FESTIVAL FOTOGRAF ZONE 2025
TALK TOGETHER3. OCTOBER 2025 – 12. OCTOBER 2025
The fifteenth edition of the international Festival Fotograf Zone, titled Talk Together, focuses on language and interpersonal communication in its many forms. This year’s festival will be presented in a condensed ten-day format, running from 3 to 12 October 2025, and will offer audiences new perspectives on how language shapes our relationships, understanding, and conflicts.
The festival centre will be located in Hall 13 of the Holešovice Market Hall, with the programme expanding to several other cultural venues across Prague, such as gallery Fotograf Zone, Petrohradská kolektiv, Tempo, and various public spaces. The audience can look forward to five curatorial exhibition projects prepared especially for this year's edition by an international team of curators: Natálie Kubíková, Judit Szalipszki, Flóra Gadó, the ETC. Magazine collective (Hana Čeferin, Lara Mejač, Ajda Kocutar), and Světlana Malina.
The Talk Together edition looks at language not only as a means of sharing information, but also as a space for intimacy, silence, and misunderstanding. The programme will present various approaches to the theme – from visual artworks and experimental installations to collective performative events and discussions that invite the audience to actively participate in a shared dialogue.
The exhibition programme will be complemented by performances and a diverse accompanying programme, featuring both events directly related to the exhibitions, as well as independent performative and discursive events that open up broader questions connected to the festival’s theme.
For the first time, this year’s festival will also include the FUTURES Annual Meeting, welcoming dozens of members from the international FUTURES Photography platform, which supports and connects emerging photography talents. The event includes presentations of two group exhibition projects developed by the FUTURES platform.
This year, the festival will also present the project GROTESK, supported by the International Visegrad Fund, which brings together artists from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland through an exhibition that explores Eastern European aesthetics via the motifs of the grotesque and the absurd.
Metamorphosis
Transformation is an inevitable movement, often barely perceptible yet fundamental. Metamorphosis presents eight artistic approaches that explore how social structures, modes of perception, and memory evolve over time. These are not sudden reversals but gradual processes—subtle shifts that shape our experience and inscribe themselves onto our environment and visual language.
Ties that Bind
The exhibition Ties that Bind explores the shifting forms of relationality, belonging, and closeness.Through the works of Sheung Yiu, Dev Dhunsi, Luna Mahoux, Donja Nasseri, and Alexander Chaika, it examines the ways in which traditional notions of family, identity, and social structures can be re-evaluated and reshaped. Rather than fixed categories, it offers space for open-ended, often contradictory or temporary forms of bonds that form between people, places, and species.
The Society of Dangerous Evidence: Dykes on Bikes 2.0
The exhibition at Fotograf Gallery maps the various forms of lesbian and queer experience in relation to space, language, the body and material structures. It arises from the need to articulate this experience not only as an identity category but as a way of being and functioning in a world often defined by heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks. The artists and collectives represented in the exhibition approach themes such as sexuality, language, cuisine, landscape or technology through specific political, corporeal and cultural strategies. This creates a layered and complex portrayal of what queer positionality can mean in contemporary European context.
Opening of the 15th edition of Fotograf Zone Festival 2025 – TALK TOGETHER
We are pleased to invite you to the opening ceremony of the 15th edition of the Fotograf Zone Festival – an international showcase of contemporary photography and visual art.
Launch of Fotograf Magazine #49 Talk Together
Fotograf Magazine is undergoing a transformation: it is evolving from a magazine into a bookmag, a more extensive yearbook with deeper thematic layers. The first issue in its new form is entitled Talk Together and focuses on language – verbal, visual, and digital – as a tool of communication, power, and identity.
Launch of OVER Journal
PhotoIreland presents OVER Journal issue 5, a special FUTURES edition featuring artists and writers responding to the theme of Metamorphosis. This issue is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Creative Europe, and is guest edited by Světlana Malina (Fotograf Zone), Raphaëlle Stopin (Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie), and Emese Mucsi, (Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center).
Performance: Phantom Limb
Phantom Limb (2023) is a project exploring the enigmatic and poetic relationship between a human being and the black box that is their interior through the use of a medical ultrasound machine. Amos Peled has been developing methods to perform audio-visual manipulations which transform the ultrasound machine into an instrument that illuminates the inside of the body and expands the space of the artistic act into the organs, under the skin.
Fever State
Our starting point is the intersection of self-representation and image-making in times of personal crisis, especially during mental and physical challenges. The exhibition explores how different strategies of employing photography and moving image—such as thermal imagery, VR, computer-generated images, and montage—can serve as powerful tools for developing personal narratives that emerge from and through the body. It also examines how artists use photography and moving image as forms of intimate, confessional expression, where the practice and process of art-making may function as a kind of autopatographic therapy.
False Friends
Language shapes our world, influences our thoughts, and reflects our societies. In the context of the Balkans, a region marked by shared histories and divergent narratives, language can both include and exclude. Through the concept of “false friends”, words that appear similar but differ in meaning, this exhibition explores how identity, politics, and cultural memory echo in the language we use, and vice versa. These deceptively familiar terms become symbols of regional complexities, miscommunications and broader cultural and historical tensions.
GROTESK – The common language of Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe has been a geopolitical buffer zone for centuries and, as a result, the people who live here have had to learn to communicate by reading between the lines and laughing at their own impossible situations, giving rise to an unmistakably unique form of expression, the Eastern European grotesque.
Fotograf Zone Festival #15 team:
Artistic Director: Světlana Malina
Curators: Judit Szalipski, Flóra Gadó, Natálie Kubíková
Curators: etc. magazine – Hana Čeferin, Lara Mejač, Ajda Ana Kocutar
Manager: Pavel Matěj
Production of exhibition program: Kristýna Khinová
Event production: Luciana Kvapilová
Technical Production: Ondřej Doskočil, Martin Cink
Architect: Ondřej Čech
Graphic Design: publikum.design / Anežka Hrubá Ciglerová, Richard Wilde
Proofreader: Zuzana Hanzlová
English Translation: Richenza Detwiler
Marketing & PR: Jan Hladonik a Tereza Vacková
PR: Klára Kudláček
Grant Agenda: Sandra Faragula
Learning and Public Programmes: Viktorie Vítů
Director of Fotograf Zone: Markéta Kinterová
Managing Editor Fotograf Magazine: Barbora Vanická Čápová
Executive Director & Fundraising: Marie Rozmánková
Office manager & Fundraising assistant: Aurika Bugaeva
Web editor & Distribution: Barbora Poláchová
Moderation: Agáta Hrnčířová
Bar & Catering: Kamila Martínková
The Fotograf Zone Festival is organized by Fotograf 07 z.s.
Jungmannova 19/7
Prague 1, 110 00
festival@fotograf.zone
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Fotograf Zone festival is organized by Fotograf 07 z.s. under the auspices of the City of Prague, the Municipal District of Prague 1, Prague 5 , Prague 7 and with the financial support of the Prague City Hall, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the State Culture Fund of the Czech Republic.
The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
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