Jack Arts

Photoworks Festival: Brighton

This year the UK’s longest running photography festivals, Brighton Photo Biennial – the Photoworks Festival, had to rethink their usual programme; titled ‘​Propositions for Alternative Narratives’ the 2020 offering, challenged what a photography festival is and who it can be for – and we helped them to bring this new chapter to life.

With the festival running amid the pandemic, the traditional programme was upended, and the vast majority of events had to be re-imagined but one format which remained stronger than ever throughout it all was out of home.  The festival was re-imagined in three sections, a major presentation of outdoor exhibitions on our billboards across Brighton & Hove, a printed ‘festival in a box’ option, and an online digital festival hub.

The Brighton-based charity, led by director Shoair Mavlian, is using the festival to re-examine cultural hierarchies and histories.  “Our inaugural Photoworks Festival rethinks both the form and content of traditional festivals and attempts to disrupt the well known histories of photography, breaking them apart to include new perspectives,”

We were delighted to be a part of the outdoor offering, with our sites providing the canvas to hosting eleven visual artists’ works.  We brought art to unexpected places on the street, and created a more accessible, street level exhibition across Brighton on our poster sites for the whole community to discover, explore and enjoy.