A look into "Fotopub": Introduction

“Institutional phobia is conveniently merging into interpretational phobia, where the number of multiple experiences multiplies; hence, creating a chaos of expectations.” (1)

Our team has had many debates on what Fotopub actually is and somehow we have decided to describe it as a platform which begun as Fotopub Festival and is growing into much more. Our goal is now clear: we intend to connect young artists and professionals with their already established colleagues and with the general public, evoke a constructive dialogue amongst them and kick-start their carriers. Our goal is to search and uncover the emerging artists whose approaches to photographic art are as inventive and different as possible. We invite them to join us into our classroom/rollercoaster to create, connect, learn and teach. Our goal is to become an international key player in the development of the emerging contemporary photography.

Fotopub had started as a documentary photography festival and workshops in 2000 and has been that until 2013, when the first chapter of the festival ended.

The second chapter started in 2014, when Jure Kastelic and myself, both at that time studying photography abroad, decided to take over the ruins of the original festival and re-contextualize it into “fotopub”. Two years after, the quotation marks were gone and Fotopub has been reborn. Since then the new festival is fusing the enthusiasm of the young and the euphoria of the old, subsequently facilitating the evolution and the materialisation of the international creativity.

Fotopub follows the trends of the post-digital age and focuses on the freshest photographic activity. Unlike many other cultural institutions working in the field of photography, our wish and foremost intention is to explore and develop a different conceptualization of photographic art. "To overcome the borders of the modernist and the post-modernist practices and to understand photography through the planetary cyber-manifestation of the new technologically conditioned sociocultural space." (2)

Last week Fotopub 2016 presented nine exhibitions showcasing works by twenty three emerging artists from nineteen different countries. The artists, selected by six guest curators, our programme committee and our partner organisations, are through carefully conveyed ideas and precisely made installations erasing the line between photography and fine art while presenting different perspectives on topics such as image making; photographic reproduction; truth, reality or virtuality; manufacturing, production and labour; in the age of blooming technological progress and digitalisation.

Aaron Schuman described this year’s festival as off the wall. The next few articles will  present Fotopub’s six main exhibitions displaying various different photographic approaches with just a few wall based (but still off the wall) works, numerous installation pieces, sculptures, videos and even a wooden floor. The six exhibitions were placed in abandoned buildings in the historical centre of Novo mesto, encouraging the artists and the curators to improvise and thus give the festival extra value trough site-specificity in the presented installations.

We are not dealing with photography but with the photographic. We deny the obsession with the medium and explore the photographic in its broadest sense. We are young, fresh and relaxed and we do not want to grow up.

We are Fotopub.

fotopub.com/info