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The CPB International Open Call 2026 transforms Chennai into a site of encounter, placing photography within malls and galleries. This dual exhibition rethinks how images circulate, resist meaning, and engage public audiences today.
The Chennai Photo Biennale has long positioned itself against the exclusivity of institutional art spaces, inserting photography into parks, beaches, and transit points. The second edition of the CPB International Open Call extends that logic to the commercial architecture of the mall. The second CPB International Open Call exhibition — on view till April 5, 2026 — positions photographs as artefacts encountered in passing, in public, in the midst of everyday life, rather than within the rarefied confines of white-cube art galleries.
On view across two venues — VR Chennai, Anna Nagar, and Avtar Foundation for the Arts, MRC Nagar — the exhibition unfolds as a split yet interconnected proposition: single images embedded within the competing visual economies of retail and advertising of a mall, and extended photo series housed in a more contemplative gallery space. Together, they map the breadth of contemporary lens-based practices while retaining a certain democratic impulse that has come to define the Biennale’s ethos.
What emerges across both venues is an insistence on photography as a medium of relation. Many of the works, selected by a jury of eminent photographers and visual arts practitioners such as Bharat Sikka, Michael Weir (UK), Vineet Vohra, Avani Rai, Karthik Rajagopal, Kaamna Patel, Per Gylfe (USA), and Ashfika Rahman (Bangladesh), grapple with questions of place, memory, and belonging — often through fragmentary, non-linear approaches. Across the exhibition, images resist closure; narratives fracture; subjects evade capture; surfaces become sites of ambiguity rather than revelation. If there is a shared sensibility, it lies in this resistance to legibility: an insistence that the photograph need not always explain itself.
The exhibition also gestures toward a renewed focus on internationalism, featuring over 100 photographers and lens-based practitioners from 37 countries. Practices emerging from South Asia sit alongside those from Europe and North America, but without the usual hierarchies of centre and periphery. Instead, they are framed in terms of adjacency, producing moments of both resonance and dissonance. The result is less a global conversation than a series of overlapping conversations between practices across countries and continents.
The overarching thesis of this year’s CPB International Open Call exhibition seems to be that photography today no longer operates under one. Instead, it presents a fragmented field in which images are unstable, overdetermined, and perpetually in motion. The exhibition does not attempt to stabilise this condition; it makes it visible.
CPB International Open Call - Edition 2 is currently on view at VR Chennai, Anna Nagar, and Avtar Foundation for the Arts, MCR Nagar. The exhibitions are free and open to all and will remain open till 5th April 2026.
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