Katerina Moschou moves fluidly between sculpture and photography, with printmaking and painting forming the core of her practice. Her multidisciplinary approach allows her to transfer characteristics from one medium to another, shaping an evolving artistic language.Observing both human-made and natural environments, she captures their intricate relationships and translates them into material and form. Her work highlights the peripheral, uncovering interactions between living and non-living entities while bringing overlooked narratives into focus.Katerina studied Fine Arts at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and École Supérieure d’Art | Dunkerque-Tourcoing. Her first photobook, How to Drive, a collaboration with Zoetrope Athens, received the Polycopies & Co Grant (Paris, 2022), won the ArtsLibris Banc Sabadell Award (Barcelona, 2023), and was shortlisted for the PhotoESPANA Best Photography Book Award (Madrid, 2023). How to drive has been featured in renowned bookstores across Europe and the U.S. Her work has been exhibited in Poland, Italy, and France.
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)
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.
Seppe Vancraywinkel (1998) grew up on the countryside in Hoegaarden, Belgium. He has always been surrounded by his close friends and they were always on the go, they still are. Since 2016 Vancraywinkel felt the need to capture these moments analog in black- and-white. Black and white is an important aspect in his work. It’s Seppes way of creating a filter that shields his dreamlike world from reality. He feels like colours are too close to reality, they can cause unnecessary distractions. Seppe Vancraywinkels work revolves around stories, shapes and scales.
vancraywinkel.seppe@gmail.com@seppevancraywinkelhttps://seppevancraywinkel.com/
In 2022 she was shortlisted at Sony World Photography Awards, Open Competition: Portraiture. In 2023 she was shortlisted at Sony National & Regional Awards. She had collective exhibitions in: Romania, France and The United States. Maria is interested in documentary photography, remote places, youth, notion of home and the relation between humans and environment.
Stefania Orfanidou was born in 1989. She is a photographer and an architect currently living and working in Athens, Greece. She has lived in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Madrid, Rotterdam, L’Aquila and Chania. In January 2019 she founded the architectural atelier CHORA. In her work, a personal experience or event, real or imaginary, is the starting point for fragments’ stitching and the composition of tales, where the irrational, the reasonable, the uncanny and the secret may coexist harmoniously. Her photographic work has been featured in magazines, galleries and festivals in Greece and abroad. In February 2019 she published the book ‘Pendulum’, a visual recounting of a return journey to the city of L’Aquila in central Italy. In 2020 she received the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. In 2021 she published the book ‘Cold Turkey’ and she created the art installation ‘Daidala’ at Yali Tzamisi at Chania, Crete.
Sensitive to the cracks that our society is going through, her work focus on social issues and human bodies as territories. Celine uses film codes to transgress the world she’s looking at.
Her various works as a photographer and video artist were presented at the Billboard Festival in Casablanca (2015), the Marrakech Biennale in 2016, the Paraguay Biennale (El ojo Salvaje - 2018), the Tangier Photography Foundation (2019), the Dummy Award Photobook of Kassel and the Fuam Dummy Book Award from Istanbul in 2018.
In 2019, she is the winner of the In Cadaqués Festival with « SQEVNV », and the Revelation Price between Festival Map and Face à la mer.
In 2020, she is selected among 100 emerging European photographers by Gup magazine and Fresh Eyes Photo Talent 2020 (book published in July 2020) and she’s the winner of the Prix Mentor 2020 with « Mala Madre ».
In 2021, she’s one of the finalist of the HSBC prize 2021 with « SQEVNV » and will exhibited it in April at the Festival Instantes in Portugal.
Her work 'Nothing Hapenned' will be exposed in April 2021 at the Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale de Niort (Villa Perochon). She’s also have been selected by Claudio Composti for the Leica Oscar Barnack, and she’s one of the laureate of the Tremplin Jeunes Talents of the Festival Planches Contact in Deauville 2021.
The photographs in an archive or collection often have no beginning or end, but they exist in layers. When moving in-between these layers, norms and structures emerge but also veins of emotion and sudden affects. These aspects co-play and turn “seeing” and ideas of how to see into a complex framework.
"I work project-oriented, and I often use somewhat divergent visual expressions in my work. The common thread is the type of material that usually work with and how I approach it."
Main topics in her practice are: life in province, religion, connections between mythology and identity, her private relations with the world and her own country, with life and death. Her working method — continuous travels to small towns. She looks for something unique — people, communities, as well as place sand objects they produce. Elena says that provincial towns can be compared to separated islands, which are far enough from the mainland for evolution to goin a very unique way. She collects peculiarities of local cultures, since is sure they are on the edge of extinction, caused by globalization as well as just poverty.
Her project “Grandmothers on the Edge of Heaven” is a private family story, but also a reflection on the gap between generations. Which is multiplied in her case by the gap between two countries and two political systems: Soviet Union and modern Ukraine.
She is a student of the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava (the Czech Republic), winner of the PDN Emerging Photographer, last year's laureate of the Konrad Pustoła's Remembrance Scholarship, winner of the Sputnik Photos Project titled "As you can see". Her works have been published e.g. in The Calvert Journal, Culture.pl, FK magazine.
