Since starting to work in photography in 2009 Shlyk has had solo exhibitions in Belarus (Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk), Russia (Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Art, Moscow and Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint-Petersburg), Belgium (Extra City, Antwerp), China (Duloun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai) and participated in several international photo festivals (Breda Photo 2016 in Netherlands, Format 2017 in Derby, Belfast Photo Festival the UK, Photo Phnom Penh 2018). Since 2016 he is collaborating on multiple projects with Ben Van den Berghe. In 2017 his work was shortlisted for Prix Levallois, Shlyk became a laureate of Carte Blanche at Paris Photo and won ArtContest (Belgium). In 2018 he won Prijs Roger De Conynck and became the Public Prize Winner of ING Unseen Talent Award.
His practice explores themes of isolation and identity, the juxtaposition of collective and individual, communication versus segregation. By using small narratives he wants to shed light on ways we affect and are affected by artificial social and physical environments.
He has exhibited in The Netherlands and abroad and his work was included in The New Dutch Talent catalogue of 2017 from GUP magazine, and in the Encontros da Imagem 2017 festival program, while his project Point of View was shortlisted for FotoFilmic18.
More: http://www.vassilistriantis.com
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
Lujza Hevesi-Szabó (1997) studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, then worked as a photojournalist and is currently a photographer for Telex.hu. Her works mainly deal with social issues and family dynamics. Hungary, especially the Hungarian countryside and the current situation of the people living there, plays a prominent role in her subjects. She uses irony to make his work attention-grabbing and consumable. She mixes classic documentary photography with elements of subjective visual storytelling.
Jošt Dolinšek (1997, Ljubljana, SI) is a lens-based visual artist. His practice is predominantly stemming from photographic medium and is expanded into moving imagery, installation and sculpture.Dolinšek mostly works on long-term projects, exploring the existential experience of environment and time and our relationship towards both. His work is centred upon the questions on uncertainty — of perspective, duration and change. Form and materiality pose as one of the crucial elements of his works, and are often strongly related to the process and the inquiry behind them.In 2023, he graduated from a MFA Photography programme at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg (SE) and in 2020, he earned a BA in Psychology at the University of Ljubljana (SI). Among others, he has exhibited his works in Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (DE), Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana (SI) and Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg (SE). He lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Bärbel Reinhard (b. 1977) is a German artist, teacher and curator based in Tuscany, Italy. After graduating in Art History, Sociology and Modern German Literature at Humboldt-University Berlin, she followed a three-year photography programme at Florence’s Fondazione Studio Marangoni. Her work has been exhibited in various shows in Italy and abroad, whilst her images have been published by the likes of Liberation, La Republica and Phroom. The main focus of Reinhard’s work lies in the characteristics and limits of photography as a time-space-tied medium. Moving between observational photography, mixed media installations, assemblages and collages with both her own and found material, she works primarily on long-term projects.
Instagram: thefoxisred
Website: www.baerbelreinhard.com
Throughout my practical and theoretical based art, I work across mediums, with a focus on photography. I explore forms of the female body, ideas of beauty, desires, taboos and sexuality. Subsequently, I analyze the interdependencies of women on social norms. I am interested in how society shapes norms that influence the representation and perception of women and how the female body can be used as a tool of power.
Sex workers are sensitive observers of our society, especially about what we do not dare to see. Thus, I consider this work a reflection on society as a whole. Sex is at first place about pleasure, desire and lust, addiction and ecstasy. At the same time, it is about power, about hierarchies, about interrelationships of men and women. It appears that the female body becomes a political weapon. How we live and talk about sex says much about our taboos and fantasies and finally how society is created by a world that exists by judging the unknown instead of listening to each other.
I am grateful for every single conversation and the time I could spend with the women who became part of this work. I cannot express in words how much they taught me about life, about our society and finally about myself.
I did not believe how much we have in common. I found my soulmates in these women who are not only crucial for the existence of this body of work, but close friends that I don ‘t want to miss anymore.
With this work I share some personal insights that truly are my own observations and therefor fully subjective on this topic. It is a collection of images and notes from women I admire and who I met in Brussels, Athens, Paris and Accra.
A belarusian photographer working with documentary and conceptual photography. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Belarusian State University шт Minsk. Graduate of the Academy of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism “Photographics”, St. Petersburg, Russia. Scholar of Gaude polonia fellowship supporting the Ministry of Culture of Poland. Participant of personal and group exhibitions in Belarus, Lithuania, Georgia? Russia, Poland. Publications: Bird in Flight, F-Stop Magazine, Takiedela.ru, republic.ru, Private, SEEN Magazine.
In my work I focus on the theme of the culture of remembrance; I worked on projects about the place of mass shootings near Minsk by the Soviet authorities in the 30s and 40s, and about the liquidators of the Chernobyl disaster as a reclaimed material of the tragedy and the consequences of building a new nuclear power plant with Russian loans. I use digital and analogue photography, as well as collages and archive photos. In early drafts talked about personal transformation. I lived in Minsk, work as a journalist for a Belarusian portal Reform.by, had to leave Belarus in 2021 and currently live in Poland. Here I continue my journalistic work and at the same time shoot a project about forced migration, using my family, which was split up in 1939, as an example. My project deals with private and general questions: about the particular "homelessness" of people from traumatic periods of history and attempts to get rid of this feeling, about the sensitivity of entire nations as a result of political decisions, about the problems of self-identity, about the search for home.
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)
Max is a documentary and portrait photographer who focuses on stories about society, social and ecological chances. He is a founding member of DOCKS collective.
