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).
Her work has been shown internationally and was featured in multiple printed and online publications. She was one of the artists selected to be part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019 and was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2021.
Her work A Blurry Aftertaste is part of the Government Art Collection and it was published as a book form as part of Paper Journal Annual 2019. In the last few years Eleonora has exhibited in galleries and museums such as L21 Gallery in Palma de Mallorca, South London Gallery and Borough Road Gallery in London, Leeds Art Gallery in Leeds, MAR Ravenna, National Museum of Gdansk, and festivals such as Circulations Festival in Paris and Format Festival in Derby.
She works editorially with The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Port Magazine, among others.
Agostini uses photography, video, performance and sculpture to tell stories that raise questions about the construction of personal identities and behaviours. Her work is strongly connected with the experience of our surroundings and she is interested in exploring how the relationships that we form inform who we are.
Through the study of preconceived structures, whether physical or psychological, Agostini aims to investigate the difficulties of how human experience is constructed and she is interested in finding a possible fracture within our socially constructed rules and the spaces we inhabit. Her work often starts from personal experiences andit is the result of a long process of internalization of memories and experiences that she re-elaborate and recontextualize to give it order and gain control over them. She is interested in the psychological action of reenactment used as a tool to investigate and gain insight into one’s life: re-enacting and re-imagining old memories and past experiences become a way to unfold and observe our personal histories.
Agostini refers to the every-day as a space full of potential and possibilities for quests, incorporating ordinary objects and activities within her images to express and navigate its different layers and meanings.
Ksenia Kuleshova is a photojournalist and visual artist. She has been featured in the British Journal of Photography as one of thirty-one women to watch (2018), as one of twenty rising women photojournalists by Artsy (2019), and as one of The 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch (2022). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, DIE ZEIT, and De Standaard. Ksenia’s first book “Ordinary People” was published by The New Press (New York) in December 2023.
Cloe Jancis (b. 1992) is an artist working with photography, video, drawing and installation. In 2018, she graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a BA in photography, and is currently following an MA programme in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Jancis is fascinated by the social image and daily roles of women – and the related myths, expectations and feelings they evoke. In recent years, her work has focused on objects and rituals associated with performing femininity.
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.
Lucas Leffler revisits the past. Starting with stories rooted in reality, his projects focus on silver as a source of inspiration and discovery.
Zilverbeek (or Silver Stream) (2017–2020) is a dreamlike investigation of a man who collects mud from a stream in order to extract the precious white metal from it. The silver was the result of years of photosensitive emulsions being discharged into the water from the Agfa-Gevaert factory. The artist documents, deconstructs then reconstructs, history, brilliantly reshaping time and our perception of it to give us an oblique look at photographic materials.
His second work, Crescent (2019–2020), is a speculative study of the scientific and esoteric significance of silver. Here, the artist delves into something that fascinates him: the moon’s influence on the metal. His attempts to synthesise it result in photograms of sculptural objects and the sky — as though the heavens were being radiographed.
For Lucas Leffler, the shoot provides tangible evidence that a fantastical story — the pretext and context for his journeys — is true. He subjects this evidence to an experimental process involving chemicals and manipulation of the film and the subjects, thus creating a synthetic version of reality: one that transcends facts, muddies the path, and allows viewers to come to their own conclusions.
- Text by Emilia Genuardi (.TIFF)
Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant are two Belgian artist-photographers based in Brussels. They have a history of collaborating but launched a new project together in 2020. Studying at ESA le 75 from 2015 to 2018, Elise Dervichian deepened herself into the reportage style. Towards the end of her studies, she worked as an assistant curator at La cité des Arts in Saint Denis, Réunion Island. Her work is focused on documentary photography, working on societal subjects such as rape culture or the Armenian diaspora in Belgium. Lina Wielant graduated from Sint Lukas Hogeschool Brussel, where she primarily focused on analogue darkroom techniques, with a predilection for editing photo-books. In August 2022 she participated in a residency at DecorAtelier, (Brussels) with the organisation Dis Mon Nom, which aims to shed light on invisibilised people. Together, Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant combine analogue and digital photography, mainly through staged self-portraits and photo-montages.
He is the author of the photobooks Smog, Near, Infra, Toskana, European Eyes on Japan Vol. 18, and The Most Important Things I Do Not Tell You At All, designed by Thomas Schostock. His works have been published in SZUM, BIURO, LaVie, Machina, POST, and Bad to the Bone. He is a winner of the Show OFF Section of the Krakow Photomonth Festival 2012 and the WARTO 2015 Award.
In 2016 he was selected to take part in European Eyes on Japan—a unique project inviting photographers from European Capitals of Culture to capture everyday life in Japan. He is the winner of Griffin Art Space Prize—Lubicz 2017 for the best portfolio at Krakow Photomonth 2017. Rusznica currently runs a photography gallery, Miejsce przy Miejscu, dedicated to promoting emerging photographers from Poland and abroad.
Ines Karčáková (*1993) is multimedia artist from Slovakia, based in Prague, Czech Republic. Her interest is in topics such as light, time, space, and disturbance of their mutual interrelationships.
She reflects on the qualities of the medium of photography through video installations in the space, which are often covered by appropriated visual material, in the long term. She is primarily interested in the changing specificity of photography - its original uniqueness is rapidly changing and today we can speak of it in terms of instability, ambiguity and untrustworthiness.
