BredaPhoto Space to Breathe '22

Space to Breathe Breda Photo x Grote Kerk Breda. Foto: Ron Machielse

From 8 September to 23 October 2022, Breda hosted the tenth edition of the biennial BredaPhoto Festival, the largest photographic exhibition in the Benelux countries. Under the title Theatre of Dreams, this edition was about hope, change and proposals for a new view of the world.

At the Grote Kerk in the centre of Breda, guest curator and Magnum photographer Newsha Tavakolian created the personal exhibition Space to Breathe, in which she combined her own work with works by various creators from around the world who have inspired or affected her.

Space to Breathe is about creating a space where people can share, listen, reflect on and process their stories.

Space to Breathe

The Grote Kerk Breda, in collaboration with BredaPhoto, were proud to present the exhibition Space to Breathe, curated by Magnum photographer Newsha Tavakolian (1981, Tehran, Iran). In an impressive career spanning more than 25 years, Tavakolian has covered a wide range of social and political stories around the world. In the past decade, her focus has shifted to a more conceptual-creative practice. With this exhibition, she entered into dialogue with 16 photographers who played an important role in her early career, inspired her or placed her work in a different perspective.

Common thread

The common thread of the exhibition can be found in the various series Tavakolian has been creating since 2010, such as Listen, Look and Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album. It is about dialogue with photographers who, like Tavakolian, approach documentary photography with self-reflection. Some photographers regard their camera as a weapon with which to respond to political phenomena. But the photographers featured in this exhibition choose to use their lens as a means of sharing personal stories. These photographers represent people who have been touched by trauma, or boldly engage in an introspective examination of personal circumstances. What all these projects have in common is a sense of intimacy through which they seek to engage viewers in individual and collective vulnerability.

Photographers

The photographers that were featured in this exhibition are: Abbas Attar, Aishwarya Arumbakkam, Gabriella N. Báez, Ghazaleh Rezaei, Hedieh Ahmadi, Khalik Allah, Merri Mkrtchian, Newsha Tavakolian, Nooshin Shafiee, Parastoo Ebneali, Pouya Parsamagham, Ranita Roy, Saba Alizadeh, Siavash Eydani, Tim Hetherington, Uma Bista and Yael Martínez.