Korean artist Han Sungpil comes in and sits at a table patiently, while the office whirrs about him. His show Polar Heir will command the Hop Temple Laneway for a month during the Biennale, which opens on August 24.

Ms Sweet says aside from the core program of the Biennale, a retrospective of Chinese photographer Liu Bolin's work over two decades - a "must see" - there is a tremendous diversity of photography on display for 2019.

"Fiona Foley - this is the first time for the last 30 years all her photography has been pulled together. The Bauhaus photos are extraordinary, amazing photographers working out of Germany. Adi Nes is talking about important issues of masculinity and aggression, looking at the Israeli military."

"So many of these artists will be coming this year, and talking to the audiences. Capital is a beautiful show, looking at the fact that we've taken over a former bank; we're looking at human capital, environmental capital, social capital, and as you can see with Darren Siwes's work, Indigenous capital."

As it is every two years, the BIFB is spread across venues all around Ballarat, from the Art Galley to the new National Centre for Photography. Ballarat Town Hall, Ballarat Observatory, the Mining Exchange, Myers, The Lost Ones Gallery in Camp Street and the Regent Cinemas are just a few of the other sites where work will be on display for 2019.

Aside from the photographic work, there will be performances and music, film screenings and lectures, chances for those wanting to learn more about taking photos and improving their art.

Ms Sweet says the program for the BIFB this year is enormous.

"I mean, it's going to be BIG. It's indoors and outdoors, we're going to take over entire streets and spaces. There's a whole segment on photo books; there's films on photography; there's walks, there are dance pieces; there's jazz."

ADI NES / SOLDIERS

Soldiers is a series of 22 photographs produced between 1994 and 2000 by one of Israel's leading photographers. Considered one of the most important works in contemporary Israeli photography, many of its prints can be found in prestigious museums and private collections worldwide.

Exhibiting this year at Ballarat International Foto Biennale is a combination of both parts, focusing on intermediary moments between privacy and intimacy within the rigid framework of military life, and with the loss of innocence within masculinity. This series has won awards including the 1999 Minister of Education, Culture and Sport Prize, and was described by the New York Times as "shrewd sendups of the pervasive, macho military presence in Israeli life".

LIU BOLIN / CAMOUFLAGE

Liu Bolin / Camouflage examines Liu Bolin's career over almost two decades; from his best-known Hiding in the City series initiated in 2005 until the present day. The exhibition aims to demonstrate how the artist's strategy of camouflage has allowed him to produce images which resonate globally with viewers across time and place.

Staged and photographed in-situ Liu Bolin's images depict meticulously painted human bodies - often his own - hiding in the surroundings of everyday spaces and places.

Through the feeling of connection that we share with the human bodies depicted, the viewer is invited to question how the dominant perspectives at play in everyday spaces and places shape our sense of self; feelings of pain, violence or loss, as part of a broader human search for mutual understanding and connectedness.

In this way the camouflaged body can be thought of as vehicle for thinking and making change; a metaphor for the idea of ethical living, where freedom from domination, fulfillment of one's own potential and the exercise of human rights, along with the call for simpler ways of being in the natural world, are at the heart of the artist's struggle.

FIONA FOLEY / WHO ARE THESE STRANGERS AND WHERE ARE THEY GOING?

To celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019, BIFB is proud to present Badtjala artist Dr Fiona Foley's solo exhibition Who are these strangers and where are they going? This exhibition showcases key works from Foley's internationally celebrated 30-year career in interactive and site-specific installations, alongside unveiling, in an Australian first, an important musical soundscape to mark this momentous occasion.

Created in collaboration with musicians Joe Gala and Teila Watson, this song is an aural recreation and expansion of the oldest known song in the history of Australia, telling of the exchange between Captain Cook and the Badtjala people. Other centrepieces in the exhibition include a 10-metre long, one-metre-wide installation comprising 3000 oyster shells, a recontextualisation of Foley's celebrated 2001 photographic series Wild Times Call, and a collaboration with Ballarat artist collective Pitcha Makin Fellas for a new installation alongside 2018's Horror Has a Face. The exhibition will be accompanied by a print catalogue with critical essays by Djon Mundine OAM and Dr Odette Kelada, and additional educational resources.

JANE BURTON / THE SUNKEN GARDEN

This new suite of photographs depicts a landscape of the Central Highlands region beyond Ballarat that was shown to the artist by a friend. This is not the kind of place found by the roadside, but a hidden place that one must walk into for some distance, crossing a kind of psychic threshold. Inside, by a vast reservoir of water, dead trees once submerged now surface due to drought, their limbs like bones worn clean by the elements.

It felt like standing in a cemetery, where once great trees had perished in stricken and mournful postures. The experience provoked the sensation of having passed into a mythical underworld, into a realm between earth and water and sky. In this landscape , one experiences that state of the sublime, where senses and imagination are awakened to the beauty, terror and wonder of nature. Feelings of exaltation and euphoria experienced at the very same time as feelings of deep melancholy and longing.

GIVE US THIS DAY

Curated by Aaron Bradbrook, Give Us This Day confronts the realities of the 'rights' of children, specifically how intrinsic social values shape a child's lived experience and dictate the definition of childhood. Traversing macro political themes of war, social and economic inequality, to individual challenges of gender and body image and their relationship to corporate organisations, the exhibition investigates how children negotiate their lives in a world governed by adults.

