The Mondes en commun contemporary photography festival is back for a second year at the Musée départemental Albert-Kahn. Organised in partnership with the Association des Amis du Musée, this new event, launched in 2024, is dedicated to contemporary photography.
The second edition of the festival will enable the public to discover series of works by 10 artists, exhibited in the museum’s garden. A press visit will be organised on Friday 16 May from 2pm, in the presence of some of the photographers, on the eve of the opening of the festival for European Museum Night.
The festival Mondes en commun ; poursuivre l’inventaire (Worlds in common; continuing the inventory) builds bridges between the museum’s historical collections and contemporary photographic creation. The aim is to revive Albert Kahn’s work by demonstrating its relevance to the issues facing the world today.
The theme of the festival – the visual inventory of the world – proposes a re-reading of the Archives de la Planète collection of photographs and films, an immensely ambitious project to draw up, in Albert Kahn’s words, ‘a vast photographic inventory of the surface of the globe occupied and developed by man, as it appeared at the beginning of the 20th century’. The inventories are also linked to the museum’s plant collections, around themes linked to living things: fauna, flora, biodiversitý, etc.
10 series of contemporary photography presented in the museum garden
The festival showcases photographic works whose aim is to methodically represent reality in all its diversitý, from the near to the far, from the ‘macro’ to the ‘micro’, from the living to the inanimaté.
Conceived in connection with the museum’s collections, this event tackles the central themes of the collection, such as human geography, cultural and living diversity, popular traditions and natural and architectural heritage.
The photographic proposals were selected by a jury made up of representatives of the museum and the Friends association, as well as qualified personalities from the world of photography. Each year, a particular country is given pride of place: in 2025, to mark the France-Brazil Year, two Brazilian photographers will be featured in the selection.
Artists and series featured in 2025
Ursula Böhmer (Germany) – All ladies, in the golden forest
Luiz Braga (Brazil) – Ode to colour, in the museum entrance
Siân Davey (United Kingdom) – The Garden, in the blue forest
Pedro David (Brazil) – Suffocamento, in the Vosges forest
Claude Iverné (France) – Sudan, in the Plaque Room Prix des Amis du musée
Peter Mitchell (United Kingdom) – Scarecrows, in the English garden
Thomas Paquet (France) – The posterity of the sun, in the blue forest
Aurélie Scouarnec (France) – Gwiskañ / Revêtir, in the greenhouse, Friends of the Museum Prize
Rebecca Topakian (France) – (n=6-9), on the west terrace of the greenhouse
