Photobook Week Aarhus 2021: Movement and Transition

Photobook Week Aarhus celebrates its eighth edition from 14-17 October 2021. The festival has existed since 2014 as a collaboration between Aarhus School of Architecture and Galleri Image. It reflects on a continuous study of the discourse of photobooks.

Photobook Week Aarhus’ main venues are Aarhus School of Architecture; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and Galleri Image. Other venues include HEART Herning Museum Of Contemporary Art and Godsbanen. The festival programme is dedicated to exhibitions and talks about publishing, researching, distributing, buying, trading, and collecting photobooks. You can also purchase new as well as vintage photobooks at the festival. Participation in the festival is free of charge and everyone is welcome.

A significant part of Photobook Week Aarhus 2021 will focus on the relationship between architecture, photography and photobooks. As Anne Elisabeth Toft, Associate Professor at Aarhus School of Architecture and one of the curators of Photobook Week Aarhus, explains:

“The theme of Photobook Week Aarhus 2021 is ‘Movement and Transition’. With this theme, we set the stage for a festival programme that deals with current issues in society such as migration, globalization and postcolonial thinking. It sheds light on the construction and distribution of ideological models and artistic movements and reflects on the forces that produce, support, perpetuate and transform them. Photobook Week Aarhus 2021 will look at the role that photobooks play – and have played – as mass media, and how they have been used in various ways as tools for political, artistic and commercial purposes.

PWA 21. Foto: Louise Bernsdorf Steffensen

Seen from this perspective, the part of the festival that relates to architecture, the part I am responsible for, will specifically discuss the construction of different normative frames of understanding for architecture, urban areas and landscapes and their significance to ideal conceptions of how society can be arranged and developed. The part of the festival that relates to architecture comprises three exhibitions: Pictures of Denmark: Sigvart Werner’s ”Danmarksbillede”; Danish Welfare Architecture and Its Image; and The Company Photobook.

The festival programme also includes exhibitions on Fluxus books, photobooks and their connections with film editing, photobooks by Korean visual artist Kyungwoo Chun, photobooks and zines from Greenland, Central European Photobooks, Portuguese photobooks, Caribbean photobooks as well as shortlisted photobook dummies from the 2021 Kassel Photobook Award and the Hong Kong Photobook Festival’s Photobook Dummy Award 2021.

Presentations and discussions by international and Danish photobook experts will put the themes of the exhibitions into perspective.”