Festival in a Box
Photoworks' Festival in a Box, curated by Sarah Mossop, Visual Arts Programme Manager at Arts at The Old Fire Station
Photo Oxford collaborated with Photoworks on presentation of Silvia Rosi's Encounters series for our 2020 festival. Photoworks presented their own photography festival during October 2020 – Propositions for Alternative Narratives. Their response to the pandemic was to create a Festival in a Box – a portable festival where you become the curator and decide where and how to install it.
Their unique, limited edition object includes artworks by Farah Al Qasimi, Lotte Andersen, Poulomi Basu, Roger Eberhard, Ivars Gravlejs, Pixy Liao, Alix Marie, Ronan Mckenzie, Sethembile Msezane, Alberta Whittle and Guanyu Xu, and a manifesto by the group Queer History Now.
We asked Sarah Mossop, Visual Arts Programme Manager at Photo Oxford Partner Arts at The Old Fire Station, to curate the Festival in a Box for our festival theme: Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen.
Sarah selected images by women photographers and, in the context of curating in her own home which has become her workplace during lockdown, decided to use different spaces for each image, trying to choose a situation which responded to an element of the image. She found it interesting to look at the domestic environment, which in the past, and still to some extent today, is conventionally association with women, as a backdrop for the photographs.