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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.
Karim El Maktafi (Desenzano del Garda, 1992) is an Italian Moroccan photographer based in Milan. In 2013 he graduated at the Instituto Italiano di Fotografia in Milan. In 2016, he obtained a one-year scholarship at Fabrica, Benetton's communication research center in Treviso.
During his residency period, El Maktafi made the project Hayati and, one year later, won the PHMuseum 2017 Grant - New Generation Prize. With the same project, El Maktafi has been finalist of the CAP Prize 2017 (Contemporary African Photography prize) and second prize at the Kassel Dummy Award 2018. In 2017 he won a mentorship with the American photographer Maggie Steber (VII Agency), while in 2018 he gets the Magnum Photos scholarship with Alex Majoli.
Karim works on long-term projects between Italy and Morocco exploring concepts as identity and sense of belonging through documentary and portrait photography. His work has been exhibited at La Triennale Museum in Milan, Museum in Der Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, Macro Testaccio Museum in Rome and in other photography festivals in Europe, as well has been published, among others, on The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic USA, Internazionale, Vice, GEO.
www.karimelmaktafi.com
Giulia Mangione (b.1987) is an Oslo-based visual artist who works with photography, film and writing. She earned a first MA in Comparative Literary Studies from Goldsmiths University of London, and a second MFA in Fine Arts from the Art Academy in Bergen. She also studied Advanced Visual Storytelling at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Denmark. Her first book Halfway Mountain, published by Journal in 2018, was selected for the Prix du Livre at Les Rencontres d'Arles and nominated for the MACK First Book Award. Mangione’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Fotoforum, Bolzano; Fotogalleriet, Oslo; and Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen. She is currently part of the 6th round of the Norwegian Journal of Photography.
Instagram: @giulia_mangione
Website: www.giuliamangione.com
Just as much a physical experience which disturbs the tranquil surface of the photograph as a workshop narrative with a documentary character, Laetitia Bica’s series Cream, cannot be confined to a single genre. Following two years of collaborations with the CREAHM workshop in Liège (Creativity and Mental handicap), she undertook two months of intense research with the workshop’s artists, the result of which is this corpus of disruptive and vibrant photographs. Collaboration, a creative process which is a daily part of this photographer’s life as she typically works on commission in the areas of fashion, music, and design, in these photographs is transmitted through the body. Gestures, colours and materials become elements of language during their creative exchanges. Thus unfolds a series of figures covered in paint with thick and bold features and accents that are at times wild, at times warlike. A few of the images, placed in a sequence, follow an artist’s movement, rendering the in progress nature of this experiment and indicating Laetitia Bica’s double position on what takes on the appearance of almost ritualistic practices: at the same time actor and master of ceremonies.
Petra Slobodnjak is an artist from Croatia who graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, studying graphic product design, in Zagreb in 2012. Since 2014, Petra has been working as a freelance graphic designer and photographer. She is a Croatian Freelance Artist Association member and has exhibited her work regularly since 2008. For work DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7, she received the Ivan Kožarić award for the best young artist, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City of Zagreb (in 2022) and award for the Best Young Artist in 2022 awarded by the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts. The mentioned work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art collection in Zagreb. Her artistic work intertwined with her personal life, examining the boundaries between these two aspects. She explores the dynamics of society in her works, emphasizing personal responsibility in shaping the environment. Through artistic expression, she fosters awareness of an individual’s impact on broader societal changes, encouraging reflection on one’s actions and relationship to the surroundings. She is currently based in Zagreb.
Marta Machado is a Portuguese-Cape Verdean artist who lives and works in Braga, Portugal. A graduate of Architecture from the University of Minho, she also holds an MA in Photography from the School of Arts at the Catholic University of Porto. Her photographic work analyses the ambiguities of history and the so-called ‘official’ narratives of the Western world, focusing on themes of colonialism, identity and territory. Machado’s Beyond Solid Ground project was exhibited at Braga’s Encontros da Imagem festival, whilst her Nos Txôn series was presented at Lisbon’s Imago Gallery. Her academic research, meanwhile, has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals.
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
Iben Gad (b. 1997) is a Danish documentary photographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work deals with identity and personal stories and, in her work, she is experimenting with different formats such as archive material, photography, graphic elements and text.In 2021 she graduated from the Danish School of Media and Journalism. She did an internship at the Danish daily Kristeligt Dagblad, studied abroad at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Bangladesh and participated in the Canon Student Development Programme at Visa Pour l’Image. Currently she is working as a freelance photographer.
Klavdia Balampanidou (b.1991) is a Greek photographer based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She studied Audiovisual Arts at the Department of Sound and Visual Arts of the Ionian University. She holds a Master’s degree in History and Theory of Art from the Department of Fine Arts at the Technological University of Cyprus. Her projects explore concepts of personal and collective identity, concepts of belonging, as well as mental health themes. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in England, Italy, France, Greece and Cyprus. In 2018, Klavdia received the Young Greek Photographers award from the Hellenic Center of Photography, while in 2021 she was selected as one of the 30 Under 30 Women Photographers by Artpil.