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Backlight Photo Festival

Etusivu
Suomi
Tampere
Backlight Photo Festival

Reittiohjeet Verkkosivusto

The Backlight Photo Festival is an international photography festival in Tampere, Finland.

The Backlight Photo Festival is an international photography festival in Finland for documentary and contemporary photo art. The Backlight Photo Festival promotes intercultural dialogue by revealing the hidden, the veiled, the lost and the forgotten. Each festival forms a new unique entity with current social theme, renewed structure and a challenging content with exhibitions and wide-ranging Symposium program. Main organizer: Photographic Centre Nykyaika, which has organized international photography festival since 1987 in Tampere, Finland. Nowadays festival is organized in co-operation with diverse international and national partners.

20/10/2026

Backlight Photo Festival 2026 has come to a close! ❤️ Thank you for an unforgettable edition – we’re already looking forward to what comes next.

A huge thank you to all the artists who shared their work and ideas with us, and a special thank you to our curator, Anna, for shaping this edition of the festival.

We’re incredibly grateful to our wonderful team and all the volunteers who made the festival possible, as well as to our funders and partners whose support and collaboration helped bring Backlight 2026 to life.

It takes a community to bring a festival like this to life, and we’re so grateful to everyone who was part of this edition.

Here are a few moments from the opening at Vooninki. Thank you for being part of Backlight 2026!

Until next time! ✨

Artists: .roncato
Curator:
Funders: , Otto A. Malm Lahjoitusrahasto
Partners:
Venues: .alue
📸: Katariina Malo (1, 3, 8), Mikko Vares (2,4-7)

10/10/2026

FINAL DAYS OF BACKLIGHT'26

Backlight Photo Festival comes to an end this Sunday, 11 October. This is your last chance to visit the exhibitions still open at Photographic Centre Nykyaika and the satellite exhibition at Nekalab.

NEKALAB – SATELLITE EXHIBITION
Sari Soininen, Anssi Ruuska & Patrik Rastenberger
📍 Lounaantie 2
🗓️ Until 11 October
⏰ Sat 9–20

PHOTOGRAPHIC CENTRE NYKYAIKA
Joel Jimenez Jara – Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies
Katerina Angelopoulou – The Fumes of Mars
📍 Kauppakatu 14
🗓️ Until 11 October
⏰ Sat–Sun 12–16

Free admission – see you at the exhibitions!

Image: Patrik Rastenberger (on view at Nekalab)

09/10/2026

Backlight Photo Festival comes to an end this Sunday, 11 October. This is your last chance to visit the exhibitions still open at Photographic Centre Nykyaika and the satellite exhibition at Nekalab.

PHOTOGRAPHIC CENTRE NYKYAIKA
Joel Jimenez Jara – Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies
Katerina Angelopoulou – The Fumes of Mars
📍 Kauppakatu 14
🗓️ Until 11 October
⏰ Sat–Sun 12–16

NEKALAB – SATELLITE EXHIBITION
Sari Soininen, Anssi Ruuska & Patrik Rastenberger
📍 Lounaantie 2
🗓️ Until 11 October
⏰ Sat 9–20

Free admission – see you at the exhibitions!

Image: Joel Jimenez Jara, Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies, on view at Photographic Centre Nykyaika.

.jj

05/10/2026

Backlight exhibitions at Photographic Centre Nykyaika continues until 11 October!

26/09/2026

The Backlight 2026 Satellite Exhibition continues at Nekalab until 11 October!

The exhibition presents artworks by three Finnish photographic artists Sari Soininen, Anssi Ruuska and Patrik Rastenberger.

Welcome!

📍 Nekalab, Lounaantie 2, 3rd floor
📆 11 September – 11 October
⏰ Mon–Sat 9–20
🌻 Free entry

25/09/2026

The last weekend of the student exhibition at Gallery Koppelo!

The exhibition presents works by eight young photographers and visual artists. The exhibition is part of Backlight’s long-term collaboration with students and Rotterdam Photo Festival.

The exhibition introduces artworks by the students of the Tampere University, the Tampere University of Applied Sciences and the Willem de Kooning Academy.

The artists are:
Djo van den Assem
Rosa Huuska
Aalto Puutio
Joel Peltonen
Woohyuk Jung (Picture 1-2)
Uliana Abrosimenkova (Pictures 8-9)
Joonas Ahtikallio (Pictures 6-7)
Benjamin Anderson (Pictures 3-5)

📸 Installation shots by Katariina Malo

Welcome!

