Lelonek won several international competitions, among others: Show Off during the Kraków Photomonth Festival and ReGeneration 3 at the Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland. Her works appear, among others, in the collection of the Museum of Photography in Lausanne, Center of the Contemporary Art in Warsaw etc
The images mainly feature personalities from the world’s nightlife, fashion and art communities. The work is an exploration of queer identity, self-invention and LGTBQI culture informed by a love of high-camp, kitsch aesthetics and art history. They aim to capture both the surface and the interior world of the subject halfway between truth and fantasy. Much as Susan Sontag elucidates in ‘Notes on Camp’, Studio Prokopiou is the lie that tells the truth.
Joana Dionisio (b. 1993) is a Portuguese photographer based in Porto, where she works as a freelancer on various commissioned and personal projects. Having first studied Audiovisual Communication Technologies, she completed an MA in Artistic Photography in 2021. Dionisio has exhibited her work in a range of solo and group exhibitions, whilst she was recently selected for FRESH EYES – a publication showcasing emerging European Photography Talent by GUP Magazine.
In my ongoing series I photograph myself in dialogue with my late sister’s dresses. Through performative acts and self-portraiture I address the complex process of grief and healing after my sister passed away seven years ago. As a part of this self-recovery, I am leaning to my family’s legacy of rug-making; the cutting of clothes of the deceased to weft. In my family what could not be used was remodelled, deconstructed and reconstructed, as a form of pragmatic exorcism. And by cutting, sewing and weaving I am working through the dresses, taking back authority of my fate.
Essential in my work is the juxtaposition of a living body and the materiality of textiles. The images portray a play between seeing and touch, the form and the tactility. Using my body and the dresses of my sister I examine the relationship of memories and materialities. Can objects harbor emotions? And can one access these enclosed emotions by intervening with their materiality? In the past years these works have become a tool of finding my identity in the world. The combination of the female nude and the aggressive act of cutting have grown to represent liberation from far more than just grief.
To make a photograph, you need a specific apparatus. The most obvious would be a camera. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to consider the camera as a mere tool that works strictly according to the intentions and desires of the photographer. Nobody, not even the operator, knows exactly what is going on inside the box after the button has been pressed. This question seems to haunt the work of Calixte Poncelet. Instead of aiming his camera at the world, he scrutinizes the photographic recording device itself. In Useless Gesture, GX680, a series of 90 images, he slowly moves around a camera, capturing it from all sides as though it were a treacherous thing that needs to be closely observed. Offscreen Interaction, GX680, is a photograph of one camera observing another one: the watcher being watched. But a third camera is also present, the one that took the picture we’re looking at now, acting as the silent observer of the two other cameras. Throughout these and other works, the camera appears as a wild, ferocious animal, as the prowling predatory system that Vilèm Flusser conjures up in his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Mimicry, a 9-minute-long video, reinforces this idea of the camera as hunter. As we stand in front of it, we look straight through the lens into its entrails. Now and then, the shutter is released, creating a bright red circle of light. The camera is transformed into an eerie Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey) lookalike. Like that computer gone rogue, the camera tells us that we humans have no business here.
Text by Eveline Vanfraussen
"My interest lies in the role of narrative as a reference point in representing contemporary social issues. I work between editorial assignments and long-term projects, taking pride in immersing myself within the place and people that I photograph, working with communities over an extended period of time."
Past works have documented the socio-political effects of the Ukrainian revolution; explored notions of escapism along The English Riviera; living in hiding with Albanian families persecuted in the age old traditions of blood feuds, as well as celebratory traditions in Greece. Previously exhibited works have been included in The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, PhotoIreland Festival, Paris Photo, Magenta Flash Forward and The Renaissance Photography Prize and clients include The FT Weekend Magazine, The New York Times, TIME and National Geographic.
Maxim is a co-founder of SHKLO – online platform about Belarusian photography and visual arts. From 2020 he is a member of Inland - international cooperative of 13 photographers.