His work often revolves around territory. In Ramo it was his ancestor’s Calabria, in Jardin the mythical space of the garden, found in the streets and parks of Madrid. In his new project, Massao is working on around the Mediterranean coasts, cradle of many civilisations, using the journey of Ulysses as a loose guideline. The scope of his work is profoundly political, as it is rooted in the need to explore how humans relate to the spaces (both cultural and geographical) they inhabit.
The work Jardin was awarded the BOZAR Nikon Monography Series Award 2016. In 2017, he was nominated and be part of the .TIFF by FOMU Antwerp.
In July 2019 his first book Jardin has been published by Witty Kiwi and L'éditeur du dimanche.
Massao'work is part of the prestigious collection of the Foundation A Stichting. He is currently a fellow of the Fondation A Stichting for a project around the Mediterranean which will be exhibited there in September 2020.
From September 2019 Massao started as teacher in the Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
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.
Ksenia Ivanova is a documentary photographer based in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on themes of trauma, explored through long-term storytelling. She was a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award (2024) and the Picture of the Year, Online Storytelling (2021), and won the Lucie Foundation Documentary Award (2023).
Ksenia's projects have been featured in The Washington Post, Courrier International, XXI Revue, and Der Spiegel. She has also contributed to The New York Times, Zeit Online, Le Monde, Libération, and GEO France, among others.
David Bakarić Mihaljević, born in 2001. In Zagreb, is an undergraduate student of cinematography at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. With ambitions of completing a master's degree in photography at the academy, David has had three solo exhibitions and participated in five group exhibitions. One of these, named "So Far," he organized himself with the help of his colleagues and friends. Besides photography, and prior to attending the Academy, David filmed two experimental documentaries. His film, "From You I Am Happy," was shown in the non-competition program at the Zg Dox festival.
Julie Hrnčířová is a photographer based in Oslo. Her long-term interest lies in her sensitivity to the details of the urban environment and the periphery. Observing these neglected places, non-places, urban coincidences and structures reveals the author's interest in a broader social context.
She graduated at Ecole Nationale Supérieure of Photographie (ENSP), Master degree, Arles, France in 2018. She participated in exhibitions as Les Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles, the GapGap Gallery in Leipzig, Gallery Fotogalleriet, Oslo , Industria Art, Brno.
https://juliehrncirova.xhbtr.com/everyday_sculpture
Cloe Jancis (b. 1992) is an artist working with photography, video, drawing and installation. In 2018, she graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a BA in photography, and is currently following an MA programme in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Jancis is fascinated by the social image and daily roles of women – and the related myths, expectations and feelings they evoke. In recent years, her work has focused on objects and rituals associated with performing femininity.
Rita Puig-Serra Costa is a Barcelona-based photographer. With a background in Humanities and an MA in Comparative Literature, she later studied Graphic Design and Photography. Today, Costa works on personal projects alongside various commercial assignments. Her first project, Where Mimosa Bloom, was published by Editions du Lic in 2014. Her ongoing Anatomy of an Oyster project will launch in 2023. Closely related to literature, Costa’s work revolves around the concept of identity. Her investigations also explore the essence of human relationships, and the influence that love, death, luck or memories have on the construction of ourselves.
Born in Gran Canaria in 1973, living in Berlin.
Lorena studied fine art photography between 1992 and 1995 in Boston. Sometime later she went to Barcelona to study filmmaking but moved back to the island after one year in film school. Immediately she joined the team of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, this work got her closer to another one of her passions, films. Being so close to many radical authors and watching their personal films made an impact on her approach to photography.
Mum of 5 children. Since 2008 she has obsessively photographed and filmed her loved ones and their lives together developing over the years a coherent photographic work of a special intensity, building an ongoing project she titled Je reste avec vous. Her images reflects her daily life and focus on her most immediate universe.
She is one of the photographers from collective Temps Zero, an international group of artists working with photographs, films and sound presenting exhibitions and performances around Europe.
She recently published a book with Brazo de Papel/ Fotonoviembre called Himmelskörper, result of the last two years observing her younger children are growing and how their lives unfold fully in the space called Home, reflecting the moment in which we live and what happens outside.
Presently, Lorena diversifies her time between her artist activity and her work as a film programmer and advisor.
Lee has exhibited individually in Caracas, Madrid, and in international group shows such as the Guangzhou Image Triennial curated by Gerardo Mosquera (2021); Vincent Price Art Museum, California, USA (2018); Arizona State University Art Museum, USA (2017); Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France (2013); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2014); the 9th Bienal do Mercosul (2013), and Biennial of the Americas 2013: Draft Urbanism. She has contributed to many other shows in the US, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Seoul, and Paris, among others.
Lee’s works are in the collections of MoMA in New York (USA), Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (USA), Cisternos Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami (USA), Colección Banco Mercantil (Venezuela), Museu de Arte Brasileira da Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (Brazil), and in various private collections in Venezuela, Colombia, USA, Spain, Germany, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Puerto Rico.
Lee studied photography at the Speos Paris Photographic Institute in 2001–2002. In 2006, she took the PHotoEspaña Masterclass with German photographer Axel Hütte and subsequently travelled with him on several photography trips in Latin America, Europe, and Asia from 2006 through 2019. She also studied with Nelson Garrido in his experimental photography workshop in Caracas, Venezuela (2007).
In addition to her career as a visual artist, Lee co-founded and was co-director of the Venezuelan artist-run space Oficina #1 (www.oficina1.com) for more than ten years (2005–2015), helping to launch the careers of emerging artists from Venezuela.