Julie Hrnčířová is a photographer based in Oslo. Her long-term interest lies in her sensitivity to the details of the urban environment and the periphery. Observing these neglected places, non-places, urban coincidences and structures reveals the author's interest in a broader social context.
She graduated at Ecole Nationale Supérieure of Photographie (ENSP), Master degree, Arles, France in 2018. She participated in exhibitions as Les Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles, the GapGap Gallery in Leipzig, Gallery Fotogalleriet, Oslo , Industria Art, Brno.
https://juliehrncirova.xhbtr.com/everyday_sculpture
Peggy van Mosselaar is a documentary and visual storyteller motivated by curiosity and human interest. Van Mosselaar creates photographic and video works based upon the stories and memories of the people she meets. The artist graduated from PhotoAcademy, Amsterdam and Foto Vakschool, Rotterdam. Peggy has exhibited at Loods 6, Amsterdam; Museum Hilversum, Hilversum; and SKVR, Rotterdam. In August-November 2022, she will present her work in FOTODOK’s group exhibition Part of Me… Shaping Mental Spaces.
Recent monographic exhibition includes: Untitled, ADN_ Sea(e)scapes, 2021 at galerie Salon H, Paris, and I, the Archive,2020, at Villa Vassilieff, Paris. Kala’s most recent group exhibitions include: This is Not Africa, unlearn what you have learned, 2021 at Aros Museum, Denmark, Un.e air.e de famille, 2021, at Museum Paul Elourd, Saint-Denis, France, Polyphony, 2021 at Gera Museum, Gera, Germany. Kala’s most recent performances include: Stranger, Danger, Wait it’s a Prayer Room, Centre Pompidou, 2019, Mackandal Turns into a Butterfly: A Love potion (2018), Le Pouvoir du Dedans, La galerie Cac de Noisy-le-Sec (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala Shows and Doesn’t Tell, galerie Saint-Severin (2018). She is the winner of the ADAGP/ Villa Vassilieff Fellowship 2019-2020, a finalist of the SAM art Prix (2018) and also a finalist for the prize for contemporary talent, François Schneider Foundation (2018). Kala’s work will be included in the 5th Casablanca Biennial, Morroco, and she an artist in residency at Urbane Kuenst Ruhr in Germany in 2019-2020. She is the founder and co-organiser of e.a.s.t. (Ephemeral Archival Station), a lab and platform for long-term artistic research projects, established in 2017.
Lukáš Opekar focuses on photography and moving images, which he transforms into virtual environments, hand-printed graphics, and cyanotypes. He explores the limits of photography using methods of computer vision, but also through algae growth or drawing. Using random processes he discovers extraordinary worlds that hide behind the commonly perceived reality. He cultivates images from fragments, and the result that emerges from this substrate is largely a surprise. A long-term theme of his work is the exploration of the intermingling of living and non-living beings over time. He studied at Faculty of Art and Design Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Ústí nad Labem and he lives and works in Prague.
Alessandro Zoboli (b. 1990) graduated from the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia in 2014. Between 2015 and 2019 he worked in Alex Majoli’s studio as an assistant, refining his skills as a photographer, printer and retoucher. In 2019 he joined Cesura Agency as an official member. Over the past years he has worked on a number of different long-term projects exploring the relationship between North Africa and Europe. Zoboli has also documented the Covid-19 pandemic and housing crisis in Italy; travelling the country from North to South, he photographs the conditions of inequality that characterise western societies, highlighting the forgotten discomfort experienced by millions of families. His ongoing Shine On project explores the multifaceted and elusive face of today’s Britain: a liquid form, constantly changing and contradicting itself in search of a new identity.
By combining personal photographs with found imagery and hand-made collages with 3d printing processes, Giovanna creates imaginary landscapes inspired by surrealist paintings virtual realities and ancient cultures. Influenced by museum displays and catalogues, Giovanna populates these landscapes with her own collection of surreal artefacts. The received view of ancient objects is deliberately distorted. A recurrent feature of her work is the juxtaposition of futuristic and primordial scenarios and the combination of historical and fictional elements.
Her work is dominated by authentic recording of everyday situations with poetic- geometric narrative overlaps. The themes touch on temporality, imagination, fiction, and the search for new image contexts (re-evalution of image). Unformal documentary images are diversfield with abstract or stylized „cut-outs“ of the everyday colors. ". The conscious disruption of the timeline opens up the possibility of individual interpretation, which the viewer can understand as he or she wishes - without time constraints. Barbora in last years is interested in the relationship between static image and the moving image. Her inspiration often comes from eastern Slovakia,personal experience, the theme of growing up and aging, home, landscape,spending leisure time and health care.
She has participated in joint exhibition projects in France, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Rupublic and others. She participated in Pla(t)form 2020 in the Swiss Fotomuseum Winterthur, where she was selected along with 42 artists. Barbora Bacova actually lives and works in Košice.
Monika Orpik (b. 1997) is a visual artist from Poland, based in Hamburg. She holds a BA in Photography from London College of Communication, and is currently pursuing an MA in Photography at Hamburg’s Hochschule für bildende Künste. Approaching questions of reconciliation and dialogue in post-traumatic societies, her practice is research based, making use of archival materials, interviews, oral histories and artefacts. Her methodology involves working with specialists across various disciplines, including ethnography, anthropology, film and music. Since March 2022, Orpik has been a member of ABC (Artists’ Book Cooperative).
