by Artistic Research PhD Candidates of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Supervisor: Gerhild Steinbuch
The Migrating Image focuses on questions of displacement, migration, workers’ rights, politics of memory, and individuals and communities on the fringes of society. The research project explores how documentary images of the everyday relate to new or imagined alternative or parallel histories of displaced communities, and whether and how these images and voices can be structured to act as agents of solidarity, new potentiality, and untold histories.
Articulating its research through newspaper publications, The Migrating Image uses community-based and collaborative work to denounce the violence and brutality of European asylum politics and procedures. It strives to use a communal process with communities living on the fringes of society and, through artistic means, act as an agent of visibility and existence.
Jošt Franko is a photographer, visual artist, and educator researching migration, forced displacement, counter-narratives, and communal deliberations of precarious lives. Using photography, text, fieldwork and collaborations to engage with social issues, his artistic practice focuses on the many lost, unspoken or unheard narratives of displaced communities in the Balkan Peninsula.
Franko is the 2023 recipient of The Aftermath Project, TED Fellowship, and multiple Pulitzer Center grants and has received an honourable mention from the Documentary Essay Prize awarded by Duke University. His work has been exhibited internationally in museums and festivals, including the New York Photo Festival, Finnish Museum of Photography, Museum of Modern Art Klagenfurt and Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana +MSUM. He holds a master’s degree from Goldsmiths and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.