Jan Kazimierz Barnaś – born in Sandomierz on September 12, 1991; currently permanently connected with Lodz. Student at the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in lodz in the specialty of Photography and Multimedia. In his works, he often takes up the subject of the destruction of the image, his main interest is film and video art. As the FILMMAKER on his account, he has several etudes, video-arts, animations, music videos and feature films.
Wojciech Kamerys – born in 1994, student of the faculty of Photography and Multimedia Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in lodz. Practice based on photography, combined with other media. Participant of several exhibition in Lodz, Gdynia and Bydgoszcz. Cooperation with Academy of Music in Lodz, and The National Film, Television and Theatre School of Lodz and MS1 in Lodz. Theme of works based in relation between human and architecture, funcion of light and shadow in a classic silver photography.
Benedek Bognár (1986) lives and works in Budapest. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. In 2012 he studied performance and video art at the Estonian Academy of Art in Tallinn on an Erasmus scholarship. His series of works address issues related to current social phenomena, aiming to create unusual or new perspectives. He is primarily concerned with the symptoms of virtuality, digitalization, and the age of image-based communication. In his work, he often reflects on photography itself as a medium capable of creating the illusion of an objective representation of the world and its role in the process of human cognition. In his recent work, he has been concerned with modern myths and the general human need for irrational stories to explain the world. In his thesis, Genesis, he examined how the entertainment and advertising industries use the patterns, archetypes, and topoi from which humanity’s ancient great myths were built, from the perspective of the functioning of consumer society. In his work CUI PRODEST, which he is working on under the József Pécsi Photography Scholarship, he deals with the pseudo-news and disinformation of the world, which are based on irrational contexts and enemy images instead of scientific paradigms.
Jonas Yang Tislevoll (b. 1993) was born as Jin Sub Yang in the city of Daegu. At 4-months old, he was given a new name by his adoptive parents in Fitjar, a small farming town in Western Norway. After studying photography in Oslo from 2019 to 2021, Yang Tislevoli moved back to South-Korea in the hope of finding his biological mother. This laid the foundation for the series, Take care of yourself son, your mom loves you. The project explores themes of identity, belonging, social issues, women's rights and adoption in South Korea. Yang Tislevoli does not see himself as a photographer, but as an individual who uses the medium of photography to tell stories that deserve to see the light of day.
@jonastislevoll
www.jonastislevoll.no
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.
Something flows, slowly, perhaps a syrup, yet nothing saccharin arises out of Sanna Lehto’s image, but rather a bittersweet background which rests tranquilly. At the heart of this muffled world, beneath a dome, a small flower has traded its innocence in order to come and pass away on the surface of faces, the fluid has abandoned its lightness and its movement in order to gain in weight. Air is rare in Sanna Lehto’s photographic world. The image sometimes blushes, at other times it pales: the chromatic palette varies from crimson red to pink, as if these faces encapsulated between the glass lens and the sensor were breathing gently. A sort of photographic herbarium, that is what she seems to evoke through these portraits and still lifes. The creative process is not that dissimilar: during her summertime walks she gathers and picks, flowers gleaned from the Finnish countryside; sometimes she buys them, guided by a vision of a coloured harmony rather than through any symbolism. Often, she dries them and awaits for a suitable visual frame in order to place them in the photographic field. We may imagine her, back in her studio, patiently pinning these specimens one by one, according to the fortunes of encounters and visual stimuli.
Born in Gran Canaria in 1973, living in Berlin.
Lorena studied fine art photography between 1992 and 1995 in Boston. Sometime later she went to Barcelona to study filmmaking but moved back to the island after one year in film school. Immediately she joined the team of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, this work got her closer to another one of her passions, films. Being so close to many radical authors and watching their personal films made an impact on her approach to photography.
Mum of 5 children. Since 2008 she has obsessively photographed and filmed her loved ones and their lives together developing over the years a coherent photographic work of a special intensity, building an ongoing project she titled Je reste avec vous. Her images reflects her daily life and focus on her most immediate universe.
She is one of the photographers from collective Temps Zero, an international group of artists working with photographs, films and sound presenting exhibitions and performances around Europe.
She recently published a book with Brazo de Papel/ Fotonoviembre called Himmelskörper, result of the last two years observing her younger children are growing and how their lives unfold fully in the space called Home, reflecting the moment in which we live and what happens outside.
Presently, Lorena diversifies her time between her artist activity and her work as a film programmer and advisor.
In the past years, she has been regularly exhibiting in Italy, Hungary, and the United Kingdom. Her work is part of the University of the Arts London collection and several Vienna and London-based private collections. Since 2017, she is a student of MA Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest.
www.bollaszilvia.com
Nikhil Vettukattil (1990, Bengaluru, India) is an artist and writer who lives and works in Oslo.
