Zsuzsi Simon (b. 1988) is a photographer and videographer living and working in Budapest. In 2015, she graduated from the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Her research interests cover questions of feminism, body image and activism. The ways in which women think about the world is also central; she is particularly interested in the image of the female body and the expectations that come with it. Through close collaboration with groups of women – and a trademark blend of humour, provocation, irony and honesty – Simon aspires to break down various taboos. More recently her work has explored masculinity, and the role of the male muse from a female perspective. Simon is a member of Secondary Archive, which brings together women artists from Central and Eastern Europe for greater visibility.
Website: linktr.ee/zsuzsannasimon
Instagram: zsuzsi___simon
In her works she often focuses on issues connected with migration or its destiny. She is mostly interested in the problematic of constructing identity and how people define themselves and the land of their origins. Recently she is involved in collective photographic research about polish migration to South America. It happens that she gets out of the material world and enters other dimensions of perceiving the world, exploring the paranormal events and believes not connected with any religious system. Finds collective creation as the best way for making photography as permanent process of putting individual thoughts in doubts.
She was born in 1990 by the Polish seaside in Gdańsk. Graduated in Photography on Academy of Arts in Poznań. She is also part of Ostrøv publishing collective.
In her most recent work, Rie Yamada stages self-portraits through other people, finding her source matter in family photo albums acquired from Japan, her homeland, and Germany, where she now lives, recreating scenes in her own likeness. Highlighting gender stereotypes and social archetypes, her often humorous work questions not just the family, but the changing role of photography itself in expressing how we want to be perceived. The images are, in a sense, a search for her own image, in the same way a family photo is intended to define and project their identity.
Poly’s art practice is merging her previous experience in documentary and staged photography. The photographer interprets cultural and visual codes of typical Ukrainian everyday life, predominantly in the fields of eroticism, fashion, and novel notions of beauty. The artist states that she finds herself constantly inspired by “trivial things, everyday events, stories from the lives of friends, and own experience”.
Julie Poly’s exhibitions serve as a continuation to her artistic message. Her ‘mockumentarian’ and slightly grotesque projects often come back to the areas of their genesis, like railway station (Ukrzaliznytsia series) or arcade centres (Kosmolot playing cards).
Born in Belgium in 1989, Lionel Jusseret is a documentary photographer. After finishing his studies at INSAS in 2012, a Belgian film school, he photographed children with autism in the French association J'interviendrais. In the search for unpredictable images, Jusseret works in the intimacy of his subject. The approach is anthropological. After seven years of immersion, he finished his first series Kinderszenen.
Lionel Jusseret lives and works in Brussels.
Tashiya de Mel is a photographer, environmental advocate, and communications specialist from Colombo, Sri Lanka who uses visual storytelling to create narratives that drive social change.
Her practice explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making and deals with themes such as colonial histories, representation, heritage, family, landscapes, and the climate crisis.
Tashiya is driven by a curiosity to forge connections with diverse disciplines such as art, history, academia and the environment. And find ways of bridging these disciplines through different forms of image-based media.
She was the recipient of the Visura grants for freelance visual journalists in 2023 for her project ‘Great Sandy River’ and received the Stroom talent award in 2024. Tashiya is a recent graduate of the ‘Photography and Society’ masters programme at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (NL). She is based between Colombo and the Hague.
The addictive force of the internet is real, and no one knows this better than Aurélie Bayad. In a post-internet world, where IRL increasingly merges with URL, new possibilities of being are creeping into our daily lives. In her versatile art practice, Bayad uses video, photography and performance to confront us with the messy, dirty thoughts and desires of our hyperreal (what is real?), cultivated identities, as we try to live up to the new rules and standards set by the digital sphere of fake likes and dark web eroticism. Bayad uses her camera, her own and other bodies, and texts she wrote to create a fresh aesthetic language for the new desires of contemporary culture. In slimy and gooey, ugly and disgusting, cheap and glittery settings, we watch her unfold the personae of her filmed and photographed subjects. She hides her models behind the soft, nostalgic hues of the kitschy eighties and nineties; includes erratic and ecstatic sequences in her films, with heart-pounding soundtracks; and fearlessly looks back into the lens, as if asking us: ‘What is your real personality? What is real beauty? What is your true desire, your fetish? Who do you want me to see?’ With her otherworldly beauty standards, her visceral and vomitous but lively encounters with food and other quotidian objects, and her frank interrogations of intimacy, giving and receiving, love and abuse — so pertinent that they can make you tremble with self-doubt — Aurélie Bayad shares with us her search for personal grounding in this confusing, networked world.
