Max is a documentary and portrait photographer who focuses on stories about society, social and ecological chances. He is a founding member of DOCKS collective.
With a mindful approach she seeks stillness and hidden messages in ordinary life, often exploring society, human-made landscape and nature.
Bundurakis’ work focuses on how it feels to be a living organism in this era that lies between the primal, the modern & the post natural-world. Images collide and divide according to the situation. Drawings, video and haikus are incorporated. Extracting fragments of the bodies that surround her and her own, she layers the pure with the artificial and the thirst for something truly crisp with loss and boredom, aiming to create cosmic and organic sensations.
In her project Eating Magma, Elena focuses on 4 ‘F’s: her Flesh, her Food, Fauna, and Flora. Creating an interconnecting universe, by combining these 4 ‘F’s, whose roles and existence, constantly shift and mutate into each other, she attempts to find an emotional and ethical position within a society ruled by control systems.
www.freethecelery.com
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
The work of Thomas Nolf examines the ways in which national myths are formed, instrumentalised and frequently suppressed. Confounding fiction and documentary, fabled event and scientific enigma, his work looks into how nation-building ideology influences modes of storytelling, and vice versa. Nolf handles his subjects with a close appreciation of narrative and its ambiguous relationship with veracity and considers the ways in which heritage and eroded beliefs can be re-established and repurposed.
For his long-term project Peculiar Artefacts in Bosnia and Herzegovina - an imaginary exhibition, for example, Nolf’s point of departure was the so-called “Bosnian pyramids” and other disputed historical sites and artefacts, including stone spheres and medieval monuments. Juxtaposing his own documentary work with kitschy acrylic paintings of dream-like, bucolic landscapes and an assortment of found photographic footage —including shots of a triangular mountain looming over a scenic village and a shepherd carrying a sheep on his back — Nolf keeps adding elements to our already confused reading of the phenomenon, its emergence and reception. By doing so, he revives the public controversy over the existence of an ancient civilisation in the region.
Drawing on the mythological dimension of the triangle-shaped hills, Nolf proposed an exhibition that would exploit the stories and objects surrounding the “Bosnian pyramids” to the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, in 2012, had temporarily closed its doors due to a lack of state funds. If myths and legends have proven to be valuable assets in branding a particular place as a unique tourist experience, its effectiveness in generating local informal economies might as well be explored.
Even if Nolf’s project-based practice is driven by a pragmatic desire to formulate alternatives to the status quo, he poetically engages with particular sites and times, carefully tending to a range of subjects — from the promise of a desirable ancient past to the current funding realities devastating cultural institutions in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina — while, at the same time commenting on photography's rhetorical qualities and its — at times deceptive — relationship to representation and truth-telling.
Text by Laura Herman
Her aim is to make the spectator observe and to be observed at the same time. While we watch others, we are being watched too. The desire of observing one another, of having insight into the lives of others posits a system of norms based on which we define ourselves compared to others. We want to confirm that we have similar problems as others, that we are better than or just as good as they are. In other words, that we only deviate from the average on an average scale.
Her works explore how we can describe our body in the most objective manner possible, to represent it without any intimacy whatsoever. Looking at these so-called anti-intimate states, the works examine all the subtle and complex relationships our physical extension forms with our environment, and how social expectations shape our appearance. Personal stories and critical observations regarding the body are represented along with abstract objects and intertwined sculptural bodies. Her fundamental medium is photography that she often combines with other disciplines, such as objects, photobooks or video.
Having worked for several years in various media as a photojournalist, he made the decision to turn in their work and personal lives mainly developing projects of human and environmental fields.
He is currently also as a photo guide in Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Norway and Ukraine.
Eva Bevec (b. 1998) is a designer, visual artist, and photographer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She completed her undergraduate studies in visual communications (with a focus in graphic design) with honors at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2020. She continued her design studies abroad, at the Master Department of Information Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where she graduated with honors in 2023.
She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Slovenia as well as internationally, showcasing her works at the prominent Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, at the Brumen Design Biennial in Ljubljana, and at Layerjeva hiša in Kranj, among others. In 2020, she held her first solo exhibition titled “Madeleines and Linden Tea” at DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana. She has received various awards for her work, such as the student Prešeren Award of the University of Ljubljana and the Brumen recognition for excellent Slovenian design. She also participated in the international pharmaceutical conference Health Services Research & Pharmacy Practice in the United Kingdom with her graduate thesis project, Developing a user-focused standardised design system for prescription medicine packaging in Slovenia.
