Ballarat Biennale: 2013 Wrap Up

The month-long 2013 Ballarat International Foto Biennale was hailed as another success by organisers.

The 2013 Ballarat International Foto Biennale has been described as a great success by Director Jeff Moorfoot. The veteran professional photographer turned organiser said, “It went off surprisingly smoothly. Everything improved this time around." He said better attendances at the various seminars and conferences staged concurrently with the exhibitions were one of the month-long event’s highlights.

Despite organising the fifth bi-annual festival with the equivalent of just two full-time staff, Moorfoot and his small team used their hard-won experience to smooth over concerns from previous occasions. Based around a core of 21 international and local exhibitors, including a retrospective of work by the late Melbourne-based commercial shooter and educator John Cato, BIFB 2013 again attracted strong crowds (though exact attendance figures, recorded at all the core exhibitions, were still being collated at the time of writing).

Moorfoot was tired, but pleased with the overall result, saying, “Everything improved at this event. The presentation was much better.” He said media exposure in both newspapers, radio, and via the web has also helped, and there were much bigger numbers visiting from interstate as well.

The exhibitions were extraordinarily diverse. John Cato’s black and white abstract landscapes were a key exhibition at the Old Mining Exchange Building in central Ballarat, which was also the site for other core shows, including those of the South Korean photo artist Young Ho Kang, who created stunning self-portraits where he disguised himself in various ways.

Also in the Mining Exchange were images from Columbian Erika Diette, local shooter Sonia Macak, Hester Scheurwater of the Netherlands, and Elisabeth Zeilon from Sweden. Their work was wide-ranging, from the haunting portraits of Diette (printed on shrouds and hung from the roof of the mining hall) which illustrated victims of violence in Columbia as they closed their eyes and remembered, to the work of Scheurwater, which illustrated what she described as “mirrored self-images encompassing my private fantasies”.

Away from the Mining Exchange another core exhibitor of note was American Francisco Diaz. His series, titled ‘The Lost Road’, had a deep sense of unease about them. The series of pictures was described in the festival guide as “a meticulously produced cinematic narrative depicting four people in a car as they become lost.” The overall effect was disturbing!

In St. Patrick’s Hall, just west of the CBD, New Zealand-based photographer Jackie Rankin was another core exhibitor offering a very different take. Her black and white landscapes were populated with objects – mostly kitchen utensils like poaching pans, graters, or forks which Rankin says she collected on her travels. They were then literally thrown up at arm’s length by the photographer and captured in mid-air using wide-angle lenses and fast shutter speeds (no Photoshop!) to freeze the action, or placed on the ground or dug into it.

Along with dozens of other exhibitions at 73 venues around the city, the program included many workshops, projections, and seminars. The core exhibitions were staged at venues primarily within the Ballarat Arts and Heritage precinct in the CBD. These included the Mining Exchange, the Art Gallery of Ballarat, the Post Office Gallery, the Ballarat Trades Hall, Gallery B1, the Ballarat Town Hall, and St Patrick’s Community Hall.


Erika Diette's images, printed on shrouds, illustrated victims of violence in Columbia. These shrouds were hung at a previous exhibition.


South Korean Young Ho Kang's bizarre self portraits were part of the core exhibition at BIFB 2013.


New Zealand-based photographer Jackie Rankin shot a collection of objects and kitchen utensils against dramatic landscapes, then included whimsical captions around the borders of each image.