UNSTATED is a Zürich–based practice that merges the physical and digital worlds through innovative strategy and design.We are committed to creating work that adapts to our changing environment.
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.
His work has been recognized through a variety of prestigious professional awards and achievements: In 2014 he was awarded the Grand Prize of the 32nd Hungarian Press Photo Competition for a photo series about the civil war in Syria. In 2015 he covered the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the impact of the refugee crisis across Europe. In the same year he was selected to participate in the Joop Swart Masterclass organized by the World Press Photo Organization. In 2017 he took part in the workshop of Magnum Photos as a recipient of the Robert Capa Centre’s scholarship. In 2018 he was the recipient of the Károly Hemző prize, one of the leading Hungarian photography awards, in recognition of his photo series which drew on a sophisticated form language to capture social phenomena in a way that reflects the photographer’s deep social sensitivity. In the same year, he was also selected to join the Nikon-NOOR Academy Masterclass.
He was awarded the Pécsi József Photography Grant in 2015, 2018 and 2019 for his project entitled The Last Storytellers. In his work thus far, he has tended to focus on the presentation of contemporary societal problems and conflicts, as well as their ramifications. But presenting the victims of long-gone repressive regimes, his The Last Storytellers diverges from this focus. Pursuing a similar theme, his The Darkest Hour series shows that in the same way that the wounds carried by the survivors of labor camps continue to mark the victims to this very day, the underlying experiences have also left an enduring imprint on the physical landscape and the collective memory of humanity.
Lucija Bogunović has been studying New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Zagreb since 2019. As a photographer she collaborated with Mostar Street Art Festival, Zagreb Film Festival and Gallery Karas. In her artistic practice she explores the conceptual relation between photographic medium and time in depicting fragments of life and repetitive events.
@adeyata
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
Younès Klouche is a photographer living and working in Paris and Lausanne. His personal projects pursue new solutions to re-define the documentary genre owing to a conceptual and reflexive approach. After graduating with honours from ECAL in Switzerland, Younès Klouche's commercial practice soon expanded to Paris; where he maintains strong connections with clients, producers and art directors. At the occasion of Art Basel 2022 & the Swiss Design Awards, he presents for the first time Panamera; the result of a three years long photography project in which he studies the urban transformations of the larger territory of Paris. The body of work is then exhibited at the Embassy of Switzerland in Seoul and published into a monographic book with French publishing house Poursuite.
The addictive force of the internet is real, and no one knows this better than Aurélie Bayad. In a post-internet world, where IRL increasingly merges with URL, new possibilities of being are creeping into our daily lives. In her versatile art practice, Bayad uses video, photography and performance to confront us with the messy, dirty thoughts and desires of our hyperreal (what is real?), cultivated identities, as we try to live up to the new rules and standards set by the digital sphere of fake likes and dark web eroticism. Bayad uses her camera, her own and other bodies, and texts she wrote to create a fresh aesthetic language for the new desires of contemporary culture. In slimy and gooey, ugly and disgusting, cheap and glittery settings, we watch her unfold the personae of her filmed and photographed subjects. She hides her models behind the soft, nostalgic hues of the kitschy eighties and nineties; includes erratic and ecstatic sequences in her films, with heart-pounding soundtracks; and fearlessly looks back into the lens, as if asking us: ‘What is your real personality? What is real beauty? What is your true desire, your fetish? Who do you want me to see?’ With her otherworldly beauty standards, her visceral and vomitous but lively encounters with food and other quotidian objects, and her frank interrogations of intimacy, giving and receiving, love and abuse — so pertinent that they can make you tremble with self-doubt — Aurélie Bayad shares with us her search for personal grounding in this confusing, networked world.
- Text by Zeynep Kubat (.tiff)
Drawing inspiration from clichés and contradictions, her work raises questions about identity, exotism, contradictions and social status. She dissects the layers of these themes, often starting from a personal narrative, which organically speaks to a collective spanning different cultures.
El Ouardani takes her camera to places where men are prominent in public spaces. As she actively interacts with them as subjects, she insists, “ I believe it’s crucial for the female gaze to participate in uncovering masculinity’s place in our contemporary world.” Her work has been exhibited at notable venues, including the Van Gogh Museum, Unseen Amsterdam, Foto Tallinn and Paris Photo.
