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.
Louiza Vradi is a visual artist working with photography, video, new media and textile. She holds a BFA and MFA in visual arts, new media, sculpture, and art education from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work explores social documentary practices, addressing themes such as personal and collective memories, human movement, gender issues, intergenerational trauma, and our relationship with the land. She often examines the impact of sociopolitical contexts on individuals and rituals in contemporary society. In addition to her artistic practice, Louiza is an art educator trained in art therapy, working with individuals with mental and psycho-social disabilities, as well as those recovering from addiction. Since 2020, she has been a freelance visual journalist for Reuters, completing a Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT) in 2023. Louiza is a member of Women Photograph and Greek Documentary Association. She was named one of 30 Under 30 Women Photographers for 2020 by Artpil and she has been awarded with the VII Academy Scholarship. Her work can be found in international media such as The Economist, The New York Times, Vogue, Le Monde, Reuters, The Guardian, Monocle, Penguin Books, BBC, Dazed, Paris Fashion Week, etc. She has showcased her artworks in museums and galleries such as The Benaki Museum, Onassis Stegi and The Breeder gallery, among others. In 2023 she was awarded by the Greek Documentary Association for her documentary film, later supported by the Greek Film Center. She is one of the Futures Photography talents selected by VOID for 2024 and an Onassis Air Fellow. She is a recipient of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and iMEdD Fellowship. She currently lives and works in Athens.
Yana Wernicke is a German photographer. In 2021 her first photo-book, Zenker, a collaboration with Jonas Feige, was published by Edition Patrick Frey. She is currently working on a new project on the concepts of species loneliness and interspecies relationships.
Dafni Melidou (b. 1990, Greece) is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice combines research, photography, writing and multi-media experimentation. Coming from a scientific background her working and research methods are versatile, and she approaches her projects from many angles. She works with her own photographs, found images, tactile materials and smells, often re-appropriated and constructed into new constellations, shapes or forms.
Melidou's experimental works start with her daily encounters of events in the mass media and her personal observations. Her themes center around gender and social injustices, the complexities of representation and our conflicting perception of reality. A common thread in her work is the understanding of materiality and the physical world in a digital age. Her fascination lies with creating non-conclusive and often confusing stories that call for an open interpretation and invite the viewers to re-think dominantmedia narratives.
Melidou holds a B.A. in Chemistry, a M.Sc. in Food Science and she is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Photography & Society at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). In 2021 she co-founded cartographydigest.com, an experimental visual platform aiming to stretch the boundaries of photography and map new territories. She is currently based between Rotterdam and Athens.
Naina Helén Jåma (b. 1991) is a south Sami photographer, vytnesjæjjah and storyteller from Snåase, Norway. With an education in photojournalism – she has worked as both a photojournalist and photo editor for various newspapers and news agencies in Norway and Sweden – documentary approaches characterise much of her work. Among others, her images have featured in VG, Aftonbladet, Aftenposten, The New York Times, The Guardian, Huffpost, and Dagens Industri. Jåma is also a member of the Sami Artist Association.
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.
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.
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.
Ebbesen works with reflections to create surreal effects in her work: "In my work, I aim to play with the sense of reality that we relate to the photograph by distorting the objects and space within the picture frame. With these effects, I aim to surprise and confuse and leave one with the question of what is real." Conceptually her works often deal with identity and the subconscious self affected by and interrelated with the surrounding world.
Cosmin Gârleșteanu (b. 1984) is a photographer and video editor based in Bucharest, Romania. With a background in economic studies – he attended the Economic Studies Academy– he felt he would like a more creative career and shifted towards radio and then video editing.His images have been published in a range of magazines, whilst his work was featured in various group and solo exhibitions during London, Brussels and Miami Street Photography Festivals or Eyeshot Open Call. His photobook, Bucharest, was published in 2023.
His work has been recognized through a variety of prestigious professional awards and achievements: In 2014 he was awarded the Grand Prize of the 32nd Hungarian Press Photo Competition for a photo series about the civil war in Syria. In 2015 he covered the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the impact of the refugee crisis across Europe. In the same year he was selected to participate in the Joop Swart Masterclass organized by the World Press Photo Organization. In 2017 he took part in the workshop of Magnum Photos as a recipient of the Robert Capa Centre’s scholarship. In 2018 he was the recipient of the Károly Hemző prize, one of the leading Hungarian photography awards, in recognition of his photo series which drew on a sophisticated form language to capture social phenomena in a way that reflects the photographer’s deep social sensitivity. In the same year, he was also selected to join the Nikon-NOOR Academy Masterclass.
