The work of Eline Benjaminsen (NO, 1992) studies the lacking visuality of socioeconomic processes and how this effects our ability to engage with them. She deals with the challenge of perceiving market processes through photographic follow-the-money narratives that combine prints, video and text in mixed media installations.
In 2017 she graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (Department of Photography) with the project Where the money is made - Surfaces of algorithmic capital about the infrastructure of algorithmic stock trading. The project was awarded the Steenbergen Stipendium (2017) and was nominated for the Zilveren Camera category Prijs voor Storytelling (2018) along multiple other nominations. She collaborates with a variety of platforms, from museums and galleries to the financial press.
The latest exhibits of her work include Stroom (NL), FOTODOK (NL), Lianzhou Foto Festival (CN), Heden (NL) and Krakow Photomonth (PL).
Nolwenn Brod is a French artist based in Paris. She has studied humanities and social sciences, and trained in photography in London and at the Ecole des Gobelins in Paris. She is a member of the Vu Agency and represented by the eponymous gallery in Paris since 2016.
She develops her projects most often in the context of creative residencies in France and Europe where she mixes photography and video; and responds to commissions for the press and institutions. Her works are regularly exhibited in France and Europe and are included in the collections of the Bnf (French National Library), the Cnap, the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, the Museum of Brittany, the Villa Noailles, the Agnès b. collection, the Neuflize OBC Foundation, art libraries and private collections.
Her first book was published by Poursuite Editions in 2015, the second is in preparation.
Hunor Tóth (b. 2000) is a visual artist from Romania, currently residing and creating back and forth between Budapest, his home village of Tăureni (RO), and Odorheiu Secuiesc (RO). In 2024, he graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest with a Master's degree in Photography.
In his artistic practice, he consistently focuses on rural life and its various aspects. Primarily, he engages in the photographic exploration and documentation of rural existence, aiming not only to dispel stereotypical images of the countryside but also to draw attention to the significance of contemporary rural culture and the various ways the concept of the village can be interpreted. He is interested in how rural communities redefine themselves, adapt, and change in response to contemporary challenges such as urbanization, modernization, and globalization.
His work combines staged and documentary photography. This combination is a defining element of his artistic practice.
Throughout my practical and theoretical based art, I work across mediums, with a focus on photography. I explore forms of the female body, ideas of beauty, desires, taboos and sexuality. Subsequently, I analyze the interdependencies of women on social norms. I am interested in how society shapes norms that influence the representation and perception of women and how the female body can be used as a tool of power.
Sex workers are sensitive observers of our society, especially about what we do not dare to see. Thus, I consider this work a reflection on society as a whole. Sex is at first place about pleasure, desire and lust, addiction and ecstasy. At the same time, it is about power, about hierarchies, about interrelationships of men and women. It appears that the female body becomes a political weapon. How we live and talk about sex says much about our taboos and fantasies and finally how society is created by a world that exists by judging the unknown instead of listening to each other.
I am grateful for every single conversation and the time I could spend with the women who became part of this work. I cannot express in words how much they taught me about life, about our society and finally about myself.
I did not believe how much we have in common. I found my soulmates in these women who are not only crucial for the existence of this body of work, but close friends that I don ‘t want to miss anymore.
With this work I share some personal insights that truly are my own observations and therefor fully subjective on this topic. It is a collection of images and notes from women I admire and who I met in Brussels, Athens, Paris and Accra.
He holds a first-class honours degree in Documentary Photography from Newport, University of South Wales. Venezia has exhibited his work in solo shows at VOID (Greece) and JEST (Italy), while his work was displayed in group exhibitions at Fondazione Fabbri (Italy), Capa Photography Center (Hungary), ISSP Gallery (Latvia) and Gallery Image (Denmark). His project Nekyia is a book published by the Italian independent editor Witty Books in May 2017, the monograph is part of the collection at the National Art Library of Victoria & Albert Museum in London and Colección FOLIO at Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City.
His latest work - Is Life Under The Sun Not Just a Dream - started in 2018 and developed under the European Program Parallel Platform, by which Venezia has been selected as second cycle emerging artists.
