“Our Songs Came Through”: Greif Alumni at BredaPhoto

A disclosure of resilience reminding us of the possibilities of carrying on even through hardship.

Running until October 25, the 12th edition of BredaPhoto is a wholehearted celebration of resilience. Titled “Our Songs Came Through”, this year’s festival takes its name from the words of Indigenous poet Joy Harjo: “When the light of the world was subdued, our songs came through.”

The festival addresses the painful, undeniable fact that we are living through a time of profound crisis. As Astrid Hulsmann—co-curating Breda Photo with Dr. Ileana L. Selejan and Mohamed Somji—writes: “During the planning stages of this exhibition, we watched a genocide being livestreamed in Palestine, tens of thousands killed with no accountability; we watched war and conflict rage in Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, Ukraine and beyond [...], we have felt the immediate impact of climate change, watching as inequalities in our societies widen, as our civil liberties and political rights shrink every day…”

In the face of all this, although a sense of helplessness may be unavoidable, to acknowledge the many who fight and resist remains necessary. And that is the spirit of this year’s BredaPhoto: bittersweet, luminous yet heavy, hopeful but unflinching. As always, Der Greif is delighted to follow the journeys of our community, with nine of our alumni currently showing at the festival.

In “Sunshine, How Are You?”, Varvara Uhlik revisits her childhood in Dnipro, eastern Ukraine, in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through staged photographs and digitally reworked family archives, she takes apart and rebuilds fragments of her past, and reflects on a present still overshadowed by Russia and the war that has forced her away from home. Saturated with colour yet softened by blur and glare, the images feel like fleeting flashes of memory, where the warmth of a beloved childhood is inseparable from the later realisation of its Russification. Judit Gyuricza-Osváth’s “The Clear Image of Paradise” also looks back on childhood with similar yearning. The work explores the childlike ability to escape reality, one we lose as we grow up: dressing up, building hideouts, inventing stories. Shot in the garden of the house she grew up in, the series speaks to a longing for a perspective we can never quite recover as adults.

“Nowruz Sayadeen” shows that sense of play can survive through shared tradition. Photographer Huda Abdulmughni documents the yearly celebrations on the Iranian island of Qeshm, where the fishing village of Salakh suspends all work to honour nature's generosity and celebrate the Persian New Year. On the beach, various characters in face paint, palm leaves and reed hats perform a story with no specific plot, yet one that everyone understands, in a celebration of community and togetherness. Disguise takes on a very different purpose in Marcel Top's "Poison Data, Kill Algorithms", where Marcel Top builds a dataset designed to attract surveillance companies training algorithms to identify protesters. Top photographed himself in over 1,000 combinations of common protest disguises, worn over a lifelike silicone mask. But 10% of the images hide a small red pixel and false annotations, corrupting any algorithm trained on them and turning surveillance against itself.

If Abdulmughni’s work is rooted in place, Hashim Nasr’s series confronts its loss. Nasr, one of six Sudanese photographers shown in collaboration with photographer and curator Ala Kheir, reflects on home, memory and displacement. Drawing on his personal experience of war, Nasr describes displacement as a permanent state carried in the body, where home is no longer physical but a place that can only be reached through memory. The theme of memory is also central to Simone Engelen's work, not as something that offers relief, but as something that must be confronted. In "27 Drafts", she revisits the United States, where she was sexually abused by two peers during a high school exchange year; the title refers to twenty-seven unfinished letters to her abusers. Retracing the journey with her mother, she uses her camera as a filter, holding the past distant enough to face it.

Like Nasr and Engelen, the artists of "A Spell Bundle – Manifesting Queer Futurity", brought to BredaPhoto by FOTODOK and curated by Daria Tuminas and Nayara Leite, turn to the past, but in order to imagine the future. The show casts a collective spell to protect queer futures, revealing queerness itself as a force for change and resistance.

Julius Thissen’s "Bones of Graphene, Skin of Kevlar" channels the ancestral power of queer elders into strong contemporary transgender figures who push back against present-day hostility and the rise of the far right. Donja Nasseri's "Both the Universe and the Nothing" draws on ancient Egyptian history and mythology, including gender-nonconforming pharaohs Akhenaten and Hatshepsut, to challenge fixed ideas of gender and power. Lastly, S*an D. Henry-Smith presents "PACES THE CAGE: Live at Torpedo Theater (open_edit)", a four-channel audio-visual installation remixing footage from the rehearsal and live reading of their latest poetry collection, casting the intimate projection of a world where the poet's voice keeps multiplying, resisting univocity.

While these works don’t offer resolution, they also don’t shy away from the pain. When grief and hope cannot be separated, these artists find strength in memory and imagination. Together, their work reminds us of how, even through hardship, people find ways to carry on. Their songs come through.