“I want you to be confronted with your own desire and the frustration that comes from not finding what you’re looking for”

Afshar embarked on a research project on de Clérambault’s archive at Musée du quai Branly, asking to access the works through the digital repository. Saving the images she wished to use, she later returned to them, only to find that the museum software had protected the files, creating crops capturing only a fraction of the image, around the cursor where she had clicked. This created an unexpected effect; a mosaic of hundreds of image fragments. 

These ‘screengrabs’ make up The Fold, now on show at the Musée du quai Branly as part of Afshar’s first monographic exhibition in France. Performing the Invisible comprises two bodies of work – Speak the Wind, which was published as a book by Mack in 2021, and The Fold, published by Loose Joints in September 2025. 

Afshar’s project potently reveals that the archive is never a neutral collection of documents, but rather a constructed apparatus shaped by power, desire and the political conditions in which it was made. De Clérambault’s Morocco photographs may at first appear to be anthropological or ethnographic studies. Yet Afshar shows that what they really expose is the photographer himself – his compulsions, his gaze, his inability to see the women as anything more than surfaces for projection. The Fold, says Afshar, is not about the nature or environment of Islamic women, but rather the one who sees and tries to represent them.

“I found it fascinating to look at the archive because when you look at these images, they show you nothing about the subject,” Afshar explains. “The image-maker is so removed from the context that these bodies are situated in… You don’t get anything from the images but what you get is an idea of the image-maker.” 

At first, the cropped details of fabric folds and shreds of gesture that Afshar accidentally obtained were frustrating. But eventually she came to see the accident as a gift. “It’s like zooming into de Clérambault’s obsession with the fold of the fabric, but also the inaccessibility of the archive,” she says. By enlarging these fragments in the darkroom, she was able to return the material to the analogue processes de Clérambault once used. The result is both tactile and forensic, a deliberate dissection of his gaze.

Afshar stresses that the work is not about reproducing the French photographs, but about dismantling them. “This is a project that works against the images that it’s referencing,” she says. “You would see the cover [of the book] and assume this is what you’re going to get – veiled women. But after flipping through, you soon realise that what you’re looking for is not there. I want you to be confronted with your own desire and the frustration that comes from not finding what you’re looking for.” 

This strategy positions The Fold in dialogue with Afshar’s broader practice. Speak the Wind deals with ritual, possession and the unseen – winds believed to inhabit bodies in the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Both projects circle around invisibility and absence, and question how photography can render what is normally unseen. In one case, it is the invisible force of the winds; in the other, the invisible but ever-present colonial gaze. Afshar also draws attention to how such images still shape political life. “The obsession towards the bodies of women, in particular Islamic women, is often used as a symbol,” she explains. “To show the oppression of certain places, or the barbarity of certain places, to justify the bombing or occupation of certain countries.” The female body – veiled, unveiled, disciplined – becomes a site on which power is asserted. Patriarchal forces inside colonised nations use women’s bodies to resist, while colonial powers use them to legitimise conquest.

This double-bind is particularly acute in France, where the veil remains a flashpoint of debate. Afshar links this fixation to a deeper historical wound. During the Algerian War of Independence, Frantz Fanon noted that women’s veils could conceal weapons; bombs were transported into French venues by women, little suspected by the authorities. For Afshar, contemporary bans on veils in France may not simply be about secularism or feminism, but about a lingering trauma rooted in that revolutionary history. 

Afshar describes her project as “a forensic investigation of the psyche of de Clérambault”, but adds that he is more than an individual; he embodies the colonial gaze. To step into her installation is, she suggests, like stepping into his mind. “In Being John Malkovich there’s a door that lets you see the world through his gaze,” she says. “When I started making the work I was thinking about that film a lot.” 

