Backlight Photo Festival

Koti
Suomi
Tampere
Backlight Photo Festival

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 Symp

osium 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.

27/08/2026

The Backlight opening weekend starts next week!

Join us on Friday 4 September for the Backlight 2026 opening seminar at Tampere University, one of the highlights of the festival’s opening weekend programme.

In collaboration with Tampere University, the seminar explores different ways of reflecting on photographic truths through the notion of metamorphosis, the interrelations between visual AI and photography, and artistic reflections on where the lie lies. The artists Joel Jimenez Jara and Sasha Velichko will discuss the festival’s theme together with curators Anna Ruth and Dana Benlakhdar.

Free entry!

📍4 September, 1–4 pm
Linna Building, Väinö Linna Auditorium K104
Tampere University, Kalevantie 5

Programme:
13–13:30 Asko Lehmuskallio: “Metamorphosis: A Forgotten Visual Technique”
13:30–14:10 Markus Sjöberg: “It Had to Be Generated: How AI Turned Exceptional Photographs into Suspects”
14:10–14:30 Coffee break
14:30–15 Maija Tammi: “The Artist’s Perspective: Where Does the Lie Lie?”
15–15:50 Panel discussion with curators Anna Ruth and Dana Benlakhdar and artists Joel Jimenez Jara and Sasha Velichko.

Photo: Joel Jimenez Jara .jj

.tammi

25/08/2026

1 week to go! 👀

Backlight'26 – The Art of Lying
The countdown is on! The first exhibition installation is already underway, and the final preparations are taking place across Tampere.

The nearly final festival programme has now been updated on our website — and we can’t wait to share it all with you.

Featuring artists from all over the world:
Sasha Velichko
Jo Duck
Akshay Mahajan
Joel Jimenez Jara .jj
David Ellingsen
Amin Yousefi
Rafael Roncato .roncato
Sheung Yiu
André Ramos-Woodard
Ganslmeier & Zibelnik
Katerina Angelopoulou
Timo Wright

The exhibitions open on Tuesday 1 September, with the festival’s official opening taking place on Friday 4 September.

A big thank you to our partners who are working hard with us behind the scenes to bring these images to life. ❤️

📍 Tampere, Finland
📅 1–20 September 2026

.alue

21/08/2026

Amin Yousefi
Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition

Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition examines the body as a political field shaped through institutional images and state pedagogy.

The project works with a state-issued military and civil defence textbook once distributed to Iranian high school students. Its staged photographs and diagrams teach how to stand, aim, rescue and respond to a threat. Yousefi intervenes in selected pages by adding corrections, darkroom notes and handwritten markings, imagining the material at an earlier stage of its life, before it entered the classroom.

The project also reenacts poses from the manual with Yousefi's own body and translates them into three-dimensional scans. By restaging the two-dimensional images as volumetric records, the work makes visible what the original photographs suppress: weight, strain, micro adjustments and the vulnerability of flesh within an idealised diagram.

Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition reflects on how institutions script bodies and how lens-based media can reveal the mechanisms that produce compliance. Situated within the present moment of overlapping crises, the project treats the body as an archive of instruction and experience, and asks what it means to take the diagram seriously enough to question, refuse and re-inhabit it.

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Tampere, Finland
1–20 September 2026

18/08/2026

2 weeks to go! 👀

Backlight'26 – The Art of Lying
In just two weeks, the exhibitions of Backlight Photo Festival open across Tampere. From 1 September, photography, moving image and installation will invite us to question what we see, what we believe, and how images can shape our understanding of reality.

Featuring artists from all over the world:
Joel Jimenez Jara .jj
Akshay Mahajan
Sheung Yiu
Sasha Velichko
David Ellingsen
Rafael Roncato .roncato
Amin Yousefi
Ganslmeier & Zibelnik
Jo Duck
André Ramos-Woodard
Katerina Angelopoulou
Timo Wright

The exhibitions open on 1 September, with the festival’s official opening taking place on 4 September.

And there’s more to come — the full festival programme is almost ready to be revealed. 👀

📍 Tampere, Finland
📅 1–20 September 2026

.alue

13/08/2026

Sasha Velichko
State of Denial

In State of Denial, Sasha Velichko explores how propaganda and the constant flow of information can redirect our attention away from what matters. The project draws on stories of political detentions in Belarus, which Velichko researches and recreates through staged photography.

The work is divided into two parts. The first uses absurd and frightening stories of detentions as the basis for staged photographs. The second brings together news headlines published on the dates of the arrests and uses a neural network to generate images from them. By bringing these headlines together with the stories of political arrests, Velichko examines how visual and informational noise can obscure events that demand our attention.

