From July 12th to August 20th 2023, FOTODOKS will once again take place in the Lothringer13 Halle in Munich. The festival for contemporary documentary photography will again consist of an exhibition (July 13th – August 20th) and a four-day accompanying programme with workshops, artist talks and discussion panels.

FOTODOKS 2023, titled Future Perfect, shows photographic work by 13 international artists and collectives who deal with the current conditions and consequences of climate change. Through the works, central questions of environmen- tal protection are brought into view: Challenges of the final storage of nuclear waste, the consequences of monocultures and factory farming or the role of the building materials indus- tries. The artists also deal with the social and societal effects of global warming. They produce an image of the present that is shaped by migration and discrimination as well as popu- lism and growing climate activism within the youngest gene- rations. Looking in all directions – whether to Brazil, Australia or Bangladesh, to the Dolomites or the Ahr Valley – it becomes clear that floods, drought and forest fires are dramatically affecting, but are no longer confined to, the Global South.

The exhibited works testify to the wide range of current forms of photographic expression. Analogue hand prints, expansive installations and augmented reality technologies will be on display. In addition to the thematic focus, many works are united by an urgency to reformulate notions of the future. Present conditions, historical information and visions of what is to come are taken up, compared and mixed by the artists. This results in questions that both focus on the medial role of photography and put primarily Western policies and patterns of action up for debate: Who will we have been? Did we ignore being in the middle of the predicted climate catastrophe long ago?

The principle of regnosis, i.e. backward questioning, could be an impulse for change, for transformation, for rethinking. Following these questions, we dare to try to look at our present from a hypothetical future. The spoken and written langua- ge allows us to make this temporal experiment by using the completed future – called ‚Futur 2‘ in German; ‚future perfect‘ in English. Let us assume a completed future.

Artists:
Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah, Poulomi Basu & CJ Clarke, Olgaç Bozalp, Marina Caneve, Lena Dobrowolska & Teo Ormond-Skeaping, DOCKS Collective, Sibylle Fendt & Paula Winkler, Tobias Kruse, Daniel Jack Lyons, Valentina Piccinni & Jean-Marc Caimi, Marcel Rickli, Maria Sturm, Dániel Szalai