The installation opens with a short animation of de Clérambault’s death, his body slumped in his fabric-filled room, gun by his side, mannequins draped in hayek around him. From there, viewers enter a mirrored corridor in which archival images are printed on panels. As you look, you also see yourself reflected into their surfaces, implicating your own gaze in the act of looking. A sound installation deepens the immersion, while video works present interviews with five scholars dissecting de Clérambault’s persona from different perspectives. 

“Such archives are never about the subject. They’re about the purpose the colonial photography was serving – to classify, to justify colonisation.” This is why theorists such as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay have described the camera’s shutter as an “imperial shutter”, summing up how, from the beginning, photography served empire. 

Afshar does not let the archive rest silently in its drawers. By fracturing it further, reprinting it, and forcing audiences to confront their own expectations, she turns the colonial gaze back on itself. The Fold is not simply about de Clérambault or a past gaze, it is about the structures of seeing that persist today in politics, the media and our own imaginations. 

When Performing the Invisible closes, The Fold will enter the collection of the Musée du quai Branly, where future researchers may return to it as part of the long conversation around archives, images and power. “It makes me very happy to know that it will be part of that history,” Afshar says. “Someone else could come and have a dialogue maybe 100 years later.” 

Her work raises a final, unsettling question: what do we really see when we look at images of veiled women? Do we see the subjects themselves, or only our own projections staring back? Afshar’s answer is to hand the question to the viewer, mirrored in the folds of fabric, fractured across thousands of tiny fragments. 

Performing the Invisible is on show at Musée du quai Branly, Paris, until 25 January 2026. The Fold is published by Loose Joints

In sunkissed portraits against the pastel tones of the buildings, the red earth and purple skies, Terry finds the “beautiful whilst referring to really some of these big potentially problematic themes.” Photographed sitting in a striped top he captures the elderly man, who shared so much about the place he once lived. “He is obviously the physical photographic representation of all of these people who would have had this attachment to the land that are now forced to live away from a place they love and cherish.” In the book he attributes a quote to him: “if I could return to the river, I would have already started running.”

In images, the photographer draws on his stories: a beautiful white goat recalls the story of the one slaughtered to appease Nyaminyami, the serpent-like river god, who villagers called on for protection after their displacement in 1958 following the construction of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River. The anger of the river god is said to have caused devastating floods during the dam’s construction as the rock by the entrance to the gorge close to the dam wall site, which was regarded as the home of Nyaminyami, would be buried more than a hundred feet below the water surface. Terry went to the area it was believed to have been sacrificed and stayed with the descendants of the tribe that had carried out this act.

When the Lake Kariba dam wall was opened by the Queen Mother on 17th May 1960, along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, it was declared an engineering feat: “the white man in Africa conquering the wild Zambezi river,” says Terry. It was supposed to produce the cheapest electricity in the world. But it destroyed more habitat than any engineering project before it. Gone was the life of abundance people described before, where the rich river soil meant most things would grow, and instead was a hard life. The resettled populations had been relocated to areas where the soil is really arid.” They work really hard, they survive off the land, but very meagrely,” says Terry.

The communities who were displaced were promised to be taken care of but as the title of his book alludes to, there was this “sort of grand colonial deception,” he says. “I was meeting with resettled tribes who still 60 years after the construction of this lake don’t have running water, don’t have electricity. The dam was built for hydroelectric power but some of these tribes who live less than 20 to 40 kilometers away from the lake shore still have no electricity,” Terry says. They were promised the ability to go back to fishing, hunting and farming; and told they would be given an allowance and have houses built for them but “there’s a continued lack of acknowledgments of the resettlement terms, things that were promised to these people that were never delivered.”

