Menjívar, C. Rose Smith, Binh Danh, Sao Sreymao and Zarina Muhammad, Ethel Lilienfeld, and Mónica Alcázar-Duarte.

The Biennial’s artist commissions and special projects provoke conversations around social justice, environmental sustainability, and transformative change. By advancing these global projects, FotoFest maintains its commitment to foster cross-cultural exchange, address social issues, and engage with and provide cultural resources for the Houston community.

Mark Menjivar’s Looking Up (Voices from Jack Yates High School) (2023) is an installation of 28 transparencies on windows located between Terminals C and D at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The project is co-presented by FotoFest, its Literacy Through Photography Learning Program, and the Curator of Public Art and Director of Houston Airports Cultural Arts Program, Alton DuLaney, for George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Looking Up is on view at the airport February through December 2024. Selections from Looking Up are on view at FotoFest and Jack Yates High School during the Biennial 2024.

Inspired by teaching philosophies developed during the 1960s civil rights movement and Freedom Schools curricula, Looking Up combines student photographs of the sky and manifestos describing Jack Yates High School Students’ ideal school experience. The multi-part artwork offers a glimpse into the students’ hopes and dreams for their school community.

C. Rose Smith’s Talking Back to Power (2024) is a series of self-portraits that propose a re-making of Black identity at sites of historical plantations throughout the Southern United States. Drawing upon frameworks of Afro-surrealism and Black dandyism, Smith questions who gets to be represented as powerful, prominent, and beautiful and examines contemporary attitudes surrounding gender expression. The project is co-commissioned by FotoFest and Autograph ABP, London.

Binh Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. As a child who immigrated to the U.S. from war-torn Vietnam in 1979, the memories and trauma of his diasporic experience serve as the foundation for his investigative practice.

In All I asking for is my body (2024), Danh uses the daguerreotype process to print archival images from 19th-century photos and stereographs depicting labor in the field onto colonial design silver platters and plates. The objects are accompanied by a video work that examines related archival source material the artist has collected over many years.

Sao Sreymao and Zarina Muhammad’s mixed-media installation, Shaking Land + Breathing in Unbreathable Circumstances (2022), is inspired by the artists’ exchange of images, songs, and stories on watery pathways and riverine arteries, disappearing communities, displacement, and grief. This site-specific installation interweaves works from both artists and reflects on the politics of inhabitation.

Ethel Lilienfeld’s installation, INVISIBLE FILTER (2022), is supported through the Etant Donnés program of the Institut Français. The project deals metaphorically with the relationship individuals have with their self-image, which is continuously archived and updated on social media. Through alternating videos presented in a sculptural installation, INVISIBLE FILTER disturbingly poses questions of self-image and representation in the virtual realm.

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte’s films, U K’ux Kaj / Heart of sky Mayan god of storms (2023–24) and Nepantla (2023–24), juxtapose the colonization of South America with the impending colonization of Mars. The films are supported by The National Geographic Society and are the focus of an immersive installation.

To learn more about Critical Geography and participating artists, please visit fotofest.org/fotofest-biennial-2024.