Something is leaking out of the walls here

On melancholy, overstimulation, and the strange new ways young Europeans are trying to figure out who they are.

Exhibition Info

Exhibition: Circulation(s) 16th Edition
Dates: March 21 – May 17, 2026
Location: Le CENTQUATRE-PARIS (104)

I. The melancholy underneath

Centquatre is a cavernous building — the kind of old industrial space that doesn’t try to be beautiful but somehow is. The light inside feels a little exhausted, like it came a long way to be here. Which is, perhaps, the right light for what is being shown.

This is the 16th edition of Circulation(s), the European festival for young photography, and the work on its walls does not arrive easily. It arrives carrying weight.

Olia Koval’s installation fills a domestic living room with 40,000 handcrafted red-winged bugs — each one small, each one insistent, together an image of occupation that refuses metaphor to become something almost physical. Clodagh O’Leary photographs children in republican County Derry: children born after the conflict formally ended, and yet the conflict has not left their postures, their expressions, the particular way they hold themselves in front of a lens.

These are not images about despair. They are images that sit with it — making it tactile, refusing to let it resolve into anything clean or comfortable.

The curatorial team — seven women, three of them new this year — chose to work without a fixed theme. And yet a mood accumulates, room by room. Facing an unstable world, traversed by uncertainty and the feeling of a loss of control, the artists choose an intentional theatricality. That word — intentional — carries the weight of the whole edition. This is not passive grief. It is grief that has decided to become form.

There is a particular quality to European melancholy that comes from living on land with too much history in the soil. These photographers do not try to step away from it. They press into it, give it texture, hand it back to the viewer still warm.

II. The digital carnival running alongside

And then the register shifts completely.

Marine Billet, a French photographer, wanted to understand Gen Z — which, as a millennial, she frames as a neighboring country she has not yet fully visited. Her method was straightforward: an open call posted on Instagram. Five strangers responded. For six months, all six of them exchanged voice notes about ordinary intimate things — what their bedrooms looked like, what they were cooking, what they did at 11pm on a Wednesday. Then they met in person, in an old rented house, and she photographed them together for the first time.

The images are warm but restless. The house is old; the energy in the room is not.

Sadie Cook and Jo Pawlowska — one American, one Polish, both non-binary, both strangers in Reykjavik until someone pointed out they looked alike — made something entirely different in spirit. Their installation layers photographs, selfies, screenshots, and glitched videos until the whole surface becomes almost illegible. Dense, beautiful, overwhelming. The question they are asking — what would it look like if everything was built for us — does not come with a tidy answer, and the work makes no attempt to provide one.

This generation did not log on to the internet. They were already inside it. And the photography that comes from that place carries a specific quality: hyper-aware of its own image-making, suspicious of its own surfaces, turning the performance visible rather than hiding it.

Glitch, collage, layering — these are not aesthetic choices made for effect. They are honest accounts of how images actually feel when you have grown up surrounded by too many of them. The digital noise and the melancholy of the previous rooms are not separate things. They run through each other. They are the same weather.

II. Who are you, actually

The third current running through Circulation(s) 2026 is quieter, but persistent.

Ellen Blair’s Homemade Undercuts is built around a vintage barber chair and a corkboard filled with queer flyers and handwritten notes. In Belfast, a haircut can carry political, medical, or community meaning — sometimes all at once.

During opening weekend, two queer hairdressers gave free cuts inside the gallery. The corkboard is designed to grow as visitors add to it. Blair calls it a living thing — something unfinished by design.

Dónal Talbot photographs queer identity through landscape. Nature becomes a space where bodies that do not fit fixed categories can exist without explanation.

T2i and NouN turn to Amazonian mythology: Manman Dilo, a fluid hybrid figure, half-woman, half-fish, reimagined as Afrofuturist installation against intense blue walls.

The question beneath these works remains the same: what does it mean to be made of more than one thing, and to claim that condition without apology?

Identity in this festival is not presented as a problem to solve. It is a practice — a continuous negotiation between self, world, and the categories imposed by both.

Czech artist Alžběta Drcmánková combines digital photography with seed bead embroidery, stitching memory into image until the boundary between them becomes unclear.

The work is slow, careful, and tender. It does not argue. It insists that some things deserve to be preserved with care — especially when they resist easy framing.

Across these works runs an idea expressed clearly by the parallel Gen Z exhibition at Photo Elysée in Lausanne: intersectionality not only as a site of struggle, but also as a site of joy.

The grief is real. So is something else — a kind of relief. The relief of not having to be only one thing, finally made visible in a space designed to hold it.

Circulation(s) does not offer conclusions. The melancholy remains open. The digital noise does not resolve. Identity does not close.

What the festival offers instead is attention — to twenty-six artists across fifteen countries, pressing gently against the parts of life that still do not have names.

That is its own kind of answer.

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