Next to his personal projects, Rocco is working as a curator for PHmuseum and he is the co-founder of PHmuseum Lab, a photographic hub based in Bologna.
Andrei Budescu has been fascinated by cameras and photography since he was a young boy. Over the last 10 years he has been experimenting with different photographic processes (Polaroid, Wet Plate Collodion) and different cameras (4x5, 5x7, 8x10 cameras). Andrei uses different cameras for his processes and recently he started refurbishing a mammoth camera for his Wet Plate Collodion Process which will be added to his collection.
Through long term projects she explores the topics of death, immortality as well as the relationship between photography and extinction. She is part of PARALLEL - European Photo Based Platform, Haute Photographie Talents and was selected as the GUP New Talent of the year 2020.
Ugo Woatzi’s photographs reference real and imagined spaces caught between the worlds of freedom and constraint. He reveals and yet conceals, as a chameleon changes colour to blend in and survive. Ugo’s collaborative process is a reflection of the desires and struggles of his community. Together they create a more sensitive and accepting world, one that both escapes from and confronts the harsh realities of divisive heteronormative structures. The images, tender yet defiant, transmute feelings of love and of conflict, a relatable and universal sense of longing. His sensuous, quietly intimate gaze taps into subtler aspects of human desire — and yet these seemingly accessible emotions are simultaneously blocked in an act of obfuscation. His concealment of faces and identities evokes the fear, censorship and stifling experienced by queer communities across the globe.
Ugo invites us to consider and celebrate a range of masculinities, performative bodies, psyches, and experiences, as he explores the idea of “visibility” as one fraught with both fear and excitement. This duality is embodied powerfully in Ugo’s work, which is both a performance and a lived reality, the speaking of truths and the creating of fictions. That is the nature of photography: to create new worlds from fragments of previous ones. It is in this new world, in the sensitivity of Ugo’s gaze, that we finally access a space of acceptance.
- Text by Michelle Harris (.TIFF)
Nazanin Raissi (b. 1981, Tehran) is a Swedish-Iranian artist and clinical psychologist based in Sweden. Centred on the medium of photography, her work ranges from site-specific installations to video animation and sculpture. Her research-based artistic practice explores themes of memory, loss, and displacement.
Kreuger uses her own archive as the starting point of her work in which she combines photography, found footage, and texts.Intuitively she categorizes, combines and edits images, and uses the exhibition space as a canvas to build new stories on.
Over twenty years ago, Jaakko Kahilaniemi, who was barely eight at that time, inherited 100 hectares of forest. The abstraction which this represents for a child, is followed by an indifference which it evokes for an adolescent. After all, this is hardly very exotic for a Finn: forest covers more than 70% of the country, totalling 26 million hectares. Fairly recently, this photographer decided to return to this heritage in order to explore its twists and turns. This series, called 100 Hectares of Understanding retraces his journey towards an appropriation of this land which is too big for a single – young – man. Photography thus becomes the location where the experience of the landscape can be filtered as it is travelled through, physically, mentally, and sentimentally. These explorations blend physical crossings and digital incursions, photographed panoramas and painted landscapes. The photographer combines these vast misty lands with a still life of a small wooden log resting upon a scale, or simple twigs upon a black background: from the infinitely big to the infinitesimal, each photograph constitutes a piece of an important memory game whose perimeter, one might imagine, increases as the photographer walks and the man grows up.
Joud Toamah is an interdisciplinary graphic designer and visual researcher based in Antwerp, Belgium. The project 'Archive of Traveling Images, an Image Amidst the Heart' (2018–ongoing) is an archive of digitised images of family albums that the artist sources from acquaintances, friends and family members in Syria and the diaspora. Toamah collects pictures that have undergone processes of scanning, uploading, searching, cutting, pasting, renaming, compressing, downloading, forwarding, etc. As such, she is creating digital archives of private and intimate images. But her research highlights something more interesting than the photographs themselves: the way that this digital circulation within personal networks becomes reflected in the image itself. Digital reproduction and circulation — the conditions of recreating bonds after displacement — leave their traces. In its digital journey of relocation, the image acquires consecutive layers of relationality.