Website: monikaorpik.com
Her practice often deals with elusive subject matters; a search for the unknown, a psychological state, the act of communication and interpretation. She is interested in creating a loose, expressive form of documentation that leaves room for subjective interpretations, embracing the suggestive and metaphorical potential of photographs.
She gained her BA (Hons) in Photography at the University of Brighton, and has recently completed her MA in Photography at the University of West England.
She was one of the recipients of the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward award 2017, selected as a Commended winner of the Genesis Imaging Postgraduate Award 2018, shortlisted for the Brighton Photo Fringe Open Solo 18, awarded third prize in the British Journal of Photography’s International Photography Award 2019, shortlisted for the Images Vevey Book Award, and most recently selected as one of the Jury’s Choice in the Prix Virginia 2020. Her work has been exhibited nationally & internationally, including as a solo presentation at Format Festival 2019 as part of their thematic Forever/Now, at Pingyao International Photography Festival, China, in Profound Movement group exhibit at Houston Centre for Photography, and most recently as a solo exhibit at Landskrona Foto 2020.
Patricia Morosan studied photography at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. In her visual poetic work, she negotiates the duality of intimacy and identity. Represented by Galerie Franzkowiak in Berlin, her work has been exhibited internationally, among which at Les Rencontres de la Photographie d‘Arles Voies Off, Fotohaus Paris-Berlin; Les Boutographies, Pavillion Populaire Montpellier; at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest; Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin; ICR Gallery Lisabon; Kommunale Gallery Berlin; Metamatic TAF, TV Control Center (KET), Athens; Atelier Varan, Paris; at 12-14 contemporary/FotoWien, Vienna; the Noorderlicht International Festival, Netherlands and at the Foto Forum, Bolzano. 2019 she won the Jury Award from Les Boutographies, Montpellier; and the Courage Prize of the Association of Women Journalists in Germany. She was nominated for the Art Prize of the Haus am Kleistpark in Berlin (2019), for the Wellcome Photography Award (2020), the Documentary Prize Wüstenrot (2020), Gomma Grant (2021), BUP Award (2022). She received various grants from: Initial Stipend from the Academy of Arts Berlin (2021) and various grant from the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe. Her work is part of public collections, as the MNAC collection in Bucharest and the Ville of Montpellier, France and in several private collections in Europe.www.patriciamorosan.com
The Land of Promises is an invitation to explore transnational and transracial adoption in China and Belgium, both in the present day and in the past. One can imagine that during China’s one-child policy era Belgium represented “the promised land” for baby girls whose parents had to give them up. And yet, as Youqine Lefèvre’s work unfolds, and she moves from her parents’ archives to her own images, the perspective shifts. When she visits her birth country, China becomes the land of promises — of finding her roots? Her birth family? Herself?
Such an ambitious promise is easy to break, which explains the palpable melancholy in Youqine Lefèvre’s pictures. Her work also conveys the ambiguity of her position: as an adult adoptee visiting her birth country, she is “an outsider within”, so close to her photographic subjects and yet so far away. From this perspective, art is the new land of promises for Lefèvre, who uses multiple supports (film, paper, etc.) in her photographic practice to create a world where she can live her truths. The work produced by the artist thus generates the artist. Youqine Lefèvre is not only reclaiming her own narrative, but challenging the status of archives that in her hands become both art and a political statement.
Ultimately, The Land of Promises is an invitation to decentre whiteness and the Global North in the visual narrative surrounding transnational and transracial adoption.
- Text by Amandine Gay (.TIFF)
Giaime Meloni is a visual researcher with a PhD in Architecture, currently living between two islands: Île-de-France and Sardinia. The aim of his work is to explore the role of the photography as a sensible instrument to narrate the space complexity. His researches has been published in various publications (MAM Saint Etienne, INTRU). In 2017, he was shortlisted for Premio Graziadei with his long-term project Das Unheimiliche. He teaches photography as an instrument of the making of the architectural design between France and Italy.
My practice is conceived as an act capable of questioning the nature of places.
The images provide a tangible proof of my presence in the territory, in a certain way they documented it. However I would like to take distance compared to the documentation – and strictly documentary photography – in order to provide a more universal reflection on our relationship with the space.
The photographic action that I develop aims to questioning the restitution of ordinary space in search of a visual and spatial connection with the subject. The specific interest of this practice is to investigate, by theory and practice, the photographic instantaneity and the message that it carries.
The paradox of images is that they pretends to reproduce things which are only themselves. But this is only an illusion, a conviction that is a part of the magic contemplation. In fact, during the act of photographing, I realize that things denying their existence by the image.
What it remains frozen into the fragments is the (artificial) reflection of reality as an intention of my gaze.
Every photos prove that there is an implicit message exceeding the limits of the image itself. I accept that the message of the images can be corrupted / destroyed at any time by the viewer / reader.
www.giaimemeloni.com
Yana Wernicke is a German photographer. In 2021 her first photo-book, Zenker, a collaboration with Jonas Feige, was published by Edition Patrick Frey. She is currently working on a new project on the concepts of species loneliness and interspecies relationships.