Showcasing the work of Lauren Greenfield and Vanessa Winship, Give Us This Day will coincide with the 30th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly's adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

CAPITAL

Constructed at the height of Australia's gold rush in 1864, the former Union Bank stands in the centre of Ballarat as a powerful symbol of the rise of western capitalism and the development of colonial Australia. Capital is curated in this architectural space as it undergoes transformation into the city's new National Centre For Photography.

The exhibition explores the use of the photography as a method for reflecting upon systems of value and exchange in contemporary Indigenous and settler cultures. Drawing together Australian and international practices that encounter forms of financial, political, human and photography's own capital, the project questions the capitalist model and its legacy.

If the invisible hand of the market grips the world, then Capital proposes that art can reveal and question that which seeks to bind us. Featuring Gabi Briggs (Aus), Peta Clancy (Aus), Mark Curran (Irl/De), Simryn Gill (Malaysia/Aus), Kristian Haggblom (Aus), Newell Harry (Aus), Lisa Hilli (Aus), Nicholas Mangan (Aus), Darren Siwes (Aus), Martin Toft (Jer), Yvonne Todd (NZ), Justine Varga (Aus) and Arika Waulu (Aus).

ERIN M MCCUSKEY / HELLO FOTO

The concept of place is something everyone has. We all come from a place, exist in a place, share our place. We all have a place we make our own, whether it's on the street, in public places or within our homes. We create space, and welcome people into it.

Photographic artist and filmmaker Erin M McCuskey, has created portraits with people in public places throughout Wendouree. She talked with residents about their concept of place, home and welcome. Through these talks, the narrative of the exhibition emerged. She filmed and photographed the subjects holding a miniature in their hand reflecting their heartfelt responses.

Erin M McCuskey grew up in a large Irish emigrant family in regional Victoria. Her love of the moving image grew from family films and transparencies created by her father, and the gatherings to view them. McCuskey works across many media, specialising in film, photography and both spoken and written word. In 1989 she established Yum Studio, a creative media company engaging with audiences through story and cinematic stylings. She has a passion for producing projects with human rights at their core, and creating media that is thought provoking and entertaining. Her short films, installations and commissions have screened both nationally and internationally, including at the Melbourne International Film Festival and White Night Ballarat.

BAUHAUS FOTO

Curators Fiona Sweet and Aaron Bradbrook: 2019 marks 100 years since the establishment of the iconic Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany, and the influence of the school and its subsequent artistic movement continues to be seen around the art world today. The overarching Bauhaus ideology is that all art forms should be brought together in one 'total' art, embracing the modern marvel of technology - and to achieve such a doctrine, the processes were highly experimental yet exquisitely executed.

While photography was not initially embraced at Bauhaus as an artistic medium in its own right, in the school's latter years the artform was incorporated. Bauhaus Foto brings together photographic artists from Australia, Germany and Ireland whose contemporary practice shows signs of Bauhaus influence. Six prominent artists interrogate their own photographic practices reflecting their concerns for the future of photography. Featuring Conseulo Cavaniglia (Aus), Zoë Croggon (Aus), Lilly Lulay (Germany), Roseanne Lynch (Ireland), David Rosetzky (Aus) and Thomas Ruff (Germany).

NOÉMIE GOUDAL / TELLURIS

Telluris (from the Latin Tellus for the earth) extends Goudal's earlier investigations into the sky to focus upon the earth. Journeying through Goudal's installation, the viewer will encounter works from the artist's last three photographic series; each depicting what look to be remote mountainous landscapes. Three dimensional in appearance, the images are in fact two dimensional backdrops. Re-staged and photographed in the landscape, there is a sense of familiarity about their geological forms and in the surrounding natural environment. At the same time, the mise-en-scène of each work reveals subtle elements of carefully constructed artifice; which disrupts the viewer's perception of a unified mountain.

This discontinuity introduces a sense of ambiguity and encourages the viewer to question their sense of place: is this mountain scene real or imagined? Goudal's ambiguous installation invites us to contemplate how the art of image making might help us to slow down; to look more closely and to think again. Her images ask: How might we think differently about these mysterious landscapes; their existence and evolution beyond the limitations of our senses and the boundaries of human thought?

LAIA ABRIL / A HISTORY OF MISOGYNY, CHAPTER ONE: ON ABORTION

For centuries, people have searched for ways to avoid or terminate pregnancy. Today, safe and efficient means of abortion finally exist, yet women around the world continue to use ancient, illegal or risky home methods; every year, 47,000 women around the world die due to botched abortions.

Why do they take the risk? Laia Abril's new long-term project A History of Misogyny is a visual research undertaken through historical and contemporary comparisons. In her first chapter On Abortion, Abril documents and conceptualises the dangers and damages caused by women's lack of legal, safe and free access to abortion, highlighting the long, continuous erosion of women's reproductive rights to present-day. Her collection of visual, audio and textual evidence weaves a net of questions about ethics and morality, and reveals a staggering series of social triggers, stigmas, and taboos around abortion that have been invisible until now.