Open Call – LagosPhoto Festival 2023  

GROUND STATE – fellowship within the uncanny . 

Lagos Photo Festival returns in fall of 2023 with an exciting opportunity to showcase emerging and established artists working with lens based media. We are seeking works with a view to our theme, GROUND STATE – fellowship within the uncanny . 

Photography has always held the power of mystery to it; the malaise, reordering, syncopation and entropy of the twenty-first century presents all sorts of possibilities and anxieties. The past two decades progressed the era of post-truth that encouraged increasingly sectarian and tribal societies with photography playing a significant role. We have evolved from the dystopian post covid reality into the era of conflict, war, of the limitless and improbable. The environment is now measured in growing levels of devastation. Centuries of an extractive history has left indelible consequences: temperatures rise, long forewarned water wars are a reality. The “Doomsday Clock” inches forward in seconds to an apocalyptic midnight. Recalcitrant colonial mindsets continue to judge worth through an impossible hierarchy. Efforts to imagine futures, decolonise, activate and recycle have ended up with reformulated hierarchies with the same output but with different players. We are racing to a breaking point; a Ground State, where everything humanity understands and identifies as “common sense” is neither. How do we restore, repair, and restitute mysteries of oral histories and aspects that are necessary for our survival.  

Populations will turn to artists to make sense of what has been referred to as a “catastrophic era”. Lagos Photo Festival seeks projects that explore the present moment and envision how repair, syncopation, putrefaction, restitution, and restoration will take place; challenging our own complicity in a culture of desire, founded on consumption and how to foster a fellowship of dynamic spiritual change, a rebirthing of the unimaginable. 

To participate, all you need to do is to send in a portfolio that fits with the theme; Ground State - Fellowship within the Uncanny to entries23@lagosphotofestival.com. 

Deadline for submission is 7th June 2023. 

If you need to know more, please write to info@lagosphotofestival.com.