📍 Gallery Koppelo, Kauppakatu 14
⏰ Tue–Fri 12–18, Sat–Sun 12–15

22/09/2026

BACKLIGHT 2026 – STILL ON VIEW

Some exhibitions may have closed, but Backlight continues in Tampere!
Here’s what you can still visit:

Photographic Centre Nykyaika
Katerina Angelopoulou: The Fumes of Mars
Joel Jimenez Jara: Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies
On view until 11 October
Kauppakatu 14
Tue–Fri 12–18, Sat–Sun 12–16

Gallery Koppelo
Student exhibition: Uliana Abrosimenkova, Joonas Ahtikallio, Benjamin Anderson, Djo van den Assem, Rosa Huuska, Woohyuk Jung, Joel Peltonen, Aalto Puutio
On view until 27 September
Kauppakatu 14
Tue-Fri 12-18, Sat-Sun 12-15

Nekalab
Satellite exhibition: Sari Soininen, Patrik Rastenberger, Anssi Ruuska
On view until 11 October
Lounaantie 2
Mon-Sat 9-20

✨ Free entry to all exhibitions ✨

📸 1. Joel Jimenez Jara .jj 2. Djo van den Assem 3. Patrik Rastenberger

21/09/2026

Katerina Angelopoulou
The Fumes of Mars

Who controls the narrative of a disaster?

On 23 July 2018, one of the deadliest wildfires ever recorded swept through Mati and neighbouring areas, 30 kilometres from Athens. Over a hundred lives were lost. Artist Katerina Angelopoulou survived the fire, fleeing with her mother and three-year-old daughter.

The Fumes of Mars is a counter-archive and a forensic, deeply personal investigation into how official narratives of catastrophe are constructed and enforced, and how governance failures and the climate crisis converge in collective trauma.

The work brings together photographs from the day and its aftermath, survivor testimonies from public archives and personal archives, aerial maps, weather and aircraft reports, CCTV footage and artefacts recovered from the ruins. It challenges the persistent official narrative around the disaster, which concealed facts and held victims culpable.

Structured non-linearly, the work mirrors the fractured nature of trauma. Black-and-white photographs of landscapes after the fire give way to colour images taken on the day, while personal artefacts are photographed as archaeological remains through which a life can be reconstructed.

The Fumes of Mars asks who controls the narrative of disaster and who is silenced in its aftermath, while addressing institutional failure, the invisibility of survivors and the struggle for accountability as climate catastrophe compounds.

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Photographic Centre Nykyaika
Kauppakatu 14, Tampere
1 September – 11 October 2026
Opening hours: Tue–Fri 12–18, Sat–Sun 12–16
Free entry

20/09/2026

Last day of The Art of Lying at Vooninki! ✨

Today is your final chance to visit the exhibition at Vooninki in the Finlayson area.

And at 2pm, join us for a Curator Tour with Anna Ruth. The tour will be held in Finnish.

📍 Vooninki, Väinö Linnan aukio 13
⏰ Open today 12–16
🎟 Free entry

Artists:
Akshay Mahajan
Amin Yousefi
André Ramos-Woodard
David Ellingsen
Ganslmeier & Zibelnik
Jo Duck
Rafael Roncato
Sasha Velichko
Sheung Yiu
Timo Wright

The other Backlight exhibitions are still open, so there’s more to see after today! Visit Nykyaika, Gallery Koppelo and Nekalab and continue exploring the festival.

📸 Jo Duck

18/09/2026

Sheung Yiu
The Ouroboros of Faces

✨ Artist talk with Sheung Yiu tomorrow – Saturday 19 September at 14:00 ✨

Through the machinic eye, a facial recognition algorithm is looking. It claims to have the power to predict sexuality from facial landmarks. Across Eastern and Western cultures, society has long developed ways to predict a person’s character through facial features. Today, the forgotten pseudo-science of physiognomy re-enters our lives through facial recognition algorithms, where societal biases and individual prejudices continue to perpetuate.

In The Ouroboros of Faces, Sheung Yiu recontextualizes archival images and diagrams of face reading alongside contemporary datasets and algorithmic outputs. He puts his own face through various predictive regimes – Western physiognomy, Chinese face reading, facial recognition, facial phenotyping, facial generation and synthetic facial data.

By placing the esoteric alongside the high-tech, the project reveals their shared logics and examines how magical thinking is automated in machine vision. It asks whether facial recognition is a form of Western face reading – or whether face reading has become a form of facial recognition – and suggests that the true art of deception may lie in wrapping old beliefs in a shiny technological shell.

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Vooninkisali
Väinö Linnan aukio 13, Tampere
1–20 September 2026
Opening hours: Mon–Fri 12–18, Sat–Sun 12–16
Free entry

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Tampere

Verkkosivusto

http://www.backlight.fi/

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