He was awarded the Pécsi József Photography Grant in 2015, 2018 and 2019 for his project entitled The Last Storytellers. In his work thus far, he has tended to focus on the presentation of contemporary societal problems and conflicts, as well as their ramifications. But presenting the victims of long-gone repressive regimes, his The Last Storytellers diverges from this focus. Pursuing a similar theme, his The Darkest Hour series shows that in the same way that the wounds carried by the survivors of labor camps continue to mark the victims to this very day, the underlying experiences have also left an enduring imprint on the physical landscape and the collective memory of humanity.
He graduated from the Film and Theatre Faculty of the “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, majoring in Cinematography, Photography and Media. He published his first photo album called “Beyond light and shadows” in 2017, an album comprising miscellaneous pieces of his work up to that time. Just like Nietzsche he believes that life without music would be a mistake. Films, books and cats are just some of the activities he likes to indulge in. His daughter Ida was born in 2018 bringing about a totally different perception of life and the way he looks at the stars.
Laure has exhibited her work internationally in Berlin (DE), Reykjavik (IS), Brussels (BE), Paris (FR), and soon in Stockholm (SE), Luxembourg (LU), and Osaka (JP). Her work has entered the collection of several foundations, such as the Fondation des Arts du Luxembourg and the Palais de Liège (BE).
She has won the LUX Prize twice for Professional Photography in the Documentary category. She has also participated, since 2008, in various solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States and at fairs like Paris Photo, ARCO, Estampa o London Art Fair. In October 2016 she published her photobook Vera y Victoria and in 2019 Gabriel, both with the French publisher André Frère Éditions and presented in Paris Photo.
She also published the newspaper DÚO-A Sobre el viaje por carretera con desconocidos (About the road trip with strangers) (edited by Phree), together with the writer Miguel Ángel Hernández. In 2018 her works have been exhibited in Barcelona (Can Basté), Madrid (Feria Estampa y Pilar Serra’s Gallery), Baracaldo (Festival Baffest), Arles (Feria Cosmos), Vitoria (Sala Amárica), Alcobendas' Art Center and Marseille (Galería Retine Argentique), among others, and in 2019-2020, in Tigomigo Gallery (Terrassa, Barcelona), F22 Foto Space (Hong Kong), KLAP Maison pour la Danse (Marsella), the London Art Fair and Desenfocada Gallery (Málaga). As an artist, Sáez is represented by the Pilar Serra Gallery in Madrid, the Fifty Dots Gallery in Barcelona and the Institute Agency in Los Angeles.
The starting point for her work are images, both her own as well as found material. Her project 'you give it an order' questions the orientation mechanisms that apply when looking at a picture in terms of its content and form.
Balázs Turós (b. 1990) studied at the Department of Photography at Budapest’s Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. After finishing his BA, Turós moved to England, where he was introduced to FotoNow – a media-based social enterprise in Plymouth, with whom he worked for two years. Having returned to Budapest, he pursued a Master of Photography course at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Turós was awarded the József Pécsi Fellowship in 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2021, he participated in the Fellowship of the Robert Capa Photography Grand Prize. The following year, his works featured in the Open Program of Fotofestiwal Lodz, Poland.
Wbsite: balazsturos.com
Instagram: balazs_turos
As an artist, João Ramilo aims to document human intervention in the world, capturing theinteraction between them. The essence of his work is to portray social and economic issues through images and immortalize those moments in time.Currently, he resides in Lisbon and works as a freelance photographer.
Gonçalo C. Silva (b. 1997) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. He has studied at both the Faculty of Fine-Arts in Lisbon and at Atelier de Lisboa, and is currently pursuing an MA at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities from NOVA University of Lisbon. In his work, which applies an artistic approach to photography, Silva addresses themes related to the representation of the landscape, and to the relationship between humans and nature. In his projects, the interconnection of images from different contexts creates new meanings and narratives with a strong symbolic character, related to the artist’s personal experiences.
Maria Leonardo Cabrita lives and works in Lisbon, where she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Fine Arts. She holds an MFA in Multimedia Art from the University of Fine Arts, Lisbon; a Diploma in Photography from the Art Academy of Munich; and a BFA/BA in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon. Cabrita’s practice engages a range of subjects, from history and science to other non-artistic practices. She often seeks to question the nature of photography, inverting the relationship between the referent and the referenced, and between what’s seen and what’s perceived. Her current project questions the interconnectivity between optical mirages, images and the act of seeing. Her works have been exhibited throughout Europe and beyond.
Yu Shuk Pui Bobby (b. 1994) is a visual artist based between Hong Kong and Oslo. With a collaborative approach to her practice, her work conjures the physical, tangible and affective phenomena associated with biotechnology through combinations of video, text, installation, sculpture, and performance. She often uses speculative fiction to tackle questions of human genetic engineering, reconfiguring perceptions of gender, body and historical discourses of identity. Bobby holds a BA from Hong Kong Baptist University and an MFA from Oslo National Academy of Fine Art. Her works have been in Hong Kong, Norway, Japan, China, Iceland and the USA.