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.
Discover the festival venues from 10 AM to 6 PM, and the public spaces open all day long.
HOLEŠOVICKÁ TRŽNICE • FOTOGRAF ZONE GALLERY • PETROHRADSKÁ KOLEKTIV • TEMPO • MŮSTEK METRO VESTIBULE AND OTHER PUBLIC SPACES
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.
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.
Festival Opening Afterparty
The informal afterparty of the fifteenth Fotograf Zone festival will symbolically close the program of public events and continue the themes of this year’s edition, which focuses on language, communication, and understanding.
Launch of the 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).
Guided tour of the exhibitions with the curators
The festival will offer an afternoon series of guided tours across all exhibition projects. Visitors will have a unique opportunity to meet the curators of the individual exhibitions, gain insight into their approaches, and learn more about the concepts and contexts of the exhibited works. A collective walk through the exhibitions will allow for a deeper understanding of the festival program as well as space for questions and discussion.
Opening of the exhibition GROTESK – The Common Language of Eastern Europe with a guided tour
We invite you to the opening of the international exhibition GROTESK – The Common Language of Eastern Europe, which presents the grotesque as a shared language across Eastern Europe. The project brings together photographers from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, highlighting how absurd, tragicomic, and bizarre elements have become an integral part of our cultural expression.
Jaka Teršek & Ivan Tomašević – The Balkan Frontier: Photo Lecture
Come to the photo lecture with Jaka Teršek and Ivan Tomašević as part of the Fotograf Zone Festival!
Opening event False Friends
We invite you to the opening of the exhibition False Friends, which, through the concept of so-called “false friends” – words that sound similar but differ in meaning – explores the relationship between language, identity, and politics.
Performance: Obelix Nutrix
Come to Ania Novak's performance, Obelix Nutrix, which is part of this year's Fotograf Zone Festival!
Opening event The Society of Dangerous Evidence: Dykes on Bikes 2.0
We invite you to the opening of the exhibition The Society of Dangerous Evidence: Dykes on Bikes 2.0 at Fotograf Zone Gallery, which maps the various forms of lesbian and queer experience in relation to space, language, the body and material structures.
Performance: This is not a representation
Come to Leire de Meer's public performance as part of the Fotograf Zone festival, which will take place on October 8 at Tempo in Smíchov!
Performance: Group hypnosis
Come to Julia E. Dyck's performance: Group Hypnosis which is part of this year's Fotograf Zone Festival!
Performance: Bruchovravy
BRUCHOVRAVY is a format of a composed feast that combines the accessibility of communal dining with the poetics and criticality of contemporary art. It creates a festive situation where metabolic processes intertwine with the creative gesture.
Nuit Blanche: Public screening of students project
Screening of student works FAMU Prague & HGB Leipzig. This special evening program offers a unique insight into the work of students from art schools through screenings of their selected projects. The nuit blanche format refers both to the glow of the projected image and to the audience immersed in the visual presentations of a young generation of artists.
Festival After Party
The informal afterparty of the fifteenth Fotograf Zone festival will symbolically close the program of public events and continue the themes of this year’s edition, which focuses on language, communication, and understanding.
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.
Fever State
Illness and vulnerable states of being unsettle the way we know and speak about the body. These conditions—whether chronic or transitory—fracture language, bend perception, time, and resist being neatly contained in existing forms of representation.
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.
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.
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.
WORKSHOP for the young festival audience
Join us as part of the Fotograf Zone Festival 2025 – Talk Together for an educational and creative workshop exploring a wide range of visual and non-visual communication.
Beyond Language
The exhibition project Beyond Language was created in collaboration between the Studio of Documentary Strategies (Markéta Kinterová and Veronika Daňhelová) at FAMU – Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and the Class for Photography and Media (Ines Schaber and Susanne Keichel) at HGB – Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig. The project is part of the Fotograf Zone festival.
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.
About exhibitions
#3 min Fotograf Zone
Ties That Bind
The exhibition emerges from an international open call within the European platform FUTURES Photography and is the result of a collaboration among Bienal Fotografia do Porto, Fotogalleriet, Fotograf Zone, and Organ Vida Festival, which jointly curated the 2024 selection.
#4 min Fotograf Zone
Fever State
Illness and vulnerable states of being unsettle the way we know and speak about the body. These conditions—whether chronic or transitory—fracture language, bend perception, time, and resist being neatly contained in existing forms of representation. Fever State emerges from this friction: the struggle to articulate experiences of vulnerability, crisis, and repair when established vocabularies fail. Where we, as diverse, mixed-abled bodyminds with different capacities, cannot align with or adhere to normative concepts of time, space and productivity. Therefore, in the context of the exhibition, images become more than documents; they operate as gestures of resistance, intimate testimonies, and tools for reclaiming agency.
#4 min Fotograf Zone
Metamorphosis
The exhibition was created on the basis of an open call for artists involved in the European photography platform FUTURES Photography. The Metamorphosis exhibition focuses on the multi-layered nature of change and through eight contemporary artists, explores how transformation is reflected in the landscape, the body, memory, narrative, and the photographic image itself.
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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