BRIGHTON.- Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams is the theme for Photoworks Festival 2026. It considers how identity, place, memory, community and the environment are interconnected, asking what it means to live through uncertainty while imagining or creating hopeful futures. The festival addresses issues including climate change, belonging, resilience and social change and is Directed by Louise Fedotov-Clements, Photoworks.
Exhibitions across Brighton & Hove encourage us to question assumptions, embrace multiple perspectives and think critically about the relationships between people, histories, landscapes and technology. Featuring artworks created by a range of artists - young people, emerging and established practitioners, each exploring subjects that include ecosystems, global and personal archives, forest restoration, ecological and social renewal, including interconnections between human and non-human worlds.
Exhibitions and partners include: University of Brighton; Jubilee Library; Phoenix Art Space; Brighton Museum & Art Gallery; Hove Museum of Creativity; Regency Town House and Gallery Lock In.
Opening days events include a conference, co-produced with the University of Brighton, exploring the festival theme; exhibition openings; talks tours and a Queer History Club Night at the Charles Street Tap, organised with Queer Heritage South; dance amongst a kaleidoscope of images; queer ravers, daring outfits and memories of sweaty nights. We've invited four legendary club photographers, a VJ and DJs to create an immersive clubnight transporting us through the decades of photography, and sounds, from queer clubbing in Brighton & Hove. On 3 October there will be a portfolio review; open review; mini photographers book launch with Thames and Hudson and workshops and October 4 exhibition talks, workshops and tours.
A central highlight of the facilitated programme is the University of Brighton’s Wilmot Gallery, which will host the Luigi Ghirri Emerging Talent 2025 / 2026 exhibition. Presented in partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute and curated by Photoworks Curator Danit Ariel and Assistant Curator Amin Yousefi, the showcase spotlights five emerging Italian artists. Visitors will experience the darkroom and archival investigations of Daniele Cimaglia and Giuseppe Odore, Rosa Lacavalla’s moving-image installation The Crossing Ceremony, Serena Radicioli’s deeply personal investigative work Non sei più tornato, and Anie Maki’s non-linear ancestral exploration Milk, Weight, Gravity.
Simultaneously, the university's Ground Floor will host Putting ourselves in the picture 1 & 2, a striking exhibition edited by Fast Forward: Women in Photography. This project features compelling visual stories from over 52 refugee, migrant, and nonbinary participants, directly confronting gender discrimination and societal marginalisation through personal photographic projects.
The exploration of forgotten histories and identity extends into other prominent city venues. At the University of Brighton’s Dorset Place Gallery, artist Jermaine Francis and researcher Deborah Ireland will present Two photographs, a forgotten history, an archive-driven residency project from the Royal Geographical Society that unravels a complex, easily misinterpreted 1860s narrative post-abolition. Meanwhile, the Jubilee Library will host Where We Meet by Eva Louisa Jonas, Kairo Urovi, and young Queer Grounds participants, celebrating queer community organizing through DIY carpentry culture.
Phoenix Art Space will host Tessa Boffin: Where We Touch The Archive, Draft 3 from 2 to 18 October, a queer and feminist archival project exploring Boffin's activist legacy alongside new contemporary commissions by Sophie Mak-Schram and Leah McLaine. During the same dates, the historic Regency Town House will present two captivating solo shows: Sam Kaufman’s Pseudomorphs, a multi-voiced film exploring cephalopod cognition and camouflage, and Holly Birtles’ Fighting Fish, which utilizes large-scale darkroom prints and AI collaborations to bridge the ecological narratives of UK and Indian riverways. Additionally, the Gallery Lock In will open Bones of Our Land by Tsz Wai Pun and ecologist Coşkun Güçlü, commissioned by WMA, a multimedia, soil DNA-sampling installation tracking the evolutionary history of a single Hong Kong hillside, presented in partnership with WMA and Dreamy Place.
For those looking to experience the programme after October, two major museum exhibitions run until Monday 18 January 2027. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery will feature Aindreas Scholz’s And So I Watch You From Afar and The Most Beautiful Anthropocene, an island-like installation utilizing ecologically sustainable, cameraless photographic processes to record climate change. Across town, Hove Museum of Creativity will host Alma Haser’s Playing With Your Eyes. Organised in partnership with Thames and Hudson, Haser’s meticulously constructed, paper-folded photographic sculptures blur the lines between 2D and 3D art, aiming to inspire a new generation of young creatives.
Cosmophotographies, the 2026 Photoworks Annual, takes Yuk Hui’s conception of cosmotechnics, and applies it to photography. Hui argues that technology is never neutral, embodying the values, assumptions and ways of knowing which shaped it – while simultaneously shaping them. Cosmophotographies asks what ideology is embedded in the camera and the images it produces, and whether we use this technology differently. Hui argues that the cosmotechnics which currently dominates emerged with European modernity, and has helped globalise a disastrous relationship with the world. In the face of impending environmental and climate breakdown, Cosmophotographies wonders, can we urgently envisage something else?
The Annual, edited by Diane Smyth, explores these questions with a global cohort of artists, writers and thinkers, who are already putting theory into practice – and vice versa. Feiyi Wen deconstructs the image and how we use it to see nature, adding a sensitivity to collaboration and chance. Ayobami Ogungbe cuts up photographs of his hometown in Badagry, Nigeria, once a major slave centre. Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo unpicks camera advertising, showing how a Western viewpoint has been universalised and sold to the world. Yining He contributes an original essay contrasting Western perspectives with traditional Chinese approaches; Beatrice Zaidenberg draws on linguist and activist Yásnaya Elena A. Gil of the Mixe people in Mexico to propose techno-diversities; Taous Dahmani and Omar Kholeif explore wider histories of the medium.
Further events take place throughout October and offer a wide range of activity from conferences, portfolio reviews, talks, tours, workshops and film screenings to be announced soon.
Alongside Photoworks Festival, Photo Fringe is taking place from 2–31 October 2026 across Brighton & Hove and along the south east coast, connecting us to coastal communities in Newhaven and Portsmouth. It is the most expansive photo festival in the UK, spanning across the south coast. This year, Photo Fringe returns with a refreshed focus on the grassroots values that have shaped the festival since 2003: artist-led participation, experimentation, community connection and self-curated exhibitions. It will be produced by Ricardo Reveron Blanco.
