Portsmouth Open: Archival Loops

For Photo Fringe 2026, we continue our partnership with Pompey Darkroom, extending the festival along the south coast to Portsmouth.

Photo Fringe has always been interested in what happens at the margins. The word fringe suggests a position outside the centre, but it can also be a place of possibility: somewhere things come into contact and new connections emerge. The coast is a fringe in this sense. It marks a boundary between land and sea, while also connecting places across it. From Portsmouth, the horizon opens outward, towards elsewhere. This felt like an appropriate place to think about archives.

An archive can appear to be a place where things are kept still. Photographs, documents and objects are preserved as evidence of something that has happened. But an archive changes whenever someone returns to it. We bring a different perspective, a different set of questions, and a different present with us. What we see in an image can shift because we ourselves or our ideas evolve.

This year’s Portsmouth OPEN brings together lens-based artists who use archives as material for looking again, selected through an open call. Their works consider how personal and collective histories are carried through photographs, documents and found material, while asking what happens when these things are taken out of their original context and encountered anew.

This is where the archive becomes a feedback loop, the Photo Fringe 2026 festival theme. An image that once seemed familiar can become strange. Something overlooked can become important. A story that appeared settled can be reopened.

The exhibition also reflects on who creates an archive in the first place. What is kept, and what is left behind? Which histories become visible? Which ones remain at the margins? And which ones make us look again?

Participating artists:
Karl Bailey
Billie Rae Cawte
Patti Gaal-Holmes
Eddie Stenstrom
Laurene Bois-Mariage
Liv Harris
Mia Blake
Monica Dhaka
Sebastián Rodriguez De Castro
Evagelia Hagikalfa

Image: Liv Harris