Tales From a Globalizing World

By uniting diverse photographic perspectives and styles of expression, this photography project aims to explore various aspects of globalisation while creating "an image of the new reality that is shaping the world we live in." The exhibit will be toured internationally.

The exhibition begins with an exploratory trip through the Pearl River Delta in China, where Tokyo-based Swiss photographer Andreas Seibert documents the living and working conditions of migrant workers from the rural hinterland. Another Swiss, Thomas Kern, tracks signs and symptons of post 9/11 America, traveling from Detroit to the Mexican border, while Spaniard Cristina Nuñez shows, between Milan and Naples, both the glamorous and the shadowy sides of the Italian fashion industry. The portraits from Belgian Stephan Vanfleteren tell of a poverty not defined by material deprivation alone, and Shehzad Noorani, reporting on what it is like to be a child in a country where more than half the population is under 15, follows the path of children from the highlands of Nepal to the huge cities of India and his native Bangladesh. In an autobiographical account, young Bosnian Ziyo Gafic recalls the attempts to destroy a culture of ethnic coexistence, while Tim Hetherington reports from Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia on former child soldiers discovering new values through sports. Bertien van Manen reconstructs stories about living in a foreign land while Philip Jones Griffiths covers the economic opening-up of Vietnam. Akinbode Akinbiyi, a Nigerian living in Berlin, rounds off with an essay on primitive African religions which, through the transatlantic slave trade in an earlier phase of globalisation, spread all the way from Nigeria to Brazil.

A 256-page book, also serving as a catalogue to the exhibition, was published in English, French, and German.

The Project website feautures background information about the project and the photographers, as well as a slide show of the exhibit.

Globalisation