CURATORS INTRODUCTION

Fotobokfestival Oslo 2023, titled Index, deals with photography’s role in classification - unmanageable systems are made tangible through photography’s inherent technological properties; collecting, measuring, categorising, indexing, and classifying. The festival highlights artists obsessively collecting and assembling information, classifying troublesome systems, and creating new structures in order to make historical accounts materially manageable. 

Guided by an interest in this methodology, the artists presented at the festival incorporate extensive research within their photobooks, using the photographic narrative to approach current and historical contexts, conveying these visually to the public. The themes explored within the photobooks range from obsessive collection, geopolitics, taxonomy, political agreements, war, technology, perception, science, surveillance, state secrecy to the hidden and the unfamiliar. 

For the main program, we present a total of five exhibitions at Fotogalleriet and Gamle Munch. In the photobook exhibition at Fotogalleriet, new titles and rare books will be on display, with books by artists from all over the world, as well as a selection of short film screenings, in collaboration with Mirage Film Festival. Four exhibitions featuring international artists will be presented in Gamle Munch, where the artists “unwrap” their photobooks in exhibition form. 

The books in the exhibitions at the two locations present projects and topics including obsessive bread collecting, bee and human interaction, use of photography in fascist regimes, space race deception, deceivingly accurate pseudoscientificarchives of plants and animals, scrutinisation of national security systems, categorising of vehicles of suicide bombers and seized contraband articles. Each artist and photobook provides us with their own unique take on the archival process, which should not be understood literally, but rather put into doubt, and to raise multi-layered questions around experience and memory, authenticity and authorship, and how history can be depicted. 

Marianne Bjørnmyr & Dan Mariner
Curators 2023

CURATORS INTRODUCTION

Fotobokfestival Oslo 2023, titled Index, deals with photography’s role in classification - unmanageable systems are made tangible through photography’s inherent technological properties; collecting, measuring, categorising, indexing, and classifying. The festival highlights artists obsessively collecting and assembling information, classifying troublesome systems, and creating new structures in order to make historical accounts materially manageable. 

Guided by an interest in this methodology, the artists presented at the festival incorporate extensive research within their photobooks, using the photographic narrative to approach current and historical contexts, conveying these visually to the public. The themes explored within the photobooks range from obsessive collection, geopolitics, taxonomy, political agreements, war, technology, perception, science, surveillance, state secrecy to the hidden and the unfamiliar. 

For the main program, we present a total of five exhibitions at Fotogalleriet and Gamle Munch. In the photobook exhibition at Fotogalleriet, new titles and rare books will be on display, with books by artists from all over the world, as well as a selection of short film screenings, in collaboration with Mirage Film Festival. Four exhibitions featuring international artists will be presented in Gamle Munch, where the artists “unwrap” their photobooks in exhibition form. 

The books in the exhibitions at the two locations present projects and topics including obsessive bread collecting, bee and human interaction, use of photography in fascist regimes, space race deception, deceivingly accurate pseudoscientificarchives of plants and animals, scrutinisation of national security systems, categorising of vehicles of suicide bombers and seized contraband articles. Each artist and photobook provides us with their own unique take on the archival process, which should not be understood literally, but rather put into doubt, and to raise multi-layered questions around experience and memory, authenticity and authorship, and how history can be depicted. 

Marianne Bjørnmyr & Dan Mariner
Curators 2023