The Month of Photography Asia returns for it’s 10th year from 29 June to 13 August 2011. Organised by Phish Communications, the festival showcases three highlight exhibitions, exploring the theme of MEMORY.
Held at various venues, the exhibitions will feature photographs by famous photographers who died in the Indochina and Vietnam wars, a photographic reportage of man‐made divides and an exhibition that takes a playful look at history through popular culture.
Festival Highlights
In line with this year’s theme, the main exhibition of the festival is Requiem: by the photographers who died in Vietnam and Indochina, co‐presented by the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. Curated by German photojournalist Horst Faas and famous British war photographer Tim Page, it features over 250 photographs by photographers such as American Robert Capa and Sean Flynn, British Larry Burrows, Japanese Kyoichi Sawada, French Gilles Caron and Henri Huet, as well as three Singaporean photographers Charles Chellapah, Sam Kai Faye and Terry Khoo. Some of the photographs in the exhibition were the last photographs these photographers captured. The exhibition will be on at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Galleries 1 & 2 from 13 July to 13 August.
Walls between Peoples, held at the Alliance Fran.aise’s gallery from 29 June to 27 July, is a photographic reportage covering eight different walls and situations in the world today, such as the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, the Barrier built between the United States and Mexico and the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. This exhibition serves as a reminder of the divides that are the result of unresolved or frozen conflicts, and of the tangible signs of permanent tensions in our globalized world resulting from historical accumulation.
A less literal approach of MEMORY is taken with up‐and‐coming Indonesian photographer Agan Harahap, whose Superhistory exhibition at the ION Art Gallery from 29 June to 8 July playfully leads to a rather deconstructionist understanding of the relationship between photography and memory, forcing us to rethink history and the way we remember the past.
The festival also features the finalists’ exhibition of the prestigious ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu Photography Award, honouring the work of Singapore photographers. The Award was launched in 2010 in conjunction with MOPAsia, and this is a partnership that the festival is very proud to continue in 2011. ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu will be on from 2 to 25 July at Helutrans Artspace.
