Magnum Foundation Heat Fellows Featured in Amman Image Festival

Festival visitors watching videos produced during the Heat fellowship. Photo by Nadia Bseiso.

At this year’s Amman Image Festival, Magnum Foundation is proud to present projects that bear witness to communities around the world transformed by environmental disruption.

They were developed in Magnum Foundation’s 2023-25 Photography Expanded: Heat Fellowship, which supported new photographic storytelling about the climate crisis and the inextricable relationship of communities to land. Across eighteen different landscapes—each transformed by power, extraction, and the shadows of colonialism—these photographers honor the people and landscapes that, through it all, remain.

Location

MMAG Foundation

Othman Ben Affan St. 30

Amman, Jordan

Duration

June 1 - June 30, 2026

Featured Projects

Featuring video installations by: River Claure (Bolivia), Luis Antonio Rojas (Mexico), Fatma Fahmy (Egypt), Mahmoud Khattab (Egypt), Florence Goupil (Peru), and Zumrad Mirzalieva (Uzbekistan).

Zine includes works by: Andrea Hernández Briceño (Venezuela), Farhana Satu (Bangladesh), Fatma Fahmy (Egypt), Florence Goupil (Peru), Gayatri Ganju (India), Giya Makondo-Wills (United Kingdom / South Africa), Hashem Shakeri (Iran), José Luis Arroyo-Robles (Mexico), Kunga Tashi Lepcha (India), Luis Antonio Rojas (Mexico), Luján Agusti (Argentina), Mahmoud Khattab (Egypt), María Valqui (Peru), Miora Rajaonary (Madagascar), Ofoe Amegavie (Ghana), River Claure (Bolivia), seth cardinal dodginghorse (Tsuut’ina Nation), and Zumrad Mirzalieva (Uzbekistan).

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Zines designed by José Luis Arroyo-Robles and distributed at the festival, featuring all 18 Heat fellows’ projects. Photo by Nadia Bseiso.

Festival visitors watching videos produced during the Heat fellowship. Photo by Nadia Bseiso.

Festival visitors reading the zines. Photo by Nadia Bseiso.

Festival visitors watching videos produced during the Heat fellowship. Photo by Nadia Bseiso.

Festival visitors reading the zines. Photo by Nadia Bseiso.

See the projects:

Andrea Hernández Briceño

Many members of the indigenous Huöttöja community in Venezuela feel the pull of the mining industry, which promises to make them rich but threatens to dilute their culture. Working with the community, Andrea Hernández Briceño aims to create a body of work that reflects Huöttöja spirituality.

Farhana Satu

In the Bagerhat district of Bangladesh, salinity is having a huge impact on people’s health, especially women. Farhana Satu brings attention to her hometown as it faces being submerged by rising sea levels.

Fatma Fahmy

When Egypt’s High Dam was built, Lake Qarun’s connection to the Nile was cut. With rising salinity, untreated sewage, agricultural runoff, and climate change, Fatma Fahmy depicts the impact of this exploitation on women.

Florence Goupil

Faced with devastating droughts, Quechua and Wanka women in the Peruvian Andes follow the ancestral practices of Jarawi singing, using polyphonic techniques to summon the rain and care for the land. Florence Goupil weaves her grandmother’s voice, memory, and archive as a central thread to explore the resilience and resistance of these women.

Gayatri Ganju

The shola (native) forests of the Nilgiri mountains in South India, to which the Kurumbas belong, are fast disappearing. Gayatri Ganju imagines what the future of the forest might be.

Giya Makondo-Willis

In South Africa, the rapid proliferation of data centres has placed immense strain on precarious local infrastructures and natural resources. Giya Makondo-Willis references ancestral practices, folklore, and creation stories to consider how narratives go from the intangible to the physical and back again.

Hashem Shakeri

Hashem Shakeri presents an elegy for the drying Lake Hamun in Iran, where drought and unemployment have led to the migration of over one fourth of the population.

Zumrad Mirzalieva

Over 90% of the Aral Sea is gone, leaving behind vast salt plains, a changing climate, public health crisis, and an abandoned fishing industry, all centered in a former port town Moynaq, Uzbekistan. Zumrad Mirzalieva asks, is there a future beyond extraction?

seth cardinal dodginghorse

In 2014, seth cardinal dodginghorse’s family was forcibly displaced from their home and land on the Tsuut’ina Nation for the construction of an 8-lane highway.  dodginghorse plans to rent a digital billboard along the highway and display images on it that express their connection to the land and refusal to be erased from it.

Kunga Tashi Lepcha

The Teesta River in Sikkim, India has been venerated by Lepcha communities for generations, yet is increasingly threatened by hydropower expansion and ecological instability. Rooted in memory, mythology, and landscape, Kunga Tashi Lepcha evokes the spiritual world that connects Lepcha communities to this landscape and honors their collective action to preserve it.

José Luis Arroyo-Robles

Using his parents’ archives, animation, and sculptures of the landscape of Michoacan, Mexico, José Luis Arroyo-Robles seeks to return the care that this landscape has given him.

Miora Rajaonary

Taking the presentation of a love letter to her son, Miora Rajaonary photographs how the most remote communities of her native island of Madagascar are trying new approaches to food production that work with nature, rather than against it, in light of climate and environmental changes.

Luis Antonio Rojas

On the outskirts of Mexico City, agricultural communities on the Xochimilco wetland fight to maintain pre-Hispanic cultural roots amid urban growth and gentrification. Working in collaboration with local residents, Luis Antonio Rojas explores the narratives embedded in Xochimilco, bringing archive, poetry, music, imagery, organic materials, and rituals into a shared dialogue.

Luján Agusti

Luján Agusti photographed the people of Ushuaia, South Argentina, who live in connection with the land. She planted the portraits in the soil and found the world of fungi advancing on the other side of her story.

Mahmoud Khattab

Through photographs and terrain samples from Egypt’s desert that he has taken over the years, Mahmoud Khattab narrates a story of the disappearance of desert ecosystems, as they give way to the promises of a fast growing nation.

María Valqui

On the banks of the Amazon River is the town of Tamshiyacu, where María Valqui’s family originates. Since 2012, Tamshiyacu has been prey to the deforestation of nearly 2,000 hectares of primary tropical forest that have been converted into cocoa plantations by foreign capital. Valquí approaches the possible loss of collective memory related to the destruction of the territory.

Ofoe Amegavie

Ofoe Amegavie explores the resilience of the communities in Ghana along the coast of Ada Foah and the estuary of the Volta river and how they cope with the consequences of environmental challenges in their everyday lives.

River Claure

Since its discovery during the colonial period, the Cerro Rico de Potosi in Bolivia has been considered to be the richest source of silver in the history of humankind—sometimes described as the birthplace of capitalism. After more than five hundred years, the mountain is starting to collapse. River Claure sets out to scare the mountain and finish this process.

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The Photography Expanded: Heat Fellowship was made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Family Foundation, the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Foundation, and the William Talbott Hillman Foundation. It was produced in partnership with Darkroom Amman and MMAG Foundation in Amman, Jordan and the Centre de las Artes de San Agustin (CASA) in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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