Maxim’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions including shows at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2020, Riga), Kasarna Karlin (2018, Prague) and CECH (2017, Minsk). He was published in Wall Street Journal, Stern Crime, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Courrier International, Meduza, The Telegraph, Le Monde Diplomatique among others.
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Julia Klewaniec (1996) photographer and culture animator. A graduate of Photography in Film School in Łódź. She is a co-creator of the Picture Doc Foundation with a group of photographers (Duży Pokój Gallery) in Warsaw. Resident in the student section of the "W ramach Sopotu" festival in Poland (2022). Chosen by Fotofestiwal in Łódź for Futures Talents 2022. Talent of the Year 2022 in the Pix.House competition. Her debut project "Silent Racism" was presented among others in Warsaw, Opole, Łódź, Turin, Braga, Bochnia, Copenhagen. At the end of 2022, together with Pix.House and Krzysiek Orłowski, she published the zine "Silent Racism". She is interested in statements about contemporary society, life and relations between people, language and the environment.
http://klewaniec.pl/@klewaniec
Tine Bek (born in 1988) is a Danish visual artist who works with video, photography and sculpture. She studied History before graduating from Fatamorgana – The Danish School of art Photography and Glasgow School of Art, where she holds a Master degree in Fine Art Photography.
Bek has exhibited in Denmark, UK, Norway, Lithuania, Germany and USA among others, and has participated in various international residencies including; Palazzo Monti, Numeroventi, Casa Balandra to name a few.
Bek is represented in Madrid by Dust and Soul and in New York by Picture Room. In 2022 her first book; The Vulgarity of Being Three-Dimensional was published with Disko Bay. The book has been awarded with the Hasselblad Foundation's Photo BookGrant 2021.
Bek lived in Glasgow from 2013-18 where she co founded the gallery 16 Nicholson street alongside a series of self published books highlighting the works of emerging artists internationally. Hereby shaping a conceptual hybrid, transgressing conversations about identity and universality, existentialism and particularism. Today Bek is based in Copenhagen.
In 2015, he began his solo career with focus in “landscape and associated behavior”. His projects evolved from painting to more conceptual processes, expanding his language to photography, video and actions in the landscape.
As center of his concerns are the humankind relationships with territory, studying aspects such as: the gradual reduction of space for wildlife, “The Naked Trace“, the overpopulation, "Genesis 1.28", the artificial character of the borders "Minimal Republics", the liquid nature of the concept of nation: "Iceberg Nations" or the dichotomy between industrial agriculture and natural agriculture: "The garden of Fukuoka".
He has presence in important collections, specially within Spain, and is beginning to exhibit abroad like the two solo shows that will take place in late 2019: one at Lianzhou Museum of Photography, China, and the other at Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal, as winner of 2018 “Emergentes” award.
My research that for formality can be described as photographic due to the medium used, even if the dimension that belongs to me is more related to the image, to what it communicates to us and how it is perceived. Like the graphic design my photographs tend to a clear reading, which privileges functionality to pure aesthetic beauty, to finalize the reading to a deeper stage of cognitive perception. I have two different aspects: the construction of the image by the sculpture, and the archiving of the photos that I collect in certain carefully chosen environments. It’s very important to me to return many times to the settings that I selected. Both approaches are always formalized and captured through photography.
In 2019 I was finalist of the FFF Fondazione Francesco Fabbri award. My work has been featured in many national and international exhibitions: Audi Studio by Nevven Gallery, Stockholm; Villa Vertua Masolo, Milano; Spaziosiena, Siena; LOFT, Lecce; Las Palmas, Lisbon; Galleria Giuseppe Pero, Milano; BASIS, Frankfurt; Spaziobuonasera, Torino.