- Text by Zeynep Kubat (.tiff)
Her work has been exhibited internationally at Red Hook Labs (NYC), Unseen Photo Fair (Amsterdam), Addis Foto Fest (Addis Ababa), the International Centre of Photography NYC) and at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair( London). Mann’s personal and commissioned work has been published internationally including The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Artsy, British Vogue, The British Journal of Photography, and National Geographic.
Her award winning series ‘Drummies’ exploring female drum majorette teams in South Africa, has been selected as a winner of the Lensculture emerging photographer prize (2018), the PHMuseum Women’s ‘New Generation’ prize for an emerging photographer (2018). Four images from the series were awarded first place at the prestigious Taylor Wessing portraiture prize (2018). Mann was also the recipient of the Grand Prix at the 34th edition of the Hyeres International Festival of Fashion and Photography (2019).
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.
Lorenzo uses the photography as a way of expression; he refines his technique during a long collaboration in the backstages for several fashion brands, a collaboration that still exists.
The skills acquired will allow Lorenzo to express himself creatively.
Through the use of a camera he captures images that evoke emotions and thoughts; he is not a lover of photographic manipulation through programs, in fact he creates installations to recreate what he thought and felt while visiting those places.
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.
Damien Caccia (b. 1989) studied at the École supérieure d’arts des Rocailles, and then at the École Supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes. His creative approach is based on narration: viewers are drawn into a fictional visual world, playing their own role in its creation. Using various materials – acrylic paint on glass, concrete, plaster, bleached tarps and fabrics – Caccia works at the frontiers of abstraction, with light, shape and colour offering rhythm to his creations. A co-founder of Grande Surface, an artist-run space in Brussels, his work has been exhibited by a range of institutions in France and Belgium.
damiencaccia.com
@damien.caccia
Xenia Petrovska (b. 1988) is a photographer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. She studied at the MYPH art school and at the Kyiv School of Photography. Xenia's works are rooted in the mysterious and even slightly surreal atmospheres created by light and color. She took part in numerous group exhibitions in Ukraine in Europe. Xenia was selected as a Fresh Eyes European talent 2021 by GUP Magazine. Member of Ukrainian Women Photographers Organisation.
Altay Tuz (b. 1993) lives and works in Hamburg. He graduated from the Photography Department of Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, and is currently pursuing graduate studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. Tuz’s work focuses on tensions between public and private spaces; he probes at notions of borders, lines, barriers and walls, analysing the reflection of this visual grammar on the public architectural texture – and its connection to social class distinction. His works have been exhibited in Turkey, France, Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany and Greece.
Website: www.altaytuz.com
He often follows the subjects of his photo essays for many years. His series are mostly people-focused, trying to explore the problems of individuals or social groups with the tool of photography. His work has been rewarded with honored awards: shortlisted in the See.Me The Exposure Award competition in landscape category, and his image was exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. He has won several awards at the Hungarian Press Photo Competition, including the André Kertész Grand Prize, the Károly Escher Prize and the Zoltán Szalay Prize for three consecutive years for the best-performing photojournalist under 30. He has been participant in international masterclasses such as the Nikon-NOOR Academy Masterclass and is now a third-time scholarship holder to VII Academy seminars.
His latest photo essay on air pollution in Northeast Hungary was chosen by the Reuters news agency as one of the most important Wider Image story.
Ieva Raudsepa (b. 1992, Latvia) holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Latvia and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been featured in i-D, The Guardian, Wallpaper, It’s Nice That, the Latvian Photography Yearbook, and elsewhere. Her series Cruise was part of the exhibition MIXTAPE at the Riga Photomonth 2016, while the book dummy was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award 2016, Amsterdam, and is now released by Milda Books. In Spring 2018 her work was part of Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe at the Calvert 22 Foundation, London. Her exhibition It Could Just Swallow You Up at the ISSP Gallery in Riga opened July 2019.
Ihar Hancharuk (b. 1986) is post-documentary photographer and visual artist from Belarus. With a background in foreign languages, his creative work makes use of photographic and digital archives, including video footage. Haranchuk’s projects refer to questions of national and personal identity, collective memory, and the influence of mass media on contemporary life; he also addresses the patriarchal violence to which he was exposed during a period of mandatory military service, concluded in 2010. Among others, his works have been exhibited at Krakow Photomonth, Poland; National Center for Contemporary Arts, Belarus; and Circulation(s) Festival, France.