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.
At the heart of a grey spectre, from moonlight to basalt, from transparency to deep obscurity, bodies, all female, reveal their plasticity. Forget lascivious poses, postpone conventional attitudes or a complacent light: this is not her subject. Pascale Arnaud disturbs appearances, because in this age which she wishes to depict, defined implicitly between the ages of adolescence and adulthood, there is little room for clear lines and distinguishable outlines. She thus undertakes an exploration which is properly photographic, it is in the matter of the image itself that she sets about translating the reality of this age of becoming and emergence. No clue of the subject’s identity exudes from this grey envelope. The young girls are symbolic figures, caryatides of silver salts which brandish their desires. Tight compositions upon fragmented bodies, contorted poses and unmasked faces: this photographic manner brings to light, from these grey zones, the strength and the vulnerability at play, at a time when an individual enters alone into the world to find its foundation. A colossus with clay feet is seen from a low angle, reminding us of all of the ambivalence and uncertainty due at a time of great expectations.
Anna Aicher (b. 1993) is a documentary and portrait photographer from Germany. After studying photography in Berlin, she became a team member at Salzburg’s Gallery Fotohof in 2018. She is currently following a Masterclass at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin. Exploring traces of old traditions and rituals in contemporary society, most of Aicher’s projects have an auto-biographical dimension. She travels constantly between the city and the countryside, turning up stories nestled in distinct communities. Besides her personal projects, Aicher regularly works on assignments for various newspapers and magazines.
Website: www.anna-aicher.com
Federico Berardi, a graduate of ECAL (University of Art & Design of Lausanne), is a Swiss-born artist and still life photographer living between Paris and Switzerland. His work explores photography’s potential for creating illusion, while interrogating the technical boundaries of commercial and fine art photography.
Andreea Harabagiu was born in Bacău, Romania, where she presently lives. Having studied graphics at The University of Arts and Design in Cluj-Napoca, she currently works as a graphic designer. Passionate about documentary photography, she is on a path to pursue this career.
andreeaharabagiu94@yahoo.com
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).
She is the author of many self-published photographic zines such as "Utopia", "Published" and "Underground". Creating zines gives her the opportunity to reinterpret existing material and create a new full-fledged work with its own meaning. She has presented her work in Belgrade, Budapest, Tel Aviv, Zagreb and Paris. In 2020, she won first place at Slovak Press Photo and the Young Talent of the Year award for her documentary series about the community called Utopia. In 2023, she placed first in the Rovinj Photo Days festival with her series of photographs about the Bratislava community. She received her bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the studio of Olja Triaška Stefanović and Jana Hojstričová. She spent a semester in Finland at the Department of Documentary Photography in Lahti. She is a recent graduate of the Master's degree at FAMU in Prague.
Born in 1991 in Willemstad, Curaçao
Lives and Works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gilleam Trapenberg (1991, Willemstad, Curaçao) moved to the Netherlands at the age of nineteen and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2017. He participated in multiple group exhibitions, such as In The Presence of Absence at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020). In 2017 he published his first photo book Big Papi and in 2018 he was one of the nominees for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He’s the fourth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis grant (2020). His first solo exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam opened in 2021. Gilleam Trapenberg lives and works in Amsterdam. Through his work, Trapenberg reflects on the contradictions that are part of the social landscape in Curaçao, were the idea of a utopian paradise is diametrically opposed to the realities of post-colonialism and tourism. He explores stereotypes and tropes that have manifested themselves through social culture and the Western media.
Hunor Tóth (b. 2000) is a visual artist from Romania, currently residing and creating back and forth between Budapest, his home village of Tăureni (RO), and Odorheiu Secuiesc (RO). In 2024, he graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest with a Master's degree in Photography.
In his artistic practice, he consistently focuses on rural life and its various aspects. Primarily, he engages in the photographic exploration and documentation of rural existence, aiming not only to dispel stereotypical images of the countryside but also to draw attention to the significance of contemporary rural culture and the various ways the concept of the village can be interpreted. He is interested in how rural communities redefine themselves, adapt, and change in response to contemporary challenges such as urbanization, modernization, and globalization.
His work combines staged and documentary photography. This combination is a defining element of his artistic practice.
Paulina Tamara is a Chilean-Norwegian artist based in Bergen. With an MFA in Photography from the University for the Creative Arts, London, her works address questions of gender creativity, (queer) culture, and the act of performing for the camera. Tamara’s interests lie in the space between femininity and masculinity; her ongoing archival project, The Others, portrays Norway’s queer community, whilst her Undress series offers an investigation into the female gaze – made collaboratively with a series of queer cis-woman. In recent years, her works have been exhibited at the likes of Copenhagen Photo Festival and Norway’s National Museum of Photography.
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)
Time at work, this time which rushes, always too short, it is this which Csilla Klenyànszki addresses in her performative and photographic games. Of course, this artistic approach is accepted, being defined by a sum of constraints which might be resumed here as follows: the daily siesta of a child, the domestic setting imposed by this siesta, or thirty minutes for creation. Pillars of Home is a series of variations upon a single theme that is as dizzying as it is absurd. In thirty minutes flat, within this confined frame and with no more than plants, plastic beakers, a vacuum cleaner, table, chair, teapot and other utensils (with the inclusion of her own body, an object which she does not hesitate to contribute and contort), this artist provides ninety-six answers held in a fragile balance between the floor and the ceiling of her apartment. We are amused by one, stunned by another. Yet none of them impose a superiority as, more than just the form, it is the process and the accumulation of experiences which the photographer wishes to highlight: not the beauty of the sculpture nor the skill of its assembly, but the action of an artist who wishes to oppose time with a mischievous and vital fantasy. Ephemeral, yes, but certainly not trivial.
In our work, we explore the result of the interplay between previous and present generations, between the crew and the entertainment we provide for the locals in the places where we shoot. We use tools like traditional film photography, performance, and mixed media, operating at the interface between non-traditional documentary and marginalized fashion photography, in the contemporary environment.
Once a year we put people of our generation in conditions where they intensely experience the conflict between the cultural wealth we inherit from previous generations and the new international, material, spiritual values that impact us in the modern world. Reconciling and integrating this conflict allows us to move on culturally and spiritually and to reveal hidden aspects of life in Ukraine.
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.
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.