It’s not always the struggles that Terry captures but he does show life on the lake as it is now: villagers drying maramba fish under electric blue fishing nets; a moth lit up against the sun glistening in the Chibwatata Hot Springs; Charara Point where young boys dive into the lake; the homes of his fixers and friends where photographs crowd the walls; and the silhouette of Zimbabwe’s white cowboys against a barely lit sky with the crescent of the moon overhead. In one beautiful image, the shadow of leaves veils a man’s head. Solomon and Terry formed a dee friendship after he picked him up as a hitchhiker going into town. “He sort of became like my confidant, my fixer, Solomon just knew everyone,” he says. “He’s this big, loud, bubbly, friendly guy that everyone kind of knew and loved.”

These contacts, connections and stories really only happen when you give a project time, says Terry. But it was his personal connection to the land that gives the work its beauty and depth. “My dad wanted to have his ashes scattered at Lake Kariba so that was the beginning of the seed that started the story because when I found that out there were a few more questions in terms of returning to the land, belonging to a place, and I guess specifically in terms of white Zimbabweans, I get the idea of returning to a land that we are originally not from. That struck me as quite powerful, but also problematic and quite complicated.”

They Still Owe Him a Boat is available now via contacting the artist at iamjonoterry.com

“By opening this space of friction and dialogue, Rencontres d’Arles 2025 pursues a vital ambition: to make photography a place of resonance, where voices coexist without hierarchy”

“It’s a rare example of true co-curation,” says Wiesner. “Where the narrative isn’t just about indigenous perspectives, but shaped by them from within. The result is both politically and visually powerful, anchored in land, memory and resistance.”

In an indictment of its historic use in ethnographic documentation, the artists in On Country reaffirm the camera as a truth-telling device – a means with which to reconcile the myth of objectivity. In the series Warakurna Superheroes, Tony Albert and David Charles Collins record children from a remote First Peoples community in the Northern Territory, for example, posing as superheroes amid dramatic outback landscapes. From the outpost of water tanks, at the dais of mechanical scrap heaps, they radiate strength and imagination. “The works on display this year offer alternative ways of telling and self-representing, rooted in cultural traditions that elude the visual standards of Western art history,” Wiesner says. “They raise crucial questions about authenticity, identity, and the legitimacy of the gaze. Who produces the images? Who displays them? And from what point of view are they seen – and understood?”

This line of enquiry is carried further by other photographers challenging power, particularly the emerging image-makers in the Discovery section. It includes Musuk Nolte’s documentary project in the Peruvian Amazon, Daniel Mebarek’s mobile studio in Bolivia (BJP #7920), and Heba Khalifa’s gendered perspectives, which resist ingrained prejudices. All invite reflection on whose viewpoints shape the narrative.

A reinterpretation of visual archives by Brazilian artists, Ancestral Futures makes for equally illuminating viewing. Sliding between quiet contemplation and fierce irony are images that pick holes in a narrow audit of Brazil’s history as told by the unreliable narrators of hegemonic culture. Gê Viana’s collaged portraits and photomontages appropriating colonial imagery are perhaps the most direct, but a similar tone echoes through Ventura Profana’s visionary photospreads, or Mayara Ferrão’s AI portraits, which playfully reinterpret visual traditions through an intersectional lens.

This year’s programme also includes the exhibition Retratistas do Morro, created by local photographers in Brazil’s favelas, and challenging monolithic Western narratives by presenting the everyday beauty and dignity they see first-hand. “What I find particularly striking,” reflects Wiesner, “is the project’s embedded nature – these are not outside observations, but relationships and histories built over time.” Conceived in 2015 by artist Guilherme Cunha, and drawn from an extensive archive of 250,000 photographs, the exhibition reflects a commitment to community collaboration and storytelling.

Arles also makes room for historical depth, reappraising Brazilian modernist photography and celebrating the socially engaged work of Letizia Battaglia and Claudia Andujar. “These historical perspectives don’t just complement the contemporary ones, they ground them,” says Wiesner. “Reminding us that today’s photographic struggles and innovations often echo older ones.”

