Breda´s Museum

Variety adds spice at the Breda Museum

Breda's museum is exhibiting the largest number of photographers during the festival. Eleven photographers in total of wich eight inside the museum and three in the outdoor areas in front and at the backside of the museum. Here we will highlight a few. 

Indoor programme
Rena Effendi’s exhibition is entitled ‘Pipe Dreams’. Rena is from Azerbaijan and this exhibition comprises portraits of people in his country who live along the route of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that cuts across the country, carrying oil to the affluent West. Unfortunately, the wealth that the local communities were hoping for has never materialised; the people are just as poor as they were before. 

The ‘Midway’ exhibition by the American Chris Jordan shows the corpses of albatrosses. Jordan took the photographs on the Midway Atoll (ring-shaped island) in the Pacific Ocean. The birds had eaten the rubbish that has ended up floating on the seas as a result of human activity, and paid the price with their lives. 

In the series ‘Palestina’, Palestinian youths and the Israeli army engage in conflict in Jerusalem’s old city. A few streets away, life continues as normal. The French photographer Antoine d’Agata created a visual record.

The Belgian photographer Jasper de Meester took aerial photos of metropolises. He edited them, for example by removing the streets. Enormous housing blocks remain. Is this a glimpse of what the future will look like if metropolises continue to grow at the same rate?

For his exhibition ‘Comfort Zone’, Jonas Mertens (Belgium) photographed hostels for the homeless. The fresh approach is striking. They are not old, dilapidated spaces but functional, sterile locations with bright colours – yet at the same time they have a palpably impersonal atmosphere.

The consequences of global warming can be seen in the series ‘Above Zero’ by the German photographer Olaf Otto Becker. His photographs are of lakes and rivers in Greenland that have been created as the snow from the glaciers melts.

The photos in ‘Landscapes and Contemplations’ show figures with their back to the camera, looking out over an overpowering rural landscape or an urban environment. The photos evoke questions. Is this a protest against human intervention in nature? The Finnish photographer Kalle Kataila wants to get the viewer thinking.

In the cities, land for building is becoming increasingly scarce but urban populations are growing. What can be done? Hong Kong has found a solution: rooftop settlements on high-rise buildings. In ‘Portraits From Above’ by Rufina Wu (Canada) and Stefan Canham (UK), we can see what this looks like.

Outdoor exhibitions

In the hollow in front of the museum visitors can see the exhibitions ‘Relics of the Cold War’ by Dutch photographer Martin Roemers and ‘Kittintale’ by the Swiss photographer Yann Gross.
In the museum courtyard there are giant triangles with photos by Charlotte Lybeer from the series ‘LARP, Taking a Holiday from Everydayness’. The theme: the need that some people feel to dress up as characters from a game or film, in order to escape the reality of everyday life.