The Lens

Two Participating Venues in this year’s FotoFocus Biennial feature exhibitions that explore the lives of refugees and immigrants, as seen through their own eyes. Prairie, Inc. in Northside will exhibit photographs made by clients of the local Refugee Resettlement Program in New American Stories, and the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College Park National Bank Art Gallery will host an exhibition titled New World: Refugees and Immigrants Photograph the Experience of a New Life in America. For much of the past five years, photographer and Executive Director of Prairie, Inc. David Rosenthal has largely used his gallery as an office space and fabrication area related to ongoing... Continue reading Recent Arrivals: Two Upcoming FotoFocus Exhibitions Feature Artwork Created by Immigrants and Refugees

In No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff, FotoFocus Guest Curator Ulrike Meyer Stump re-stages an iconic 20th-century photo exhibition with a modern twist. Here, the independent curator and Zurich University of the Arts lecturer discusses abstraction, Paris, and curatorial problem solving. No Two Alike re-conceives a 1929 London exhibition featuring photographs by German sculptor Karl Blossfeldt and American photographer Francis Bruguière. What is most memorable about this pairing, and why is the exhibition worth revisiting? The combination of Blossfeldt’s plant photographs and Bruguière’s experimental photographic designs is surprising. They were initially created in entirely different contexts: Blossfeldt’s as teaching materials for Jugendstil designers... Continue reading Meet the Curator: Ulrike Meyer Stump

Steven Matijcio is the FotoFocus Guest Curator behind The Fold: Space, time and the image, featuring Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, on view at the Contemporary Arts Center October 5, 2018 through February 10, 2019. Here, the CAC curator discusses curatorial instincts and society’s ever-expanding archive.

Akram Zaatari is a photographer, but he also considers himself an archivist, collector, curator, critical theorist, and filmmaker. What can you tell us about his work? Akram was one of a handful of artists to emerge out of the prolonged Civil War in Lebanon, and this short-lived era of experimentation in the television... Continue reading Meet the Curator: Steven Matijcio

For FotoFocus’s 2018 ArtHub—an inflatable pop-up project space—local creative studio Intermedio will create “In Place of Forgetting”: an interactive multi-channel audio-visual installation that explores “the contemporary overabundance of memory and its impact on the quality of the experiences we attempt to remember.” A group of artists, designers, musicians, experimenters, and coders that engage audiences through the creation of aurally and visually immersive environments and performances, Intermedio’s founders Justin West and Sam Ferris-Morris met while studying music composition at Heidelberg University. In searching for people with architectural modeling and design backgrounds to collaborate with in Cincinnati, the two subsequently met multidisciplinary designer Eric Blythe in 2014... Continue reading Intermedio is Making the FotoFocus ArtHub an Audience-Controlled Aural-Visual Experience

Drew Klein is performance art at the Contemporary Arts Center. Bringing an international sensibility to the Cincinnati scene, Klein’s curations and commissions have been nothing shy of existential, provocative—and absolutely stunning. From Takahiro Yamamoto’s Direct Path to Detour to Jens Lekman’s Ghostwriting project, the Performing Arts Director has proven tireless in his quest for extraordinary art that asks us stretch our minds. While Klein continues to change the face of performance art in the Midwest, we’ll eagerly await the CAC Black Box performance of Blind Spot—an interdisciplinary collaboration between writer-photographer Teju Cole and composer Vijay Iyer. Blind Spot takes place Saturday, October 6 at 7 p.m.,... Continue reading Meet the Curator: Drew Klein