In her artistic and design practice, Eva explores various media and topics, always connected by a genuine interest in the ordinary and the banal aspects of her surroundings. Through curious and critical investigation and documentation of the seemgly mundane, she reveals deeper and broader social, political, as well as aesthetic questions, patterns and implications. The prosaic becomes the extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes the poetic.
A common thread throughout his practice is an interest in the metaphorical potential of photographs. His project, ‘John’s Notebooks’ (2020-2021), pulls on the symbolism present with the landscape of the home to touch on the emotions and memories connected to the childhood loss of his father. Whereas his most recent work ‘Murmurations’ (2020-21), employs the starling murmuration as a symbol to reflect on the current global crisis and the act of coming together and converging as a group.
Barraclough is a recent graduate of the MA Photography programme at Bristol UWE and is due to exhibit his master’s project, ‘John’s Notebooks’, at the 2021 Bristol Photo Festival.
Sebastian Koudijzer (b. 1993) studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. Growing up as a child of different races – and surrounded by a large extended family on his Javanese side – he is interested in how identities are created. Using various techniques, he creates intimate stories that address themes of family, faith, identity, and their representations. Collaboration plays an important role in his projects; Koudijzer likes to give those he photographs space for their own voice. His work is an attempt to bring disappearing traditions, values and spirituality back into his own reality, with the camera becoming an exploratory tool.
I'm a photographer based in Brussels. After a stint at the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie in Arles, France, I have developed my practice with the support of various art institutions, including Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Centre photographique d'Île-de-France, FOMU in Antwerp, and Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire in Dakar. My work operates at the crossroads of official history, erased memory, and personal narrative, exploring the ecological, social, and spiritual transformations that marked the Brazilian Amazon at the turn of the 20th century. Through my practice, I examine the philosophical and phantasmal framework that sustain the ideals of discovery, conquest, and supremacy central to Western modernity, offering a subtle yet incisive reflection on their enduring impact.
Mentored by the Magnum photographer Carl De Keyzer, he chose not to show the war in the east, but to focus on the aspects of life presented to him in the capital Kiev. By his active presence his work functions as an extension on the early 20th century documentary approach and tends to reveal universal questions rather then to depict actual proof of fact.
While working on two new projects, David is finishing the dummy book of Let Us Not Fall Asleep with the input of British Ukrainian researcher and cultural manager Myroslava Hartmond. Within the book the images will be interconnected with referential sources, testimonies and reflections on the impact that both media and politics have on the hybrid war that is putting strains on the Ukrainian dream and experience of freedom. This book will be published at the end of 2018, exactly 5 years after the start of the hybrid war.
By adhering to the seemingly simple and straightforward medium most of us engage with every day Krummi is able to push himself forward and engage with his environment. He rattles on, maneuvering through the obstacle course of his everyday life with his unconventional walking pattern - a clumsy flaneur.
Krummi was a teenager when he became disabled. Through his relationship with the photographic medium he has come to see that whether he is able, less able, more able or disable, he is always, in some way, able.
Krummi has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, most recently in a curated group exhibition at Reykjavik Museum of Photography.
Pavo Marinović (b. 1995) is a photographer and visual artist who lives and works between France, Switzerland and the Balkans. In 2020, he graduated with a BA in Photography from Lausanne’s ECAL. His work has since been shown at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Paris Photo, amongst others. Traversing fields of identity, conflict, and collective memory through photography, video and installation, Marinović’s practice explores the state of a territory in transit, as well as its social effects.
Nina Hansch is a photographer who works in classical photojournalism. Her documentary works are characterized by their nuances and a cinematic quality in her visual language. At the same time, she succeeds in emphasizing the socio-political relevance of her stories and in exploring their visual complexity.
"I am always curious about the facets and details of life and humanity. And often ask myself questions like: What are the decisions and circumstances that consequently made us who we are today?", explains the artist.
Visual artist, performer, author of installations and video art. PhD fellow at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City in 2023. MFA graduate of the Studio of Spatial Activities of prof. Mirosław Bałka at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2020). Also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2010-11) in Amsterdam and during an internship at the Studio of Performance at FaVU VUT in Brno led by Julie Béna and Jakub Jansa (2021). Received the Europe Beyond Access award granted by Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and British Council in 2021 and the Grand Prix at the 10th Biennale of Young Art Rybie Oko (Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Słupsk, 2022). Presented her works and performances at, among others, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2023), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2022), Galeria Miejska Arsenał in Poznań (2022), Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (2021), Sto Lat Gallery in New York (2021).
He has published several books with his photographic series. His work is held in a number of private collections nationally and internationally. In 2019, Andrii Dostliev was awarded the 3rd prize at the II Ukrainian Biennale of Young Art for his project examining the mythologization of memories of a territory lost due to a military conflict.