About the Exhibition

The works selected from submissions received from 66 countries world wide, are presented at this exhibition in eight different categories, reflecting the essence of Sarajevo Photography Festival: the belief in photography as a polyphonic, reactive and subversive art form.

The Finalists and Winners Exhibition of the Sarajevo Photography Festival will be open to the public from 20:00 to 21:00 at the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The festival consciously rejects the certainty of stylistic single-mindedness and ideological uniformity. Instead, it insists on openness to contradiction, experiment and narratives that do not conform to dominant views and established conventions. In this space, photography acts as a medium of resistance and articulation, a place where the ‘intimate’ and the ‘political’ freely intertwine, without the limitations of predetermined forms.

Sarajevo Photography Festival does not reward obedience or fleeting aesthetic trends. It brings together authors who use photography as a tool for thinking, artists who pose questions, challenge established systems, expose social wounds, and do not shy away from discomfort. Here, even the silence captured in a frame, if genuine, possesses the power to move and transform.

In a world oversaturated with images, this exhibition offers no definitive answers. Instead, it provides a multitude of perspectives, uncompromisingly diverse, sometimes uncertain, but always deeply thoughtful.

The finalists were selected by internationally recognized experts from the world of photography: Alessia Glaviano, Irfan Hošić, Kiana Hayeri, and Marina Paulenka.

– Jelena Janković, Program Director –

The global community, overwhelmed by contemporary conflicts, every day poses new challenges to all of us in our survival and movement towards the future. Thereby our emotional apparatus is invited to respond to these challenges every day, although the effect of our emotional apparatus, and our active contribution, are almost motionless. In a time when it seems to us that we cannot do anything, but we all feel the same, or at least we should feel the same, photography stands out as the most powerful tool for overcoming barriers in such an emotional state. Throughout history, photography has always provided a shelter for overcoming fear, accomplishing ideas, documenting the truth, achieving justice and authentic expression, or as a call to action, or protest. Thus, the power of photography is precisely recognized in the movement of humanity towards the better, leaving behind the previous condition of ‘global illness’. Also, photography has always been a medium, a bearer of a message, a loud witness of time and social events in moments when the community would have fallen silent.

Over 190 photos from all around the world testify to the desire and efforts of the 55 finalists in this year’s competition within the fourth edition of the Sarajevo Photography Festival, to understand and overcome current challenges together. The displayed photographs show that in a time when it seems that we cannot do anything, when we are completely silent and ‘diseased in spirit’, we can still have an attitude, because we can still speak through photography, grab our cameras and continue telling stories in frames.

– Armin Ćosić, Exhibition Designer –