BRIGHTON, UK.-Brighton Photo Biennial announces its 2006 edition, intimate in scale and international in scope. Curator Gilane Tawadros selects historical, contemporary and newly commissioned photographic and moving image works, exploring the thin line between past and present, fact and fiction, illusion and reality.

BPB 2006 keynote exhibition Nothing Personal is located at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: exhibited together for the first time are images from Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s 1964 book Nothing Personal, shown alongside striking works from international collections by William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Paul Fusco, Richard Misrach and Andy Warhol. These often melancholic images reflect on the compelling attractions and dark shadows inherent in empire, drawing connections between Britain as an emerging imperial nation and the United States of America in recent decades. Complementing these works is a newly commissioned film by Fiona Tan, presented outside the flamboyant Royal Pavilion, in which Tan’s piece was shot.

Voodoo Macbeth is a major BPB exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, based on Orson Welles' African-American theatre production of Shakespeare’s play. Curated by David A. Bailey in collaboration with Gilane Tawadros, Voodoo Macbeth contains film footage and archive photographs of Welles' original production, plus screenings of the director's films and a video installation featuring his famous radio broadcast War of the Worlds. The project additionally features new commissions and recent work by contemporary international artists including Kara Walker, Steve McQueen, Glenn Ligon, Phyllis Baldino and Mitra Tabrizian.

Fabrica hosts the European premiere of Alfredo Jaar’s dramatic new installation The Sound of Silence. David Claerbout presents White House, a powerful new thirteen-hour film at University of Brighton Gallery, which simultaneously hosts Armenian-Egyptian studio photographer Van Leo’s extraordinary wartime self-portraits plus Adel Abdessemed’s animated film God is Design. In the Bloomsbury Group’s rural enclave at Charleston Farmhouse, Henna Nadeem shows her series of collaged photographs Henna Nadeem’s Picture Book of Britain. Gabriel Kuri, as Design Archives Artist in Residence at the University of Brighton, presents a public project throughout Brighton drawing on the culture of display.

At Gardner Arts Centre, Falmer, an extraordinary exhibition of photographs by Walker Evans reveals a poignant and littleknown chapter in the life of the great American photographer. Drawn from the archives in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, these images, brought together for the first time, record Evans’ visit to Sussex in 1973, two years before his death. A fully illustrated catalogue is to be published by Photoworks and BPB, co-edited by Gilane Tawadros and David Chandler, Director of Photoworks.