This year’s Photoworks festival, which takes place across Brighton and Hove, considers how identity, place, memory, community and the environment are interconnected. It asks what it means to live through uncertainty, whilst imagining or creating hopeful futures. The biannual festival takes Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams as its 2026 themes, addressing issues including climate change, belonging, resilience and social change. A central highlight is the Luigi Ghirri Emerging Talent 2025 / 2026 exhibition, whilst spotlights five Italian artists who are making waves in contemporary art. Meanwhile, Fast Forward: Women in Photography features compelling visual stories from over 52 refugee, migrant and nonbinary participants, directly confronting gender discrimination and marginalisation through personal photographic projects. Today, we’re highlighting five artists whose work is presented as part of the festival to add to your list.
Anie Maki
Anie Maki’s ancestral exploration, Milk, Weight, Gravity, is part of the Luigi Ghirri Emerging Talent 2025 / 2026. The series reconstructs an elusive narrative, referencing personal psychological and mental health dynamics that had been silenced for decades but “had reappeared like ghosts in the artist’s life.” The photographs appears like a family album, “filled with a chaos of voices, faces and untold stories.” Maki presents a panorama of characters, connections and place as a non-linear way of reconstructing her family tree and sharing thoughts in response to a century of passed-down stories.
Alma Haser
Known for her complex and meticulous constructed photographs, Alma Haser expands the traditional photograph using techniques such as paper-folding, collage and mixed media to create layers of intrigue and manipulate photographs into bewildering sculptures. Playing with Your Eyes blurs the lines between two-dimensional and three-dimensional imagery, the real and the imagined, to create striking work that catches the eye and captivates the mind, often calling into question what you can see. This exhibition is especially aimed at inspiring young people to be creative and explore contemporary art.
Daniele Cimaglia and Giuseppe Odore
This artistic duo’s photographic work explores the relationships between collective memory and vernacular imagery. Combining community engagement with darkroom experimentation and archival reactivation, they transform private memories into collective narratives. Their projects often serve as platforms through which to investigate environmentalism, feminism, the depopulation of small rural areas and the evolving nature of social interaction. They bridge the gap between the historical rigour of the archive and the shifting needs of modern communities, reactivating the past to question the present.
Aindreas Scholz
German-Irish photographer Aindreas Scholz presents a dual exhibition at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The show brings together two bodies of work, exploring ecologically sustainable cameraless photography as a fragile record of environmental change. Coastal edges, vulnerable plant life and unstable landscapes meet within the museum space, forming an island-like installation shaped by erosion, atmosphere, water and time. Scholz focuses on locations affected by human activity. He experiments with alternative photographic processes to critically reflect on our daily carbon footprint.
Debmalya Ray Choudhuri
The Weight of the Earth is a diary of fragility, loss and desire. The ongoing project is the artist’s response to the suicide of a lover, and a confrontation with tuberculosis as a young adult, alongside their questioning of identity as a South Asian immigrant is a politically and socially fragmented America. The multilayered narrative was built over seven years, examining the intricate relationship between mourning and melancholia. It also raises the questions of what is means to be queer. The project features portraits of strangers and friends, influenced by conversations around mental health, trauma and sexuality.
Photoworks Festival is at Various Locations, Brighton from 2 October: photoworks.org.uk
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1&7. Debmalya Ray Choudhuri, The Weight of the Earth.
2. Anie Maki, Milk Weight Gravity.
3. Alma Haser, Four Legs.
4. Daniele and Giuseppe. Latera (VT), Italy, 2021.
5. Daniele and Giuseppe. Latera (VT), Italy, 2021.
6. Aindreas Scholz, And So I Watch You From Afar.