With over 40 exhibitions, the French photofestival is a platform for diverse voices, and Wiesner has deliberately avoided corralling them too tightly. “By opening this space of friction and dialogue, Rencontres d’Arles 2025 pursues a vital ambition: to make photography a place of resonance, where voices coexist without hierarchy,” Wiesner says. “It feels less like a fixed narrative than a collective constellation of voices, each adding to a larger, unfinished image of the world.”

Together these works signal a meaningful shift toward shared authorship and renewed agency, reminding us that there is no neutral way of seeing, only personal and cultural ways of making meaning through images.

rencontres-arles.com

“The way I had learned about apartheid and the struggle was with statistics and these moments…. You didn’t get a sense of what daily life was like for these people”

– Thero Makepe 

This family history of diverging paths and roads left untrod, of personal responsibility and unintended consequences, inform Thero Makepe’s series We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here, on show a Lemkus Gallery, Cape Town from 15 February to 12 April, and at Format International Photography Festival, Derby from 13 March to 31 May (and which BJP has selected as its FORMAT25 Award Winner). Growing up in Botswana, Makepe knew little of his family’s radical history, though he was very aware of his South African heritage; his mother in particular felt estranged from her roots, and often went back to South Africa, taking Makepe with her. Friends and relatives often visited, and Makepe’s godparents were also South African. 

Eventually Makepe moved to Cape Town to study art in 2016, arriving amid #FeesMustFall protests [the 2015 #RhodesMustFall movement demanded the removal of a statue of arch-coloniser Cecil Rhodes, then expanded to a wider call to decolonise universities, including removing tuition fees]. Initially, he says, he couldn’t understand what was going on. “My upbringing in Botswana was very peaceful,” he explains. “I had never experienced any civil unrest, people fighting collectively for a cause. The national project of Botswana is that we are all one people – there are different subgroups and tribes but there is one flag, one language, one people, and it is one of the most stable economies in Africa. I grew up in a place where, though we are close-knit, it’s still individualistic in the sense of ‘We’ve got everything, we’re in a stable economy, just go to school and get a job’. 

“But in South Africa, there is huge imbalance. There’s a lot more poverty, and there is a racial dynamic between people who are descendants of Africans, people who are descendants of Europeans, and people who are descended from Indian slaves. It’s also a huge piece of land, so there are the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Swazi, so many cultures and different types of people. Then there is also all the struggle they have been through, and are still going through. When the ANC came into power there was a Freedom Charter, and part of that was [a commitment to] free education for all students. So by then [his student years] people were like, ‘Wait a minute, we never got that’.”

Makepe hung back at first, he says, remaining an observer rather than a participant, “just wanting to be an artist and express myself”. It took him a while “to understand and be part of something bigger than myself”, he says, but eventually counted himself part of this movement. And, though direct photojournalism isn’t his style, We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here was born of this experience. A series of staged and documentary images, it depicts his family in both Botswana and South Africa, with layers of meaning and symbolism showing how the personal relates to the political, and showing the cost that comes with both. 

Take his image of a woman dressed in black, for example, standing outside a building and pointing. The woman is Makepe’s mother, and she’s standing outside a church; her posture, which he asked her to adopt, is styled to evoke a gun, or the experience of being pointed out. The image is titled Under Surveillance and it’s an oblique reference to both Christianity and the armed struggle in South Africa, because his Botswana family are devote Anglicans, while Desmond Tutu and the Anglican church played a key role in the anti-apartheid movement. 

But there’s also another layer of meaning. In Botswana, his grandfather Mothopeng retrained his links with the struggle back home, and regularly housed exiles travelling from South Africa to Tanzania to undergo military training. “So my mother, as a child, would see these men with young guns and bullets, preparation for a war and revolution,” explains Makepe. And this edge of violence also references a wider sense in Africa, he adds, relating to the fact that Africans “have never received adequate reparations for what happened to us historically, so there’s also this emotion of wanting to enact this violence on these people, abstractly, who did these things to us”.

