The annual European Young Photography Festival, Circulation(s), continues its tradition of vibrant and inclusive artistic expression in Paris. Originally conceived in 2011 by the French collective Fetart with a passionate do-it-yourself spirit, the festival has evolved significantly over the past decade while retaining its distinctive independent character. Now a prominent fixture in the spring cultural calendar, it occupies the expansive Centquatre multidisciplinary arts center in the capital's historically working-class La Villette district. The sixteenth iteration, held in March, transformed over twenty thousand square feet of the center's glass-ceilinged industrial hall into an engaging exhibition space, harmoniously coexisting with various performing arts.
This year's Circulation(s) was curated by an all-women team, including Caroline Benichou, Carine Dolek, Laetitia Guillemin, Marie Guillemin, Emmanuelle Halkin, Ioana Mello, and Lucille Vivier-Calicat. Rather than imposing a specific theme, they identified common threads among the approximately eight hundred submissions. While participating photographers must have European connections, their artistic explorations extend globally, with this year's festival featuring works rooted in Brazil, Argentina, and Iran. Recurring motifs include personal identity, a sense of belonging, societal unrest, and memory, often presented through innovative, hybrid forms of visual art. Curator Emmanuelle Halkin notes that when multiple artists converge on a particular style or visual language, it's considered a compelling reason for inclusion.
The current exhibition features twenty-four distinctive projects from burgeoning artists. Housed within chartreuse-green exhibition structures near the entrance, traditional photographs are often complemented or even surpassed by other mediums. Alongside video presentations, many works lean into craftsmanship, such as intricately overpainted traditional Polish ceramic dishes and abstract beaded fabric hangings that shimmer in the ambient light. A dedicated section highlighting Ireland includes a pop-up hair salon alongside Ellen Blair's evocative series documenting DIY haircuts within Belfast's queer community. These ambitious and frequently striking installations underscore a generation of artists who, despite being keenly aware of digital aesthetics, are committed to presenting art beyond the confines of a phone screen.
A notable highlight is the ongoing collaborative project, Everything I Want to Tell You, by Reykjavik-based artists Sadie Cook from North Carolina and Jo Pawlowska from Poland. This engrossing work, the culmination of years of weekly engagement with themes of social class, gender, sexuality, and illness, offers both revelation and obfuscation. An immersive display of roughly six thousand images in a compact area, it draws viewers into the tumultuous currents of private anxieties and subconscious narratives that flood the artists' minds before sleep. Intertwined figures and peculiar liquids glow in vivid, almost digitally corrupted hues. Large-scale prints sprawl across the concrete floor, intermingled with self-portraits, medical records, and manipulated screenshots haphazardly fastened to the walls, while translucent images are suspended so high they are barely discernible. Viewers must navigate carefully, as loose, confetti-sized photographs of indeterminate subjects are scattered across the ground.
Some of the most compelling pieces on display leverage photography as a starting point for exploring broader connections. In Black Carnation Part Three (2024–26), Konstantin Zhukov crafts an imagined narrative of queer beaches in Soviet-era Latvia. Zhukov, drawing inspiration from mid-century diary entries of a closeted gay man, notes that queer history is a burgeoning academic field in Latvia. He presents his ethereal, gray-toned depictions of intimate encounters on ephemeral materials like newsprint or receipts. By utilizing thermal printers, similar to those that produce flimsy restaurant bills, Zhukov subtly underscores the inherent paradoxes in these moments, which are simultaneously transactional and imbued with profound human warmth.
For Paris-based photographer Marine Billet, the camera serves as a tool to engage with a group of teenage girls. Their tender and meandering voice notes accompany her photo and video series, Reliées (2025), accessible through headphones. Billet, who is thirty-four, views the project as a form of temporal displacement, reflecting on what it would have been like to grow up in their era. Through painterly, medium-format compositions, she captures the teenagers in a stylized yet authentic manner, whether huddled in a confined bedroom or absorbed in their phones around a dinner table. This evocative series offers a window into the contemporary experiences and emotional landscapes of young women.
The festival's opening weekend drew approximately three thousand visitors, including the subjects of Reliées, who were seen photographing themselves in front of their portraits. Beyond the exhibition, attendees enjoyed a variety of free public performances and readings. Throughout the day, people engaged in hands-on activities, from receiving haircuts and temporary photo tattoos to participating in studio portrait sessions led by local photographers. The rapper T2i delivered an energetic performance, collaborating on a project with artist NouN inspired by a mythical mermaid figure from Guyana. Swiss artist Nathalie Bissig captivated audiences by drawing with red gouache on a large screen, creating whimsical, raw, and sometimes macabre images that explored the folk traditions of the Canton of Uri. In a reflection of reduced sponsorship, the festival catalogue was more streamlined this year, and there were no quiet corners dedicated to selling photobooks. Nevertheless, the curators and dedicated volunteer team remain steadfast in their commitment to this community-focused, resolutely inclusive, and often improvisational artistic endeavor. As one artist recently remarked to Halkin, while other venues might offer a straightforward display of photographs, only Circulation(s) provides the opportunity to embrace artistic risks before a live and engaged audience.