Fotografia Europea has opened in Reggio Emilia in Italy. Curated by Arianna Catania, Tim Clark, Luce Lebart, and Walter Guadagnini, the 21st edition of the international photography festival, explores the theme ‘ghosts of the moment’ – studying the seen and the invisible, questioning what was and what could be after figures, events or images appear to have withdrawn.
The festival sprawls across the city and brings together major names, younger voices, civic venues and independent publishing together for a rich program comprising 15 exhibitions, events, conferences, screenings, workshops, portfolio reviews and site specific performances.
From the main exhibitions at Chiostri di San Pietro and Palazzo da Mosto, to premier solo offerings and activations, artists throughout explored notions of how facts survive. Can the inside of a home contain sorrow, or an electronic device convert fear into routine? Can an absent frontier still command a story, or can a salvaged object restore a sense of dignity? These eerie constructs aren’t Halloween ghouls, but instead, traces and records that haunt the present. Here are our five festival highlights not to be missed…
Felipe Romero Beltrán, Bravo, Rubén, Mexico, 2025 © Felipe Romero Beltrán
BRAVO
At Chiostri di San Pietro, Colombian artist Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Bravo concentrates on a 270-kilometre stretch of the Río Bravo river, a natural borderline between the USA and Mexico, although its waters rarely occupy the artist’s frame. It’s this precise absence that creates tension prevalent in the work, as the river becomes a silent actor shaping the lives of those who interact with it. On wooden and metal structures, portraits face sparse domestic scenes and rough terrain. A mattress, speaker or painted table carries as much weight as a body. The sequence advances through Endings, Bodies and Breaches, showing migration under waiting and control. Beltrán refuses easy drama. His compositions are calm, but never neutral. El Cruce, the video work nearby, brings baptism and fishing back to the river via testimony, where survival meets border violence with stark formal force and restraint.
Mohamed Hassan, Our Hidden Room, untitled, Alexandria Egypt, 2023 © Mohamed Hassan
OUR HIDDEN ROOM
Mohamed Hassan’s Our Hidden Room, also in the same location, shifts the mood inward. The Wales-based, Egyptian photographer, tells the deeply personal, yet fragmented story of his relationship with his father, who had a deep love of photography, but who also battled mental illness. The work is arranged in six chapters, mixing pictures with plain, painful narration. At its core is a small dark chamber in the family’s Egypt home. For Hassans’ father, living with bipolar disorder and without support, that tiny space became both shelter and prison. But the artist does not turn his father’s struggle into spectacle. Instead, he highlights the stigma surrounding mental illness (which ultimately led to his suicide) and balances the complexities of the emotions surrounding this act, with love. Photographs from his father’s difficult childhood in Alexandria and Cairo sit beside those of his military service, where he found photography and some form of refuge from his illness. For Hassan, a large piece of his life that could have remained private, destined to become a sadness inherited by future generations, instead becomes a careful act of witness. The artist’s grief is present, but tenderness is felt in every image.
Sara Bezovšek, SND series, 2020-ongoing, Courtesy of the artist
GHOSTLAND
At Palazzo da Mosto, the group exhibition Ghostland casts the screen as a haunted zone. Its premise maps how online systems steer anxiety and focus. Sara Bezovšek’s multimedia installation SND was its strongest point, with the Slovenian artist inviting viewers to navigate an interactive website where possible futures unfold like disaster cinema. Its vocabulary derives from the internet, ranging from memes and emoticons to found fragments. No element suggests fiction or fabrication, so the threat feels real. Apocalypses stand next to artificial paradises. Climate panic mutates into alien invasion. The flow captures ‘doomscrolling’ with cruel accuracy. We keep reading bad news, even though we know it causes us harm. Bezovšek translates that reflex into wallpaper, clips and sculptures, lending the feed a physical charge. It’s this humour that makes the viewer’s dread harder to shake.
© Karim El Maktafi, ZONA Archivio del mare
VOICES
At Palazzo dei Musei, the Luigi Ghirri Award finalists seamlessly shift the festival’s theme to another register. Under the theme Voices, the five emerging Italian talents explore what photography can carry when speech is missing. The Italian-Moroccan photographer Karim El Maktafi’s ongoing Archivio del Mare is perhaps the most poignant offering of them all. Set against public fatigue around migration, his imagery focuses on objects recovered from Mediterranean shipwrecks, examining items belonging to people who crossed the sea with little more than what could be held. Under his lens a shoe or document functions as evidence of a life cut short, or left unknown. Through these personal possessions El Maktafi creates a sobering memorial, an archive built from a quiet care.
Ndayé Kouagou, Heaven’s truth, 2026 © Ndayé Kouagou
HEAVEN’S TRUTH
Collezione Maramotti offered a valuable detour from the main circuit with Heaven’s Truth, Ndayé Kouagou’s first solo exhibition in Italy. The Paris-based artist links performance and visual art, with language as its unifying thread. Bringing together recent works and new commissions, the offering extends over several rooms, inspired by the fotoromanzo (an Italian photo-comic format) and unfolds across video, three-dimensional cutouts, wall pieces and text works. The artist’s aim throughout is to probe the instability of meaning, albeit through wit and entertainment. Four manga-infused characters: Pudding, PimPim, Pudha and Pochi (long-term elements of Kouagou’s practice) appear in the first room and weave a thread through the spaces. Wandering through, messages as moving images confront the viewer, commanding attention, before slipping away, creating a sense of disorientation. Posed questions for a fictitious news broadcast at first sound casual, before descending into discomfort.The tone is playful, yet its meaning far from light. And amongst the majority of image-led exhibitions, the work of this language-based artist feels incredibly vital.
Text NIKOLAS VAMVOUKLIS
Fotografia Europea 2026 is on view across several venues in Reggio Emilia until 14 June 2026.