In Maria Baoli’s series, linearity is constantly broken up. The stories she tells are diffracted; space and time overlap; images are shot through with cracks and scratches like broken mirrors. Although it is clear that the photographer is attached to human situations, to stories and environments charged with life and memories, these devices make us focus on the stylistic elements of the images and stimulate an open and complex interpretation of them. This is particularly true for one of her most recent projects, Chez moi loin de chez moi [At Home Far Away From Home], which explores the Maison Africaine in Brussels, a community home for students.
Maria Baoli’s images are balanced between the depth of their intention (archive, memory, time, love, dreams, etc.) and the surface. This plays a primordial role and in so doing forms a highly personal (and unique) response from the artist to the contemporary use of the snapshot.
Through an uninhibited use of flash, which flattens shadows and adds drama to the composition even in the most mundane and stripped-down environments; through her preference for the close-up or dense landscapes that block the horizon; through the frontality of her perspective; through her use of collage, which disrupts the documentary by introducing a fascinating graphic dimension, Maria Baoli relies on the figures of discontinuity that she turns into loyal servants of reality.
Text by Anne-Françoise Lesuisse
Hanna Rédling was born in Pécs in 1993 and now divides her time in Budapest and Rotterdam. She holds a BA and MA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Budapest) and studied Photography at Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam). Her works focus on the uncertainty of present existence and understanding and defining individual and collective nostalgia. Her photographs show childish curiosity and optimism merged with anxieties of unpredictability of the future and virtual world simultaneously. The attitude, that analyses the memories of the past at once, and the fever dream-like present and future at other times, calls forth an alternative world that converges in space and time. The elastic and jelly-like texture keeps recurring on Hanna’s photographs and this element carries the possibility of both ascension and ‘sinking in mud’ feeling. Her main aim is to image those spiritual and physical in-between states that we experience in our lives - during these experiences we have departed already but have not reached our objective yet. She received the scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers in 2020 and won the Pécsi József Photography Grant in 2021 and 2022. Her most recent works were exhibited at Unseen Photography Fair in Amsterdam in autumn 2021. She has been represented by Erika Deák Gallery in Budapest since April 2021.
redlinghanna@gmail.comwww.hannaredling.com @hannaredling
Richard Kiss (b. 1994) holds a BA in Photography from Budapest Metropolitan University. He is currently an MA student in Photography at the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As society and visual culture change rapidly, Kiss uses new media to grasp at the essence of our saturated present, focusing on changes triggered by the internet and their effects on contemporary art. In his projects, Kiss often strips photographs of their original contexts and meanings, transforming them into entirely new artworks. Throughout his projects, Kiss seeks to question the relationship between the spectator and artwork and the reasons behind an image’s production, thus making the act of photography a subject of reflection.
Website: kissrichard.com
Instagram: r_ch_k.ss
She very often travels to remote places, far away from the big cities, where she is able to find more simpler ways of existence.The subjects she photographs are often isolated with little context around them. While this visual isolation is the way Juliette presents herself to the world, she also craves human connection. A direct confrontation with the camera is a way for her to connect with the subjects she photographs and through them with the rest of the world.
In a few words, her practice in documentary photography is a search of self-knowledge and an attempt to reencounter the essence of a life without noise.
She is primarily involved in such documentary photography and projects which allow her to have a long-term cooperation with a given community and document their daily lives objectively without loosing the possibility of subjective associations. Her series are mostly concerned with rural life due to her personal involvement.
After growing up in a small village in the Eastern part of Hungary before moving to Budapest for her studies, the young photographer began to observe more objectively and systematically document the things around her.
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.
For her photographic adventure I am just a scenic spot, Pauline Niks made two long journeys to China, travelling the entire country to photograph so-called landmarks. Her particular focus was on replicas of iconic tourist attractions from other countries, such as the Eiffel Tower and the White House. The idea behind the undertaking was the manipulative nature of documentary photography: it is often seen as a reliable reproduction of reality when in fact it creates its own reality.
www.paulineniks.com