Recently, she has primarily focused on research in astrophotography, among on cosmic microwave background, or on the boundary between the rough telescope record and the aestheticized photography serving to popularize astronomy itself. Now, she is forming an arc over the schematic and romanticized visions of cosmic distances, coming back to much more terrestrial problems. Her current themes are the misbalance between the pace of technological development and its actual understanding, or the consequences of long-term neglect of environmental problems. She had several exhibitions in Slovakia, Czech Republic, but also abroad - for example in Budapest, New York or Düsseldorf.
Agnieszka Sejud is an interdisciplinary visual artist operating between Hamburg and Wrocław. She holds a Master’s degree in Law from the University of Wrocław and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Silesian University in Opava (Czech Republic). In her artistic practice, Sejud engages with various media as tools for critical reflection on identity, the notion of individual freedom, and the oppressive structures that constrain human autonomy. Her work aims to deconstruct and dismantle these mechanisms through an experiment-driven artistic approach. She works with photography, both digital and analog collage, artist publications, installations, and video art. A distinctive feature of her aesthetic is the deliberate deformation of the image, which serves as an expressive vehicle for conveying complex ideas and emotions. Sejud’s works have been exhibited in numerous international contexts, affirming their universal resonance and significance within the discourse of contemporary visual art.
It’s been seven years since I left Poland, my native country. The departure created the need to question my homeland. It swings constantly back in my mind and in my works. What I try to understand is why Poland resonates in me. Why do I constantly look for it abroad whereas all I wanted was to escape from it? Finally, how can I free myself from it? Answers never come; only more questions appear. Somewhere between past and present stories, speculations; an opportunity for me to wander through different identities.
My practice mixes photography, physical presence, text, installation and sound. Our My work in progress, Dom* [EN house, home], lies between performance and theatre play, not suiting plainly to either of them. It engages two performers and me, a setting that is being constructed during the show and numerous stories that come along with it. What I explore is the visual mean in which a story, a memory, or an image is transmitted throughout a performative act.
* Dom is written by Wiktoria Synak, directed by Wiktoria Synak and Erwan Augoyard and performed by Wiktoria Synak, Anouk Boyer-Mazal and Olga Wyszkowska.
I started off with photography on a late age, because I have a history of pro-basketball player. I decided to go back and study after I quit basketball. After a stop at RITS Drama school in Brussels I started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent where I got my bachelor in Photography.
I have an undeniable curiosity and hunger for both small and large, well-known and less well-known stories. I use my camera as a key to enter a world or to make any contact. It gives me a fly on the wall feeling, with which I can experience a tranche de vie for a while. I always try to approach my subject as objectively as possible and let my eye do the work.
Photography helps me to understand certain facets of life in a better way.
I've always been attracted to uncommon subjects and stories, which aren't mainstream and easy to approach.
Michaela Nagyidaiová (b. 1996) is a Slovakian photographer based in Bratislava. Her work analyses connections between landscape, memory, identity, migration, and the topographies of Central and Eastern Europe. Interested in how ideologies and political systems influence layers of personal life – and drawing inspiration from both past events and contemporary issues – Nagyidaiová works on long-term projects that combine images with text, archival material and video. She holds an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication, and is a member of Women Photograph. Her Transient Ties project was exhibited at Fotograf Festival in Prague’s National Gallery, and at a series of further shows in Czechia, Slovenia and Austria. In 2021, Nagyidaiová participated in the Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London & Fotohof in Salzburg, as well as in the British Journal of Photography’s Open Walls ’21: Then and Now exhibition at Galerie Huit in Arles.
I’ve always loved photography, even if it sounds like a cliche. The first photos I took, I did without knowing how to do that, without paying any attention to framing, subject or composition. After a while, I began to understand what is happening in the space between me as a photographer and the subject I was photographing. And many years later, I also understood why I love to photograph. To communicate. A message, a concept, an emotion.
In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.
“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”
Michal Sita (1985) is a photographer and curator. Graduate of photography at the ITF in Opava and anthropology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he is concluding doctoral research on social uses of the past in contemporary Poland. Interested in social memory and research strategies of photography. Curator of an interdisciplinary analysis of Wiesław Rakowski’s interwar zoological photographs, curator and producer of a series of exhibitions (including Małgorzata Lebda and Rafał Siderski, Mayumi Suzuki, Jan Kurek, Martin Parr and Rimaldas Vikšraitis, Sputnik Photos, among others), and photobook festivals. Co-author of “Củ Chi Tunnels Restoration Report” (Photographic Publication of the Year 2020 – Łódź, PL), a book relating to the activities of the Polish-Vietnamese architectural heritage conservation mission. Author of “History of Poland” vol. 1 and 2 — publications commenting on anthropological research carried out in Murowana Goślina among volunteers staging a large-scale historical pageant. Author of critical texts on photography. Lecturer at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań.
Arno Brignon (b. 1976) lives and works in Toulouse. With a background as an educator in underprivileged neighbourhoods, he later devoted himself fully to photography, joining the Signatures agency in 2013. Brignon’s work questions the place of man in the world, exploring ideas of territory and memory through a poetic photographic approach. He divides his time between teaching, residency programmes, personal research and assignments for various media outlets. Brignon’s images are regularly exhibited both domestically and internationally, whilst his works is found in a series of private and public collections. Thus far, he has published four books Ancrages, D'après une histoire vraie, La formacion de las olas, and Terre et Territoire #1.
arno-brignon.fr
@arnobrignon
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.