Another image also touches on violence, showing a group of men slaughtering a sheep. This shot is documentary, taken at a relative’s wedding in a township in South Africa, and on one hand it simply records a traditional custom – the bride’s family provides livestock as a dowry, and some of the animals are killed for the wedding feast. But the image is titled Spilling Blood, and the blood being split is moot. Makepe’s revolutionary great uncle had a son who became a musician, he explains, and one of his hits was a song titled Where Have My Cows Gone? In South Africa, and beyond, this title reads with a double meaning as being about literal loss but also about being dispossessed of one’s livestock and land – one’s wealth – by colonisers. 

A third shot shows Makepe’s sister and mother, gathered by his increasingly frail grandmother’s side; summing up something quite literal about the cares heaped on his mother’s shoulders, this image also emphasises the impact of one generation on the next, at a granular, personal level. “That was what was really fascinating for me, when I started to explore the revolutionary side of my family,” says Makepe. “The way I had learned about apartheid and the struggle was with statistics and these moments, you know, at this protest, they burned this, then this person went to jail, and then they were released. 

“You didn’t get a sense of what daily life was like for those people, and when I was looking at history it was like everybody was always on the same page. But sometimes there were individuals who felt, ‘I honestly don’t have the capacity to do this right now’. That was something I wanted to get across in my imagery.”

This project was also personal for Makepe on another level, because the revolutionary history of his family was something he had to seek out. Growing up he was sheltered from what was happening back in South Africa, and his family’s efforts as a safe house were hush-hush; it wasn’t until he was an adult that he was able to ask questions and discuss. One of the images in We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here is therefore a self-portrait, depicting the artist in his grandmother’s home. He looks like a hip young man, white socks matching his crisp t-shirt; he’s on the cusp of his adult life, considering his two relatives and the diverging paths their lives took. 

Meanwhile the carefully displayed artefacts around speak of much older, longer histories, and the mantlepiece bears family photographs proudly narrating another story of babies and youngsters in graduate gowns. Other images in Makepe’s series take up this theme of display and frames within frames, of what’s shown but equally what’s not. There’s a photograph of a pair of feet just seen in a doorway, for example, further framed by the edge of the shot; partly this image is just playing with composition, says Makepe, who started out interested in drawing, and painting, and comics, but it also has a very political impetus, relating to Botswana’s less-told history. 

“There was a raid that happened in 1985, where the South African Defence Force came into Botswana looking for exiles, and people who were housing exiles,” Makepe explains. “My family survived that attack, but there were 15 casualties. This shot doesn’t show the exact place where it happened, but these houses look very similar, so when I found them, I knew I wanted to photograph them. I wanted to capture what looks like the aftermath of people being murdered by a state, to set up a tableau that depicts the past.”

Makepe’s uncle was happy to pose for the image and, as We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here makes clear, his family are active supporters, often literally helping him make his work. His new project, It’s not going to get better, ​​which shows dissatisfaction in the apparently placid Botswana, also includes family members; and it also combines staged and documentary shots. “I usually photograph people when we have an established relationship and I can take my time,” Makepe explains. “But if not, I’m not someone who just takes a photograph without permission. I’ll approach and say ‘You were doing this just now, could you please do it again? Can I take a photograph? Here’s my business card, let’s exchange’. 

“You know, I don’t exist in a metropolis or cosmopolitan area where every day you’re encountering someone who’s new,” he chuckles. “I know everyone around. Botswana is a small country – the population is only 2.5 million, and the capital city is only 250,000 people. So if I take a picture of somebody, there’s a high chance I’ll see them again, at the barber shop, at the shopping mall.”

