Maria João Salgado, was born in Portugal, in 1992 and has studied at the Portuguese Institute of Photography (IPF) and at Institute of Cultural and Artistic Production (IPCI) in Porto. Since 2015 she has been focusing on Documental Photography, mainly developing projects on human rights and alternative living communities. Currently, she is focusing on a more artistic approach, developing themes on personal issues.
Zellei studied Photography at the University of Kaposvár and received her MA in Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest in 2017. In 2016 she studied as a visiting student at Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Besides Hungary, she was represented in exhibitions in Berlin, London, Vienna, Kanazawa, Breda, and Monopoli. Her works were published in several magazines, for example on the cover of HANT Magazine für Fotografie, in The Guardian, Spiegel Online, IMA Magazine (JP) and C41 Magazine (IT).
In 2020 she earned the 3-year scholarship of Hungarian Academy of Fine Art. In 2018 the artist was a New East Photo Prize finalist, a Prix Pictet nominee, and earned the Pécsi József Photography Grant. She won the third prize of Different Worlds competition in 2017.
Their ongoing work focuses on the relationship between climate change, development, environmental degradation, human rights and geopolitics through which they consider how documentary film and photography inherently reveal the presence of pervasive power relationships , power structures and the mechanism of othering within the political landscape of our globalized society. Through a study of the landscape, the portrait and the still life they consider the shifting cultural meaning of nature, how this is changed by the definition of the Anthropocene and how we may decolonize nature.
They have worked extensively in climate change stress zones producing work in China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Uganda and Laos PDR. Their work has been exhibited internationally including exhibitions at Krakow Photomonth (2016), Fotofestiwal (2014), Fotograf festival (2014), Mpm Gallery (2015) and The Grey House Foundation (2016).
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.
Fred Mungo (b. 1994) is an Italian photographer and visual artist, currently based between London and Bologna. Born in Rieti, she first moved to London in 2013 to study. Mungo holds a BA in Fashion Photography from London College of Fashion (University of the Arts of London), and an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths University. Her artistic research sits within the framework of visual sociology.
Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant are two Belgian artist-photographers based in Brussels. They have a history of collaborating but launched a new project together in 2020. Studying at ESA le 75 from 2015 to 2018, Elise Dervichian deepened herself into the reportage style. Towards the end of her studies, she worked as an assistant curator at La cité des Arts in Saint Denis, Réunion Island. Her work is focused on documentary photography, working on societal subjects such as rape culture or the Armenian diaspora in Belgium. Lina Wielant graduated from Sint Lukas Hogeschool Brussel, where she primarily focused on analogue darkroom techniques, with a predilection for editing photo-books. In August 2022 she participated in a residency at DecorAtelier, (Brussels) with the organisation Dis Mon Nom, which aims to shed light on invisibilised people. Together, Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant combine analogue and digital photography, mainly through staged self-portraits and photo-montages.
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.
With additional background in gender studies & activism Marta’s artistic work focuses on geopolitical and social issues, gossip & fiction, as well as personal experiences. She experiments with various media including participatory workshops and sound installations..
Marta’s work was shown e.g. at OBSCURA Festival of Photography in Malaysia, at TIFF Festival in Wroclaw, at ODESA PHOTO DAYS 2020, BLICA - First Biennale of Arts in Lebanon. Photobook presenting SHIFTERS project is shortlisted for Mack First Book Award 2020. She was selected for several residencies, most recently Landskrona Foto Residency (2020), as well as Nida Art Colony, Gasworks, and Botkyrka Konsthal. She took part in ‘Re-Tooling Residencies Project’ organised by CCA Warsaw. She created & curated ‘Fenix Cities: workshops and exhibitions in Warsaw and Beirut’.
www.martabogdanska.com
“Can a cardboard disc be mistaken for the moon? Could a streak of paint be perceived as a beam of light?” In her series Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent experiments, fails, plays around and messes with our perception of reality. We are confronted with familiar scenes that we often fail to notice: a puddle of water, a sunbeam on the pavement… In Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent sets out to recreate these fleeting moments in her studio and capture them in photographs. The appearance of a rock in the sand is replicated using industrial chemical components. Each image is painstakingly produced, the result of a tireless pursuit of the right materials, lighting conditions and framing. The process is chaotic but the final image seemingly perfect. Bringing the work to the exhibition space, Vincent continues her game: she cleverly places the photographs in unexpected corners, behind a staircase or floating in front of a window. The photographs become sculptural and encourage the viewer to move around and discover what lies beyond the image.
