Save the Date for the 10th edition of Photobook Week Aarhus: 2 – 5 November 2023.

Photobook Week 2023 will celebrate the positive things of life.

Photobook Week Aarhus, our yearly festival exploring the wonderful world of the photobook, turns ten this year! Join us from 2 – 5 November 2023, when we celebrate our anniversary with one of our most ambitious programs to date.

Galleri Image, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus School of Architecture, Dokk1 Library and HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art will once again house a wide variety of curious, creative, and thought-provoking exhibitions, talks and workshops.

Under the theme Future Revisited, Photobook Week 2023 will be a celebration of what is worth saving in times of trouble. We do not deny that our planet is suffering from our actions and things are getting worse every day.  Still, we propose a fresh look and a new wave of optimism to encourage artists to shape a new discourse around things such as Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence.

Please find our Open Call for artists working with AI for series, books, dummies, and projects with a minimum of 20 images and a narrative structure based on the power of visual literacy. The Call is connected to this year’s festival theme and open until October 9, 2023. Participants will receive a special discount for our workshop programme, organized in collaboration with The Curator Ship Academy. Artists and renown public speakers Boris Eldagsen and paula roush will give insights into how to use AI in image making and photobook publishing.

Photobook Week Aarhus 2023 is made possible by the City of Aarhus (Kulturudviklingspuljen), The Dreyers Foundation, The Politiken Foundation, Instituto Camões, Portugal’s Embassy in Denmark, The Nordea Foundation and Institut Français Danemark.

We will pay homage to Albert Renger Patzsch’s book “Die Welt ist schön” (The World is Beautiful), published 95 years ago, and propose a new wave of optimism. This search for the joy of our existence will include a look into the future, and other things that make us happy.

Side-themes will include Photonovels and Children’s Books, while and on the geographical axis we will look at Estonia and Lebanon.

This year, the festival will also have a special focus on Artificial Intelligence as an image-making technique and a tool for creating new narratives. This will include a Call for artists, seminars and online workshops.

The 10th anniversary of Photobook Week Aarhus will be duly celebrated with a compendium co-published with Fw:books that explores some of the most important moments in the history of the medium, and our small contribution to it.

As always, the festival will close with the yearly Sunday photobook market, where you will have the opportunity to buy photobooks from all over the world, both from second-hand dealers and from the publishers and artists themselves.

See you next November and stay tuned for more news soon!

What's new?

Exhibition Architecture & Photobooks

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Photobooks on Architecture or Architecture Books…

Open Book Call for Publishers

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Join PWA X by participating in…

Exhibition Preview: Photonovels

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One of our most expected exhibitions…

PWA AI Workshop Program

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This year, we will complement our…

Our World is Beautiful. 
Call for artists working with AI for visual storytelling

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Our World is Beautiful. 
Call for…
Children's photobook Dasenka

For Kids Only?! Exploring Photobooks for Children

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Exhibition Announcement - PWA 2023 For Kids…
b&w image of an agave

Recreating an image from “Die Welt ist schön” with Midjourney

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This is a first try to…
Chat GPT

Finding our festival title with chat GPT

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A review: Thomas Wiegand’s thoughts on PWA 2022

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Danish photobooks at Hong Kong Photobook Festival

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’Time Dilate’  - an exhibition of…

Exhibition: Towards Evenings, My Heart by Chen Zhe including her award-winning photobook “Bees & the Bearable”, curated by Yining He

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Galleri Image presents the exhibition Towards…

Exhibition: Endangered Landscapes, curated by Anne Elisabeth Toft

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The exhibition Endangered Landscapes features photobooks…

Exhibition: Ukranian Photobooks after Maiden, by Kateryna Radchenko

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For the past thirty years, Ukraine…

Exhibition: Books on Books on Books, curated by Adam Mazur and Moritz Neumüller

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This show concentrates on a relatively…

Open Book Market: This years’ publishers!

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We are very excited to share…

Exhibition: The Artist’s Book as Mycelium – curated by Anne Elisabeth Toft and Nanna DeBois Buhl

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PWA proudly presents the artist’s books…

Thank you for a wonderful Photobook Week Aarhus 2022!

Photobook Week Aarhus 2022: Off Balance

Thank you all for joining us in the ninth edition of our festival, which took place from 27–30 October 2022 in Aarhus, Denmark.

This ninth edition of the festival brought the important photobook medium directly into the twisted realities of our current context. Besides the central theme, we also showcased other themes such as Books on Books on Books, which have shaped an often-critiqued canon of publications. Our regional focus was on Canada, as a Nordic country, with guest curator Louis Perreault, and a special focus on the books and films of Edward Burtynsky, who has been working on environmental issues for more than three decades. Another expedition on the geographical axis took us to the South-West Pacific.

This year we also presented a special third regional focus with an exhibition about photobooks from Ukraine curated by Kateryna Radchenko, to highlight the country’s art and culture. This provided insight into a country that is currently at the centre of global politics, but which has not been widely explored or discussed in these terms.

Off Balance was an attempt to cope with the imbalance of our contemporary condition. Climate change pressuring a possible catastrophe for humanity, the unsustainable gap between rich and poor, plastic pollution and the drastic decrease of biodiversity, and the first pandemic in over a century. These are examples of a world with complicated issues that need to be addressed but are constantly confronted with political divisions and economic interests.

A special highlight of the festival was the showcasing of the NO!art Movement, and its three founding members, Boris Lurie,  Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. With the generous support of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, we show key works from these three artists, as well as the legendary NO BOX, a multiple by the German Edition Hundertmark, published in 1996. This exhibition at our satellite venue, the HEART Museum will be on show until November 30 and will be accompanied by a catalog, with unpublished manifestos and texts from the early times of the NO!art Movement.

Photobook Week Aarhus 2022 was an open and inclusive event that underlines the urgency for action, and the roles that art might play in the process of acceptance, grief, and collaborative action in the most important issues of our time.

Photobook Week Aarhus is a collaborative effort by Galleri Image and the Aarhus School of Architecture, with support from the City of Aarhus, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Dreyers Fond, and Nordea Fonden, as well as our exhibition and communication partners.

A big Thank you to Fur Bryghus and Sjask for sponsering drinks.

Photos by Moritz Neumüller, Thomas Wiegand, Beate Cegielska, Masato Ushimaro, Hanna Hrynkevich, Mikkel Friis and Salih Basheer.

FROM PREVIOUS EDITIONS