We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here is on show at Lemkus Gallery, Cape Town from 15 February to 12 April, and at Format International Photography Festival, Derby from 13 March to 31 May, and BJP has selected the series as its FORMAT25 Award Winner. The work will also travel to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Frankfurt from 28 March – 17 August with the Foam Talent group show. theromakepe.com

“I would like to reimagine Young and Wheeler’s book, not because I’m angry about it, but because I would like to have a conversation around photographic representation”

This insight shifted Abdul Hadi’s earlier perception of the book from “reactionary anger” towards “an appreciation of the idea we actually had similar experiences”. Realising her positionality as a member of the diaspora, she recognised she also came to the region from outside. “That’s when I started thinking how interesting it would be to see if any Iraqis had archives from the time that Young and Wheeler were there,” she says. Reaching out on Instagram, she soon started to receive images from that era. “Then my project took another turn,” she reflects. “I wanted to have a conversation. I would like to reimagine [Young and Wheeler’s] book, not because I’m angry about it, but because I would like to have a conversation around photographic representation.”

Abdul Hadi’s main line of questioning was, ‘Can histories be colonised even in imagination?’, because she realised that her own conception of the Ahwar and the Ahwaris [marsh Arabs] had been coloured by Young and Wheeler’s work. Using her own photographs alongside archival images from Iraqis taken between 1976 and 1978, she is creating a book with the working title Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes, designed by her partner Roï Saade. In a region dominated by images of men, this series features many women and children. “Women in the marshes are very strong, they do the work,” Abdul Hadi explains. “They’re not just homemakers. They take care of the kids and cook the food, but they also work on the land with the buffalo and sell reeds. Women in the marshes are actually very present.”

In one scene a woman balances a washed blanket on her head; Abdul Hadi says she was very open to being photographed. Elsewhere another young girl, Nihaya, sits on a buffalo. Abdul Hadi recollects taking this photograph at around six in the morning; Nihaya had just finished milking the herd with her brothers before sitting for the portrait. In another image two men in blue hold hands in a tender moment of Iraqi male affection; Abdul Hadi approached the best friends hanging out after school, near the city of Chabayish. And in another soft scene, a buffalo sits under a blanket, separate from his companions. His owner told Abdul Hadi the animal was feeling unwell so was swaddled. The photographer was happy to find him feeling better the following day.

@tamarabdul

Dreamland © Mounir Raji

Contributing artists Mounir Raji, Tina Farifteh and Rosângela Rennó discuss their projects with BJP as responses to questions around home, migration, and colonialism

In a country making sense of its future following the recent election of a right-wing government, BredaPhoto Festival 2024 presents a timely and necessary conversation about identity, power, and history. The festival brings together global as well as local voices to create a chorus of photographic inquiry. 

This year’s edition of the festival, themed Journeys, encourages its contributors and audience to reckon with the lasting impacts of colonial legacies. Through photographic explorations, artists take on questions about historical narratives, memory and displacement at the locus of the various diasporas present in the Netherlands. 

Breda is a quiet city in the southern Netherlands, about two hours from the capital, Amsterdam. It seems an unlikely place for a photographic festival of this scale, and of this nature. The festival has been platforming both Dutch and international photographers since its inaugural 2018 edition. This year, the festival feels particularly charged. With the election of a conservative government that has taken a hardline stance on immigration and multiculturalism – the far-right Freedom Party, which won most seats in the November elections, is headed by Geert Wilders who pledged to ban the Quran and close Dutch borders – the work showcased in Breda underscores the political tensions running through Europe at large. The question now looms: what role can artists and photographers play in reframing national identity and addressing a problematic past?

A Romanticised Notion of Homeland

Mounir Raji’s Dreamland, shot over the last five years and culminating in a book in 2023, is a personal tribute to the Morocco of his dreams and memories. Born and raised in the Zaan region of the Netherlands to Moroccan parents, Raji spent his childhood summers in Morocco. The familiar diasporic experience of the annual pilgrimage to the homeland has shaped both his identity and artistic output. Raji, a graduate of Amsterdam FOTOfactory, has exhibited at institutions in the Netherlands including Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Unseen Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum. 

