Photobook Week Aarhus 2021: 8th Edition: Movement and Transition

Photobook Week Aarhus celebrated its eighth edition from 14 to 17 October 2021. The festival has existed since 2014 as a collaboration between Aarhus School of Architecture and Galleri Image. It reflects a continuous study of the discourse of photobooks.
Photobook Week Aarhus’ main venues are Aarhus School of Architecture; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and Galleri Image. Other venues include HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art and Godsbanen.
The festival programme was dedicated to exhibitions and talks about publishing, researching, distributing, buying, trading, and collecting photobooks. A significant part of Photobook Week Aarhus 2021, curated by Anne Elisabeth Toft, focused on the relationship between architecture, photography and photobooks.
The theme of Photobook Week Aarhus 2021 was ‘Movement and Transition’. With this theme the curators set the stage for a festival programme that dealt with current issues in society such as migration, globalization and postcolonial thinking. It shed light on the construction and distribution of ideological models and artistic movements and reflected on the forces that produce, support, perpetuate and transform them. Photobook Week Aarhus 2021 looked at the role that photobooks play - and have played - as mass media, and how they have been used in various ways as tools for political, artistic and commercial purposes.
Seen from this perspective, the part of the festival that related to architecture specifically discussed the construction of different normative frames of understanding for architecture, urban areas and landscapes and their significance to ideal conceptions of how society can be arranged and developed. The part of the festival that related to architecture comprised three exhibitions: Pictures of Denmark: Sigvart Werner’s ”Danmarksbillede”; Danish Welfare Architecture and Its Image; and The Company Photobook.
The festival programme also included exhibitions on Fluxus books, photobooks and their connections with film editing, photobooks by Korean visual artist Kyungwoo Chun, photobooks and zines from Greenland, Central European Photobooks, Portuguese photobooks, Caribbean photobooks as well as shortlisted photobook dummies from the 2021 Kassel Photobook Award and the Hong Kong Photobook Festival’s Photobook Dummy Award 2021.
Presentations and discussions by international and Danish photobook experts put the themes of the exhibitions into perspective.