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.
Recent monographic exhibition includes: Untitled, ADN_ Sea(e)scapes, 2021 at galerie Salon H, Paris, and I, the Archive,2020, at Villa Vassilieff, Paris. Kala’s most recent group exhibitions include: This is Not Africa, unlearn what you have learned, 2021 at Aros Museum, Denmark, Un.e air.e de famille, 2021, at Museum Paul Elourd, Saint-Denis, France, Polyphony, 2021 at Gera Museum, Gera, Germany. Kala’s most recent performances include: Stranger, Danger, Wait it’s a Prayer Room, Centre Pompidou, 2019, Mackandal Turns into a Butterfly: A Love potion (2018), Le Pouvoir du Dedans, La galerie Cac de Noisy-le-Sec (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala Shows and Doesn’t Tell, galerie Saint-Severin (2018). She is the winner of the ADAGP/ Villa Vassilieff Fellowship 2019-2020, a finalist of the SAM art Prix (2018) and also a finalist for the prize for contemporary talent, François Schneider Foundation (2018). Kala’s work will be included in the 5th Casablanca Biennial, Morroco, and she an artist in residency at Urbane Kuenst Ruhr in Germany in 2019-2020. She is the founder and co-organiser of e.a.s.t. (Ephemeral Archival Station), a lab and platform for long-term artistic research projects, established in 2017.
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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Kwabena Sekyi Appiah-nti (b. 1994) is a Belgian-Ghanaian photographer based in Amsterdam. Straddling the boundaries of documentary and fashion photography, his projects reveal a fascination for people who face societal prejudice, aspiring to cut through the clichés of stereotyped representation. Delving into his subjects’ worlds and observing their behaviours, Appiah-Nti documents their true essence; he describes ‘boyhood’ as the overarching theme in his work.
Charlotte's work is being published by outlets internationally and her personal projects on migration and women were shown in solo exhibitions in the United States, Turkey, Austria and Japan. She speaks six languages and is currently based in Berlin.
http://www.charlotteschmitz.com/
Since they first met in United States, Elsa and Johanna have been working together as a duo of artists photographers and directors. They were invited at 61th Salon de Montrouge in 2016, finalists for the prize 'HSBC pour la photographie 2016', nominated the same year for 'Révélations Emerige 2016' and invited at Festival Circulation(s) 2017 and Festival Photo Saint-Germain 2017. They won the 2nd prize of 'Prix Picto de la mode 2017'. In 2018, their piece A Couple of Them enters the collection of the FMAC. Elsa & Johanna recently won the Public Prize at the 2019 Hyères Festival in the photo section.
Marin Håskjold is an artist and filmmaker based in Oslo, Norway. She studied moving images at Nordland School of Art and Film in Kabelvåg on the Lofoten islands. Identity is a central theme in Håskjolds work, where she philosophically explores different notions of gender and sex in a queer and feminist perspective. Håskjolds work has been exhibited and screened at a number of art institutions and film festivals, such as Tate Modern, London, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal, Coast Contemporary, Oslo, Kyiv International Short Film Festival, Helsinki International Film Festival, the Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad, Trøndelag Center of Contemporary Art, and Vega Scene, Oslo, as a part of Fotogalleriet’s programme. Her short film «What is a Woman?» (2020) has also been awarded with a Norwegian Academy Award in 2021, the Amanda, for Best Short, and Best Script at Beirut International Women Film Festival.
Luiza Marinas (b.1987) is a Romanian photographer, whose work merges elements of fine art, conceptual photography, portraiture, documentary photography and travel photography. Travel was her entry point into the discipline; for Marinas, photographing other cultures offered a means to better understand herself. She photographed people and places in Romania, Mongolia, Nepal, Argentina, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Jordan, Iceland and Greenland, before later turning to the world of fine art and conceptual photography. Her photographs have been published by the likes of Blur Magazine, National Geographic and Vogue Italia, whilst her work has featured in several exhibitions in Romania and abroad.
Florian Amoser (1990), lives and works in Olten. Florian graduated in 2017 with honors from ECAL in photography. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from ETH Zurich (2011). After working for the last five years in the BA and MA Photography at ECAL as well as conducting the research project Automated Photography (with Milo Keller, Claus Gunti), he is now focussing on his personal artistic practice. Florian is also part of the curation team of annual young art show JKON / Junge Kunst Olten. Florian Amoser’s works explore the different aspects of human perception. Since photography’s invention, human beings use it as an instrument to expand the limits of their observational capacity. Consequently, the technological development of the photographic apparatus has a significant influence on our perception. Florian Amoser builds his own original tools for his artistic works, which make new photographic images possible. His photographs bear witness to a material dissolution of the environment in which the view of physical reality is strongly influenced by experiences in digital space.
Sasha participated in the 5th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art in MMoMA, previous year took a part of “Somewheres & Anywheres: Young Photography from Eastern Europe” exhibition in Berlin gallery EEP and join BERLIN PHOTO WEEK.
His short film “Swallowed by the Routine” was selected for the Fashion Film Awards 2019 by SHOWstudio X HARRODS and was shown in London last October.