Raji captures a sun-soaked Morocco in the warm hues of the late summer atmosphere. The photographs are imbued with a sense of nostalgia, evoking his childhood memories of reunion with family, playing freely outdoors, and the boundless feelings of freedom, trust, and hope that marked those summers. “It is my own romanticised view,” Raji explains, acknowledging that the Morocco he portrays in his images is not entirely grounded in reality, but a reflection of his personal, idealised version of the country.

“I was walking in Marrakesh and I saw the title Dreamland on a big billboard for a new complex they were building,” Raji tells me. He shows me around the circular outdoor installation by beginning with an image of his grandmother, who passed away last year. “Morocco is my dreamland, and I make it look perfect, while I’m pretty aware that not everything is perfect over there.” Raji was keen to show people, particularly those with little connection to Morocco, “how amazing the colours and the people are, the freedom you have. Because we in the West are quite structured, and everything is for an agenda. Sometimes I miss the freedom we have there.”

Struck by a lack of misrepresentation about Morocco from Dutch communities around him, Raji says that in the Netherlands, many think that “Moroccan kids, they’re troublemakers”. In 2014, one of his first projects highlighted Slotermeer, “the ‘bad’ neighbourhood where they put all the migrants, like the Moroccan and Turkish migrants,” says Raji. Through stylised images, he aimed to capture the playfulness and joy Moroccan kids find on the streets, with little space to go elsewhere. 

The images from Dreamland portraying the drier Moroccan climate are presented in stark contrast out here in a Dutch semi-rural location. One image taken at an Eid celebration in a large, sandy playing field shows a couple with their faces obscured, turned away from the camera, in matching blue garments. “People are afraid of Islam, [but] when they see this, they’ll probably think, ‘Oh, that looks cosy, and they’re looking beautiful’.” Raji says he ‘stole’ the shot after catching them in a mirroring stance, with a complementary flash of green from the plastic bag. It’s a relaxed, romantic scene. 

Raji’s work oscillates between documentary and dreamscape, crafting images that evoke longing for a land that may never have truly existed – at least not in the form he remembers it. The project is a meditation on home and belonging, but also a commentary on how memory and nostalgia shape our perceptions of place. In a world where migration and the diaspora constantly reshape individual and collective identities, Dreamland invites viewers to consider how much of ‘home’ is built upon memory and imagination.

The Sun, the Moon, and Borderless Visions

In Tina Farifteh’s cinematic installation piece When I Saw the Sun and the Moon at the Same Time, the focus shifts to the experience of migration and the fractured sense of identity it leaves in its wake. Iranian-Dutch artist Tina Farifteh embarks on a deeply personal exploration of belonging and identity. Born in Tehran and having moved to the Netherlands at the age of 13, Farifteh has long navigated the complex interplay between displacement and the search for home; graduating from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, her project Kitten or Refugee? was selected for the Debut Competition and premiered at The Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) 2023. 

Farifteh’s latest project, developed specifically for BredaPhoto Festival, is centred around a 24-hour journey along the Sedyk (sea dyke) in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands, presented in a 24-minute multimedia installation. The work traces her move from Amsterdam to the village of Sexbierum, prompted by the unaffordability of urban life and a feeling of being perpetually unmoored – unable to return to Tehran yet struggling to find her place in the Netherlands. When I Saw the Sun and the Moon at the Same Time becomes a metaphor for her complex relationship with the idea of belonging in a boundaried world. 

Despite the rural isolation, Farifteh’s connection to the landscape is profound. The birds, sheep and elements she encounters in Friesland become metaphors for the human desire for freedom, even as we remain confined by social constructs and borders. “Sheep are blocked by the cattle grids and fences,” she notes, “we as humans want to be free, but we keep each other framed and limited, like what we do with the sheep.” 