Toamah’s art and research are deeply relatable despite the fact that her archive of travelling images is not publicly accessible. Although she chooses to share only the project’s conditions and context, her approach is poetic rather than analytical. We are invited to see how she secures the invisible, the inaccessible, the untranslatable. The artist’s research suggests that to safeguard one’s humanity, one must retain agency over one’s images — and protect them from the othering gaze. Yet her project moves beyond this aspect: through the recollection of private and personal images, she creates personal bonds based on reciprocity, generosity, care and feedback. Photography becomes an interaction between people, a tool to talk and share. A tool for knowledge production, for telling and retelling, for activating each other’s stories and memories.
The digitised images reveal their unique materiality: the fading of the paper, the despair that one will forget certain places, the writing scribbled on the backs of photographs to remind us across generations and distances that to remember is to relate. Toamah’s research moves beyond the binary oppositions between digital and material, here and there, past and present. She establishes a relational archive and an aesthetics of care: the archive of travelling images creates simultaneously belonging and protection.
- Text by Petra Van Brabandt (.tiff)
Martyna Benedyka, born in 1991, is a Polish visual artist, vocalist and teacher working in a wide range of media including painting, film and digital photography, collage, installation, and sound art. She studied Art and Design at the Gray’s School of Art in Scotland, UK and graduated with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art Painting in 2014. She has exhibited in the UK, Poland, Romania, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Canada and the USA. Her work has been chosen by the Federation of British Artists for the Futures - UK’s largest annual survey of emerging contemporary figurative art at the Mall Galleries, London, among others. She is the recipient of both Polish and British scholarships for her artistic achievements as well as the winner of international residencies and competitions - the latest being the Photo Romania Festival 2022 and De Structura cross-border project 2022-2023, Tallinn, Estonia. Her work is in private and public collections. She specializes in classical music and has performed in many group as well as solo concerts internationally since 2004.
https://martynabenedyka.com
His work has been recognized by several public and private institutions, such as the Salomon R. Guggenheim (USA) or the Sasakawa Foundation (Japan-Scandinavia). He has exhibited in numerous countries like: Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, UK, Slovakia, Norway, Russia or Singapore.
His practice is focused on new approaches to the idea of contemporaryy landscape, he has develop different bodies of work such us Metropolis (2018-2019), De Magnete (2016-2018), Environments (2014-2016), Velocidad de las Ventanas (2015) or Almost Black (2011-2015).
Gorospe combines his work as an artist with the study and understanding of the image from a theoretical point of view.
He collaborates in different projects as a curator and photo-editor.
Julia Gaes (b. 1993) lives and works in Hamburg. Her work is primarily focused on ideas of body image and identity. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Photography at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld in 2018, and received a Master of Arts in Photography at the HAW Hamburg in 2022. Gaes has exhibited her work at a range of international festivals, including the Triennial of Photography, Hamburg; Kolga Festival, Tbilisi; and Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam.
Wbsite: www.juliagaes.de
Olgaç has most recently been featured in British Journal of Photography's "Ones to Watch" photographers of 2019, and Aperture’s "Element of Style" issue, that investigates the role of style, dress, and beauty in the formation of individual identity. His work has also been published such as M Le Monde, New York Times Style Magazine, Dazed, Dust, Replica.
https://www.olgacbozalp.co.uk/
Zane Priede (b.1990) a self-taught still life photographer based in Riga, Latvia, has a background in design and a passion for photography. A graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Priede’s work creates imaginary and surreal scenes with everyday objects, infusing them with fantasy. Her deep fascination for architecture and design can be seen in her visual approach, which involves constructing scenes with small-scale objects. Her interest in science, biology, and psychology are also evident in her visual explorations, contributing a playful approach to storytelling, and discovering the fantastical in the mundane.
During Photo London in 2018, They were my landscape (MACK) was launched.
Kiely was nominated for the Paul Huf Award, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award and selected to be in the British Journal of Photography Ones to Watch, Talent issue (2018).