The image selected for GdA’s poster is a summa of the Japanese photographer’s poetics
The world-renowned Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi graces the poster for the 2026 edition of Giornate degli Autori with an original photograph. After Pax Paloscia, Francesca Gastone, Anna Franceschini, and Rä di Martino, a work by another astonishing artist joins our event’s poster gallery for the last few years and will accompany the upcoming edition of the independent sidebar of the Venice Film Festival on its next adventure.
Born in 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, Rinko Kawauchi simultaneously released in 2001 a series of three photobooks – UTATANE, HANABI, and HANAKO. Kawauchi has participated in and hosted a multitude of group and solo exhibitions both within Japan and all over the world. In 2024, a faraway shining star, twinkling in hand was hold at Fotografiska Stockholm and the exhibition toured other countries. Her latest photobook is M/E (2025).
Amidst the constant bombardment of stimuli that has become the paradigm for our interconnected world of digital networks, the photography of Rinko Kawauchi is a balm for the soul. The extraordinary is no longer screamed to the rooftops or underscored by bombastic graphics; it’s an epiphany that springs from an intense and silent observation of the ordinary, that microcosm of small places, sensations, gestures, and objects we are surrounded by. The detail here reveals the universal, while everyday life becomes a magical foreign land to rediscover.
The image selected for Giornate degli Autori’s poster this year is a summa of Rinko Kawauchi’s poetics and captures, in its simplicity, a precise moment: the moment when we are walking along and suddenly look up at the sky, only to strike upon a ray of light between the leaves of the trees. Our surprise at this encounter, a seemingly common occurrence, becomes the starting point for a impromptu journey that will illuminate us – a voyage through our gaze and others’ as well, filtered by the sensibility of so many different filmmakers who, like prisms ablaze with the light of passion and curiosity, will carry our audiences at this edition of Giornate degli Autori in the direction of new ways to read the world.
“In a contemporary scene that continues to be punctuated by darkness,” declares Gaia Furrer, “we had an urgent need to find the light once more: a light that could shine on us through our many challenges and difficulties, from the smallest and most private to the largest and most global, and guide us towards beauty and the rediscovery of the ordinary. We found it! The poetic photograph by Rinko Kawauchi was an epiphany, illuminating us from the start with confidence and hope in a future that will always find its compass in art.”