Her encounters with nature reveal a deep connection to the world beyond the human-centric, transactional approach that modern societies often adopt. “We don’t see nature as something of value unless there’s a transactional benefit for us,” she says, underscoring how capitalist and colonial systems determine value, even in the most remote and ‘empty’ of spaces. “Who decides what has value? We say there is nothing there, but for the birds, there is a lot there.” The work is engrossing with its bright and deeply exaggerated light and shadows, set across a huge, asymmetrical three-channel screen. 

Farifteh’s reflections often move between the deeply philosophical and the intensely personal. As she walks the sea dyke, listening to Iranian music, she feels the tension of belonging and rejection. “People think I’m crazy, listening to Iranian music in the north of the Netherlands,” she remarks. Yet in moments of simplicity – seeing the sun and moon together in the sky – she finds peace in the universality of the human experience: “When I saw the sun and the moon at the same time, I realised I am at home because I’m here. No one can tell me I don’t belong.” 

In this project, Farifteh asks larger questions about the nature of home and identity in an era of migration and displacement. She interrogates the pressures of assimilation, particularly in conservative parts of the Netherlands where, she explains, “you have to assimilate and forget your background – it was a very violent assimilation,” she remembers of her upbringing. Farifteh also suggests a parallel with the country’s own shifting identity, noting that even these rural communities, in their resistance to change, may themselves feel like they are being forced to assimilate to a ‘new Holland’.

Archival Activism and the Politics of Memory

Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó brings a distinctly archival approach to her exploration of colonial legacies. In co-production with the Grote Kerk Cathedral, Rennó presents a site-specific solo exhibition, interrogating the potential murkier history of the Grote Kerk and presents this new work in combination with existing work. Last summer, Rennó received the prestigious Women in Motion award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. 

Through a series of multimedia installations, including photography and video, Encounters | Encontros draws attention to the little-known, interconnected history of Brazil and the Netherlands. Rennó’s work delves into historical archives to unearth forgotten or suppressed narratives, recontextualising them through contemporary interventions. Her contribution to the festival investigates how colonial powers have shaped the production and preservation of knowledge.

“For me, archives are not neutral spaces,” Rennó explains. “They are sites of power. The act of collecting, classifying, and storing information has always been political. My work aims to deconstruct that by questioning what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.”

Encounters is a series of reappropriated colonial documents, maps and photographs that Rennó has altered or distorted. The images are faded, often difficult to decipher, as if the weight of history has worn them down. This intentional blurring forces the viewer to confront the fragility of memory and the role of colonial powers in shaping what is remembered.

“In Brazil, like many countries in Latin America, our history is still deeply tied to colonialism. The ways in which we understand ourselves and our past are shaped by these imperial forces. My work looks at how these narratives are embedded in the archives themselves. Who owns history? Who decides which voices are heard and which are erased?” says Rennó. Her use of archival materials serves as a way to make visible the systems of power that control historical narratives and challenges the viewer to think critically about how knowledge is produced and preserved, and whose interests that serves.

A Photographic Intervention

The timing of this year’s BredaPhoto Festival could not be more significant. As the Netherlands, like much of Europe, wrestles with the rise of nationalist sentiment, the festival’s focus on decolonial image-making feels like a necessary intervention. The festival’s work serves as a sobering reminder of the challenges facing Europeans from migrant backgrounds, while remaining aesthetically attuned to technical brilliance and beauty.

Taking over the city of Breda, the festival also encourages a more physical approach to, and intervention of, photography. The spaces we enter range from quaint residential streets lined with large image installations of Breda’s historic North African migrant communities, to unused industrial warehouses near the canal housing Farifteh’s film, for example. The festival’s dispersal of bikes are thus a very Dutch welcome to exploring the city. 

With a sense of urgency, the festival positions itself as a site of resistance to dominant narratives. The artists at BredaPhoto Festival 2024 are blurring lines and pushing the boundaries of where photography takes its viewer. 

BredaPhoto Festival 2024 opened on 13 September and runs until 03 November 2024.

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