The main themes explored by Sasha now are the struggle with the language, because words controls us and reduces our worldview; queer theory, that means infinite pluralism of identities, meanings without hierarchy, ever-changing flexible self-definition; and criticism/decentration of the concept of truth.
This three ideas are really close to each other like the liberation from automatisms, habits and the aspiration to independent, affective perception and action.
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.
Kreuger uses her own archive as the starting point of her work in which she combines photography, found footage, and texts.Intuitively she categorizes, combines and edits images, and uses the exhibition space as a canvas to build new stories on.
Tamara Janes is an artist based in Bern. After studying photography at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and at the School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA), she completed a master's degree at the Institute of Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel University of Art and Design. She then returned to New York on a Studio Scholarship from the City of Bern to continue her research at the Public Library. Among others, her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Glarus, HeK Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Kunsthaus Baselland, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Stadtgalerie Bern, on the occasion of Plat(t)form15 at Fotomuseum Winterthur and at the Bieler Fototage. Her projects have been supported and awarded several times. Tamara Janes received the Swiss Design Award 2023 in the category photography with her work “Copyright Swap”. Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at the photography class, F+F School of Art and Design, Zurich.
Artist Statement
In my work I deal with the conditions of digital images. I take a critical view of current photographic behaviour because our perception and our handling of images is increasingly determined by technology and algorithms. Mostly we unreflectively consume images every second and strive for more and more unrealistic sharpness and brilliance. This development is at the same time thought content and friction surface for my work. By shifting through and contextualizing my own and other people's visual material, I want to create new perspectives and visual commentaries.
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)
The work of Eline Benjaminsen (NO, 1992) studies the lacking visuality of socioeconomic processes and how this effects our ability to engage with them. She deals with the challenge of perceiving market processes through photographic follow-the-money narratives that combine prints, video and text in mixed media installations.
In 2017 she graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (Department of Photography) with the project Where the money is made - Surfaces of algorithmic capital about the infrastructure of algorithmic stock trading. The project was awarded the Steenbergen Stipendium (2017) and was nominated for the Zilveren Camera category Prijs voor Storytelling (2018) along multiple other nominations. She collaborates with a variety of platforms, from museums and galleries to the financial press.
The latest exhibits of her work include Stroom (NL), FOTODOK (NL), Lianzhou Foto Festival (CN), Heden (NL) and Krakow Photomonth (PL).
Her work has been shown internationally and was featured in multiple printed and online publications. She was one of the artists selected to be part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019 and was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2021.
Her work A Blurry Aftertaste is part of the Government Art Collection and it was published as a book form as part of Paper Journal Annual 2019. In the last few years Eleonora has exhibited in galleries and museums such as L21 Gallery in Palma de Mallorca, South London Gallery and Borough Road Gallery in London, Leeds Art Gallery in Leeds, MAR Ravenna, National Museum of Gdansk, and festivals such as Circulations Festival in Paris and Format Festival in Derby.
She works editorially with The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Port Magazine, among others.
Agostini uses photography, video, performance and sculpture to tell stories that raise questions about the construction of personal identities and behaviours. Her work is strongly connected with the experience of our surroundings and she is interested in exploring how the relationships that we form inform who we are.
Through the study of preconceived structures, whether physical or psychological, Agostini aims to investigate the difficulties of how human experience is constructed and she is interested in finding a possible fracture within our socially constructed rules and the spaces we inhabit. Her work often starts from personal experiences andit is the result of a long process of internalization of memories and experiences that she re-elaborate and recontextualize to give it order and gain control over them. She is interested in the psychological action of reenactment used as a tool to investigate and gain insight into one’s life: re-enacting and re-imagining old memories and past experiences become a way to unfold and observe our personal histories.
Agostini refers to the every-day as a space full of potential and possibilities for quests, incorporating ordinary objects and activities within her images to express and navigate its different layers and meanings.
Marcin Kruk (b. 1982) lives and works in Rzeszow, Poland. With a background in Archival and Historical Studies, he currently studies Photography at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. A Fujifilm Poland ambassador, Kruk is also a member of the Archive of Public Protest (A-P-P). His practice revolves around a series of long-term documentary projects.
Yana Kononova (b. 1977) has an academic background in social sciences, and holds a PhD in sociology. She was born on Pirallahi island in the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan – now an important site of oil extraction. During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, her family emigrated to Ukraine. Having later relocated to the countryside of the Trachtemiriv peninsula, Kononova turned to photography. She graduated from the Photoschool of Viktor Marushchenko before following a photography course organised by the Image Threads Collective (USA). In 2019, Kononova won the Bird in Flight Prize in emerging Photography, and in 2022 was the recipient of the Hariban Award, presented by Benrido. Her works have been exhibited in Ukraine and abroad.
Mafalda Rakoš was born in Vienna in 1994. In addition to her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, she earned a degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She then moved to the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she taught for a couple of years. Her work has been nominated and honored several times at international awards, exhibited in museums such as the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, Benaki Museum, Athens and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, as well as shown outside an art context at conferences on eating disorders or at the General Hospital in Vienna. Publications such as Die Zeit, Volkskrant Magazin or Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and organizations such as The Wellcome Collection have published her images. Mafalda Rakoš lives and works between Vienna and Amsterdam, her third photo book A Story to Tell was published in 2020 by Fotohof.