Coming Into Focus

FotoFocus Biennial: World Record
Opening Reception

Four Exhibitions. One Celebration.

Friday, Sept. 30
5 p.m.–12 a.m.

5 p.m. – Cocktail Reception
in Kaplan Hall
CAC Members and FotoFocus Passport Holders Only

6 p.m. – Exhibition Preview
CAC Members and FotoFocus Passport Holders Only

7 p.m. – Film Screening + Discussion in CAC Black Box with artists Dara Friedman and Lizzi Bougatsos
CAC Members and FotoFocus Passport holders only

8 p.m. – Opening Celebration
Kaplan Hall, 4th and 5th Floor Galleries
Free and open to the public

Everyone has a camera at all times now, with filters and Facetune to perfect their shots. But that ubiquity allows the art of photography to be even more appreciated. Sure anyone can take a picture, but only some people can tell compelling human stories through their photos.

FotoFocus celebrates and champions photography as the medium of our time through programming that creates a dialogue between contemporary lens-based art and the history of photography.

The 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, now in its sixth iteration, activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio throughout October.

Each Biennial is structured around a unifying theme; for 2022 that theme, World Record, considers photography’s extensive record of life on earth while exploring humankind’s impact on the natural world. FotoFocus welcomes global artists, curators, critics, educators, and regional visitors to Cincinnati with exhibitions, talks, performances, screenings, and panel discussions during an expanded week of programming, Sep. 29–Oct. 8, 2022. Find details at www.fotofocus.org.

FotoFocus World Record officially begins Friday, Sept. 30 with an opening reception at the Contemporary Arts Center. The CAC has three FotoFocus curated exhibitions for the biennial, along with Cameron Granger: The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Heaven in the Kaplan Lobby, which is a FotoFocus participating venue.

On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith

Mitch Epstein. Installation view, On The Line: Documents of Risk and Faith. Photo: Wes Battoclette, 2022. Image courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.

This group exhibition features artists whose work engages the complex and contested relationship humans have with notions of environment, wilderness, nature, and place. Drawing metaphorically from the phrase “on the line”—what is at risk; what is at stake; the body caught and captured; following the path of a line—the exhibition repositions various artistic interventions, with a focus on ephemeral acts to suggest an expanded conception of photographic time and the document. On the Line comprises a diverse selection of artists from the Americas and includes works in all media, with a special emphasis on photography, video, and performance.

On the Line is co-curated by Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel curator of photography at Harvard Art Museums, and Kevin Moore, FotoFocus artistic director and curator.

Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s

Allen Bérubé, Snapshot of pride parade [FTM Contingent], 1994, Color photograph, 4x6”, Allan Bérubé Papers (1995-17), Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

Through photographic documentation of activism, education, and media production within trans, queer, and feminist grassroots organizing of the 1970s through the 1990s, Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s reveals the technologies through which influential image cultures were constructed and circulated. The exhibition presents a range of photographic practices to explore the process of learning within alternative schools, workshops, demonstrations, dance clubs, slideshow presentations, correspondences, and community-based archive projects. Featured artists and collectives include Diana Solís, Joan E. Biren (JEB), Lola Flash, the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and the Sexual Minorities Archives, among others. The exhibition is co-organized by the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York, where it will travel in the spring of 2023.

Images on which to build is curated by writer and curator Ariel Goldberg.

Baseera Khan: Weight on History

Baseera Khan. Installation view, Baseera Khan: Weight On History. Photo: Geoff Winningham, 2022. Image courtesy of the Moody Center for the Arts.

The CAC also presents Baseera Khan: Weight on History, the first institutional solo exhibition in the Midwest by this New York-based artist. Khan shifts seamlessly between media to explore the interconnectedness of capital, politics, and the body. Their work in video, photography, sculpture, and performance creates spaces of reprieve, beauty, and safety, while also critiquing power structures and knowledge systems that systemically exclude or misrepresent marginalized populations. The exhibition features a new body of sculptures, existing photographic collages, video, and sculptural work, as well as a site-specific installation, the exhibition addresses issues such as access, cultural appropriation, and migration. The exhibition is co-organized with the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, where it was recently on view.

The exhibition is co-curated by CAC Senior Curator Amara Antilla and curator Ylinka Barotto.

Cameron Granger: The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Heaven

Cameron Granger (b. Cleveland, OH; lives and works in Columbus, OH), This Must Be the Place (detail), 2018. Digital color video, with sound, 4 min., 32 sec. Courtesy of the artist.

For his solo project at the CAC, Cameron Granger: The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Heaven, the Ohio-based artist and filmmaker develops a new iteration of The Line (2021) for the CAC lobby that draws from his personal biography as a Black man raised by his mother and grandmother in Ohio. By juxtaposing live-action scenes, autobiographical texts, and found footage, Granger’s videos and installations weave stories that complicate accepted interpretations of the past and present. His works thus offer poignant meditations on Black history and culture, highlighting not only the systems of racial inequity that target and police Blackness, but the communities that continue to thrive, persist, and most importantly, demonstrate love.

This project is curated by Stephanie Kang, former assistant curator at the CAC.