He uses a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes related to lived experiences. He has previously exhibited at venues such as Kunsthall Oslo (2022), K-U-K, Trondheim (2021), CAPC, Bordeaux (2021), Art Hub Copenhagen (2021), K4 Galleri, Oslo (2021), Louise Dany, Oslo (2020), EKA Gallery, Tallinn (2020), Kristiansand Kunsthall (2020), and Le Bourgeois, London (2019). Forthcoming exhibitions include Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, and the National Museum of Norway, both taking place in June 2022. He is a member of Tenthaus and Carrie's art collectives and a part of Atelier Kunstnerforbundet (2021-2023).
M.D.C. always starts a conversation about Reference Guide with the last photo in the book, and this time is no exception. He took the photograph in question in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
He enjoys telling the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine, a collection of 18th-century fake fossils — known in English as Beringer’s Lying Stones — of which some can be found at the abovementioned museum. In 2017, H.V., who was in charge of managing the science collection, gave M.D.C. and L.K. a guided tour of the museum and told them of all kinds of curiosities to be found there, including the famous Lügensteine. In the early 18th century, two palaeontologists were keen to play a trick on an arrogant colleague, a certain Johann Beringer. They buried a large part of around 2,000 fake fossils — featuring suns, stars, snails, shells and even Hebrew inscriptions — and sent a beautiful young woman, who pretended to be a doctorate student, to visit Beringer with the rest of the stones. He fell into the trap and went in search of the fossils. He found them, believed the hand of God to be the only explanation for these — what were referred to back then as — ”figure stones”, and wrote a scientific article about them.
Things ended badly for everyone. Beringer realised too late that he had been tricked. He took his colleagues to court and won the case; however, his own name will always be associated with the Lügensteine. M.D.C. grins as he tells the story but is no longer sure whether the young lady’s role in it is true.
We read about the entries in Reference Guide at the back of the publication: “The collection demonstrates a surprisingly high interest in characters and phenomena along the sidelines of these episodes and displays a severe tendency to digress”. A few days later, L.K. calls H.V. just to check the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine. It was most likely two small boys who first brought the stones to Johann Beringer.
- Text by Lars Kwakkenbos (.TIFF)
Her work is centred around reworkings of historical tropes relating to the black female body, taking from contexts that include art historical paintings and sculptures as well as 19th century colonial photography. She works to subvert established notions about black female sexuality and the standard of beauty ascribed to black females. By placing historical imagery in a contemporary context, the relationship between the treatment of the black female body in the past and its treatment in the present day is explored. Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Photography, she has been a recipient of the SSA New Graduate Award and the Degree Show Purchase Prize, resulting in her work becoming part of The University of Edinburgh Art Collection.
Simon Grunert (b. 1990) is a German photographer and graphic designer. He holds a Bachelor's degree in North American Studies and a Masters in Photography from the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Gent. With a focus on photobooks, Grunert utilises a documentary approach to build imaginary realms and topographies. His work has been exhibited in various institutions in Germany and France, and has featured in publications such as Camera Austria International.
Wbsite: simongrunert.com
Cristina Gârleșteanu (b. 1984) is a photographer and marketing professional. With a background in social sciences – she attended the Faculty of International Relations and European Studies at UBB Cluj-Napoca – photography was a means to bring her closer to this field. A former Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine FOTO4all, Gârleșteanu is also a co-founder of Bucharest Photo Week. Her images have been published in a range of magazines, whilst her work has featured in various group and solo exhibitions, most recently in the USA and Mexico. Gârleșteanu is a member of Women Street Photographers. Her photobook, The Flight Odyssey, was published in 2022.
Dorota Franková is a Czech photographer finishing her studies of photography at the Libuše Jarcovjáková’s studio at the Faculty of Design and Art Ladislav Sutnar in Pilsen. She is engaged in various professions such as social worker in nursing home. In 2022, she devoted a photographic series in a hospice, where she encountered the passing of people to the other side. Here she interviewed dying people and documented their last moments. She has also been working on a documentary about her ailing grandmother for several years. She enjoys fashion photography and loves collaborating with musicians on their album booklets. A core part of her work is self-reflection and understanding emotional states and their reflection in photography.
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.
Kristina Õllek (b.1989, Estonia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She is working in the field of photography, video and installation, with a focus on investigating representational processes, geological and ecological matter, and the human-made environment. In her practice she frequently uses situations when fact and fiction, synthetic and natural, copy and original intertwine with each other and become a hybrid object / matter to obtain new and reconsidered meaning.
Her works are often site-sensitive, analysing the exhibition location and format, questioning modes of presentation and installation politics, viewing it from different perspectives — from a historical museum to online space.
Kristina Õllek has graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts (BA degree in 2013, MA degree in 2016; at the Photography Department, Fine Arts). She has also studied at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016) and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2012). She’s been the laureate of the Estonian Academy of Arts Young Artist Prize 2013 (BA) and 2016 (MA). In 2019 she received the Art Proof Production Grant. Her works have recently been shown in various international group and solo exhibitions in Estonia and abroad. Her works can be found in private and public collections.
www.kristinaollek.com