Ann Vincent plays a trick on us, and in doing so, touches upon one of photography’s most fundamental properties: its disturbing relationship with reality. This body of work is an illusion, disclosing its poetic magic only to the attentive viewer.
www.annvincent.be
The current project Systems of Order examines the hidden relationship between fear and joy - something that is deeply embedded within the Russian condition. The first part of the project focuses on the drag community in Novosibirsk, Russia. In joy, there is a darker reality and often the truth must be hidden in this world and “joy” can only be expressed through beauty - one has to place him/herself within the system.This, in a lot of cases, is based on oppression and boundaries. The theme of oppression vs. exhibition is constantly present in those systems of order. Joy becomes a form of repression in itself, there are moments of freedom in the constructed safe space, but they can only be obtained and permitted behind the masks of beauty and entertainment.
Beauty within a Russian context allows for certain freedoms from the norm. You must fit in the central mass of these systems unless you have power, money or beauty. In this way, beauty can become your safety net. In the country, unsure of its own reality and fearful to discover the boundaries, many struggle to be themselves in the current dystopian hybrid.
Laura San Segundo (b. 1990) studied Fine Arts at Madrid’s Complutense University, followed by an MA at Efti International School of Photography and Cinema. Her personal projects have since run alongside commissioned work and a series of teaching roles. A recipient of various scholarships and residencies, Segundo’s projects have been exhibited internationally. With a playful but thoughtful methodology, her work makes conceptual connections between different image types, exploring their many layers of meaning – and how their meaning can be altered by visual strategies like cropping, fragmenting and decontextualising.
Georgiana Feidi, currently based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, is a visual artist whoachieved her photo video MA's degree from the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca in 2020. In her artistic approach, she uses both digital and analog tools, including post-processing and the hands-on exploration of darkroom and alternative photography techniques. In her artistic endeavors, Georgiana explores themes inspired by the mysteries of the universe, nature, personal insights and experiences. Her works reflect a journey into unexplored territories, creating visual narratives that transcend conventional boundaries of thought. Over the years, she has presented her work in solo exhibitions nationally, and participated in group shows across Romania and internationally, including cities like Dortmund, Melbourne, New York, and Rome. Her work has also been featured in various online publications both nationally and internationally.
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).
Ieva Baltaduonyte (b.1988 in Kaunas, Lithuania) is a lens based artist and graduate of thePhotography BA programme at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Informed by her own personal experience of displacement, her artistic practice engages with topics and issues relating to migratory culture. Central to her work are the psychological consequences of migration, such as displacement trauma, as well as the concepts home, identity and the in-between state. After spending seventeen years living in Dublin, Ireland, Ieva has recently returned to her native Lithuania, where she is currently based. Transnational migration is perhaps the most highly contested issue across Europe. For new migrants spatial and temporal displacement is potentially traumatic, resulting in shifting identities where home can no longer be understood as a fixed knowable entity. Ieva is preoccupied with revealing personal and collective narratives where trauma, identity and memory encourage a deeper engagement with cross-cultural dialogue. By using photography for both personal expression and to foster a critical dialogue with contemporary society, she invites the viewer to participate in societal debates, foregrounding human experiences, and exposing what is otherwise obscured or ignored. Her carefully constructed projects combine politics and aesthetics inviting a dialogical relationship with the viewer.
I like to approach different styles of photography, but I prefer the most URBEX (Urban Exploration) photography. I think this genre represents me the best, that's why I'm even more concerned with my project called PLACES SUFFERING.
I'm fascinated by the idea of going into abandoned buildings, finding out their stories, what happened there, why they were abandoned. When I enter such places it is as if I go back in time, I try to imagine those times, to feel the lives of the people who have passed there. Every time I go to a new location, I encompass the emotions for what I can find or what I can meet. We have found all sorts of things undamaged for years, left to chance, from documents, photographs, paintings, dishes, money, clothes, toys, to dead, mummified animals.
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).
He deals with social issues and the people‘s connection to history and their surroundings. With his photo-essays he wants to raise questions that follow the viewer and contribute to an examination of the topics and thus to a better mutual understanding.
He was awarded for PDN Student Contest, World Report Award, PDN Emerging Photographer and was nominated for the W. Eugene Smith Student Grant. In 2019 he was selected for the screenings at Visa Pour l’Image. His work was featured in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, FAZ Woche, Tortoise Media and others.
He is a founding member of DOCKS, a collective of five documentary photographers who act upon shared humanistic values.