Through staged photography and AI-generated images, State of Denial examines how visual and informational noise can redirect our attention away from issues of significance.

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Tampere, Finland
1–20 September 2026

Backlight26

11/08/2026

3 weeks to go! 👀

Backlight'26 – The Art of Lying

In three weeks, Backlight Photo Festival takes over Tampere with photography that questions what we see, what we believe, and how images can shape our understanding of reality.

Featuring artists from all over the world:

André Ramos-Woodard
Sasha Velichko
Joel Jimenez Jara .jj
Akshay Mahajan
Sheung Yiu
Jo Duck
Amin Yousefi
Ganslmeier & Zibelnik
Rafael Roncato .roncato
David Ellingsen
Katerina Angelopoulou
Timo Wright

Across three venues in the heart of Tampere – Vooninkisali, Photographic Centre Nykyaika and Gallery Koppelo, home to the festival’s student exhibition — the festival brings together photography, moving image and installation exploring truth and fiction in an age of AI, image manipulation and increasingly uncertain notions of truth.

We’re getting ready. Are you?

📍 Tampere, Finland
📅 1–20 September 2026

09/08/2026

Joel Jimenez
Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies

Hummingbirds are the only birds capable of flying backwards. Their suspended motion mirrors the process of grief, moving into the past while still held in the present.

After leaving his home country of Costa Rica, Joel Jimenez lost his father. His mother later told him that the hummingbird his father had cared for continued to return to their garden. In Costa Rican folk belief, influenced by the cosmology of the Boruca people, hummingbirds are believed to carry the souls of the dead and return to greet those they love.

Bringing together personal archives alongside colonial and ornithological materials, Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies explores the hummingbird as a migratory body moving between science and myth, the earthly and the celestial. The project asks how photography attempts to capture, verify and classify a fleeting body. Conceived as a practice of care shaped through interspecies relationships, it opens alternative ways of experiencing grief and memory.

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Tampere, Finland
1 September – 11 October 2026
jj

06/08/2026

Rafael Roncato
Tropical Trauma Misery Tour

Taking the 2018 stabbing of Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro as a catalyst, Tropical Trauma Misery Tour explores how a single event can be amplified into political myth. From Brazil to a wider global context, the project examines the strategies of misinformation, spectacle and narrative manipulation that increasingly shape our political realities.

Combining staged photography, archival material and fictional strategies, the project examines how images can blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, emotion and evidence. While rooted in Brazil, Tropical Trauma Misery Tour reflects on a global media landscape in which disinformation, propaganda and algorithmic persuasion increasingly shape how we understand the world.

Rather than offering clear answers, the project invites us to ask: What does it mean to witness? To believe? To resist?

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Tampere, Finland
1–20 September 2026
roncato

30/07/2026

Timo Wright
Search and Destroy

What if we could see the world through the eyes of an algorithm?

Search and Destroy explores how different algorithms perceive our visual world. At the centre of the project is a video in which a custom-made algorithm analyses a documentary about public and private surveillance. The original footage is never shown. Instead, viewers see only the information extracted by the algorithm: tracked faces and bodies, camera movements, objects, compression artefacts and other visual data.

The work begins playfully before gradually revealing something more unsettling beneath the surface. Technologies we encounter every day—from mobile phone camera filters and self-driving cars to passport control systems—share many of the same underlying technologies as AI warfare systems and surveillance networks.

Through video, prints and a book, Search and Destroy invites us to consider how machines see us—and what that means for the way we see ourselves.

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Tampere, Finland
1–20 September 2026

27/07/2026

Akshay Mahajan
People of Clay

People of Clay began with songs. Inspired by folk songs sung in a language he did not yet know how to place, Akshay Mahajan began to explore the history and cultural memory of the Rajbanshi people, whose language, traditions and identity have gradually been absorbed into larger regional and religious narratives.

Combining photography, archival material and text, the project pieces together fragments of a folk culture that has gradually been obscured by colonial histories and absorbed into larger regional and religious identities. Moving between documentary and myth, People of Clay reflects on what is remembered, misnamed, sung and forgotten.

As the artist writes, People of Clay is also a reminder that we are all "people of clay": shaped, broken and remade, and never entirely bound by the borders we inherit.

On view at Backlight Photo Festival 2026
Tampere, Finland
1–20 September 2026

Osoite

Tampere

Nettisivu

http://www.backlight.fi/

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