'Traditions and Resistance' at Photoville Festival 2023

As part of the 12th annual Photoville Festival in New York City, the Pulitzer Center will be featuring the work of grantees Brian Adams, Enayat Asadi, Sharon Castellanos, Gui Christ, and Shefali Rafiq in the exhibition, Traditions and Resistance.

Photoville is an ongoing event with exhibits in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, beginning on June 3, 2023. Throughout the festival, there will be in-person and virtual storytelling events, artist talks, educational programming, and open-air exhibitions in parks and other New York public spaces.

Learn more about the exhibit below, and visit this link to learn more about Photoville 2023.

“In the face of modern forces, they’re standing their ground.”

In Traditions and Resistance, this collection of projects supported by the Pulitzer Center explores themes of cultural traditions and resistance. It showcases the resilience of communities around the world as they fight to preserve and revitalize traditions that sustain livelihoods and create hope for the next generation.

Viewers will meet the nomadic Bakhtiari women of Iran, who play an outsized role in keeping families together; women and girls of the Gujjar and Bakarwal tribal communities in Kashmir, who are fighting patriarchy to help the next generation of tribal women take care of their menstrual health; rural Andean communities in Peru using sustainable agriculture to preserve human life; the Indigenous Amazonian Akroá-Gamella people persisting in their efforts for legal land reclamation; and the Native Alutiiq people of Alaska reclaiming and preserving their ancestral heritage in the face of government attempts at erasure.

These are stories of quiet resistance through the preservation and revival of ancestral traditions, despite threats of urbanization, climate change, or conflict and displacement.