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Backlight'26 - The Art of Lying

1.9.-11.10.2026

Joel Jimenez Jara – Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies
Katerina Angelopoulou – The Fumes of Mars
Exhibtions 1.9.-11.10.2026
Backlight Photo Festival opening ceremony
>Photographic Centre Nykyaika & Gallery Koppelo 6 PM to 8 PM
>Vooninki 7 PM to 9 PM

Joel Jimenez Jara

Hummingbirds are the only birds capable of flying backwards; their suspended motion mirrors the process of grief, moving into the past while still held in the present. After leaving his home country of Costa Rica, Joel Jimenez Jara lost his father to a neurodegenerative disease. The project began with family memories and the hummingbird, which in Costa Rican folk belief carries the souls of the dead and returns to greet those they love.

Glimmers, Feathers and Staring Skies explores the hummingbird as a migratory body moving between science and myth, the earthly and the celestial. Bringing together personal archives with colonial and ornithological materials, the work questions how photography has attempted to capture, verify and classify a fleeting body.

Conceived as a practice of care shaped through interspecies relationships, the project reflects on grief, memory and ecological fragility. It proposes alternative ways of relating to more-than-human others while becoming a means of reconnecting with the artist's father through the language of flight.

Joel Jimenez Jara (b. 1993, Costa Rica) is an artist and filmmaker based in Madrid. Working across photography, installation and moving image, his research-based practice explores memory, landscape and archives through themes of erasure, displacement and the instability of historical narratives.

Katerina Angelopoulou

On 23 July 2018, one of the deadliest wildfires ever recorded swept through Mati and neighbouring areas, just 30 kilometres from Athens. Over a hundred lives were lost. Artist Katerina Angelopoulou survived the fire, fleeing with her mother and three-year-old daughter.

The Fumes of Mars is a counter-archive, a forensic and deeply personal investigation into how official narratives of catastrophe are constructed and enforced, and how governance failures and the climate crisis converge in collective trauma. The work brings together photographs from the day of the event and its aftermath, survivor testimonies from public archives and the artist's own archive, aerial maps, weather and aircraft reports, CCTV footage, and personal artefacts recovered from the ruins.

The work challenges the official narrative that persists around the disaster, in which facts were concealed and victims held culpable. Black-and-white photographs of landscapes after the fire give way to colour images taken on the day itself, while personal artefacts are photographed as archaeological remains through which the story of a life can begin to be reconstructed.

Structured non-linearly, the work mirrors the fractured nature of trauma. Though rooted in a specific catastrophe, The Fumes of Mars asks who controls the narrative of disaster and who is silenced in its aftermath, while addressing institutional failure, the invisibility of survivors and the struggle for accountability in an era of compounding climate catastrophe.

Katerina Angelopoulou (b. 1982, Athens) is an artist whose lens-based practice explores the tension between private memory and public record. Drawing on her background in performance design and dramaturgy, her work combines oral histories and archival research to recover silenced pasts and question institutional power and the construction of collective memory.

Backlight Photo Festival 2026

The international Backlight Photo Festival will take place in Tampere during September. Founded in 1987, Backlight is one of the oldest photo festival in the Nordics, with this year being the 14th time is has been held.

The theme of the festival The Art of Lying will examine how images, stories and techology affect our way of understanding reality. In a time when Artificial Intelligence, algorithms and social media shape our understanding of the world, the exhibitions ask the question of who gets to define what we think of as real.

The international exhibition collection brings 12 artists and artist groups from around the world to Tampere. In their artwork they address the relationship between photography and power, political propaganda, surveillance techonology, algorithm visibility and alternative methods for knowledge and experience.

The main exhibtions will be held in the Finlayson Area in Vooninki and in Photographic Centre Nykyaika. In Gallery Koppelo, an international student exhibition will be held with students from Tampere University, Tampere University of Applied Sciences and Willem de Kooning Academy.

Backlight 2026 invites you to think about how images form our reality - and what remains unseen. The festival and its exhibitions are free of charge for all visitors.

For more information visit Backlight's website:
https://backlight.fi/

Photo by Katerina Angelopoulou