Riccardo Svelto (Florence, 1989) is currently based in Florence, where he works as a professor and freelance photographer. Svelto is graduated from the BA Photography at LABA (Libera Accademia di Belle Arti) in Florence (2015).
He has been the winner of the FOLIO International Online Photobook Masterclass (2020) by PhMuseum & Witty Books. In 2021, Witty Books published his first photobook entitled La Cattedrale. His work has been selected for Giovane Fotografia Italiana GFI 2022, exhibition in Fotografia Europea Festival 2022. At the same time, his work is featured in printed and online publications like Ignant, i-D, Booooooom, VOSTOK magazine and others.
His work is mainly focused on the relationship between empathy and social dynamics, trying to understand the emotional interaction and mind shapes we all face at the different ages and circumstances of life.
Van Wyk is a member of the African Photojournalist Association with World Press Photo, Women Photograph and Black Women Photographers. Her work has been featured by the internationally based i-D, The Washington Post, Photo Vogue, Der Greif and The Times UK.
I started off with photography on a late age, because I have a history of pro-basketball player. I decided to go back and study after I quit basketball. After a stop at RITS Drama school in Brussels I started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent where I got my bachelor in Photography.
I have an undeniable curiosity and hunger for both small and large, well-known and less well-known stories. I use my camera as a key to enter a world or to make any contact. It gives me a fly on the wall feeling, with which I can experience a tranche de vie for a while. I always try to approach my subject as objectively as possible and let my eye do the work.
Photography helps me to understand certain facets of life in a better way.
I've always been attracted to uncommon subjects and stories, which aren't mainstream and easy to approach.
With his interest in the glorifying and influential nature of photographs and images, Jeroen Bocken investigates the increasingly prominent role of hyper-idealised aesthetics in today’s world. Bocken is fascinated by natural science, human criteria and calculations and the limitations of the camera. He combines a variety of digital processes with natural patterns and algorithms. This experimental and associative process results in illogically constructed images. The photographer alternates these with classic “documentary” images – often iconic and familiar – to create an ambiguous context.
The interplay between real and constructed images requires vigilance. By playing these extreme methods off against each other, Bocken reminds us that an image never really shows the ultimate reality but is only capable of representing it. The image is a documentation, a snapshot and a notion of reality. It has the unequivocal power to steer our interpretation and perception in one direction.
New digital advances, such as 3D renders, mean that hyper-constructed images are being unleashed on the world at a dizzying rate. These immaculate, aesthetic and fabricated renderings are increasingly wrong-footing us and impacting on our perceptions. It is only with effort that we can distinguish the “picture perfect” from reality. Bocken is very intrigued by this ironic and surrealistic fact. By twisting and distorting the technical processing of his own images, and embracing the faults, Bocken explores the boundaries of our sense of reality.
Text by Eléa De Winter
She has been changing places from Slovenia to Greece for nearly a decade and after to Paris - for a quest of a home while on the other side she was always urged by the necessity to move.This is also the main focus she explores in her work, the question of her home, geographically as well as emotionally. Tereza’s life can be read within her photographic motives, her work stretches between diary and documentary photography, characterized by a minimalist reality that grows into surreality. Based on intuition and on her everyday life, the images spread from the north of Japan to the south of her kitchen. She is a self-thought photographer, mostly using 35mm film.
In 2020 she was the winner of Fotofever prize, the photo fair held every year in the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. Her work was exhibited at Voies Off in Arles, La Nuu Photo Festival in Catalonia, at Institut Francais in Phnom Penh, Analixforever Gallery in Geneva, Inselgalerie in Berlin, Photon Gallery in Ljubljana, etc. She selfpublished photozines that were exhibited at Athens Photo Festival.
She graduated with a Master in the Fine Arts at KASK in Ghent (BE) with great honours in 2012. Her photo series 'The Dwarf Empire' was rewarded with the Photo Academy Award 2012 as well as the International Photography Award Emergentes DST in 2013. Her serie ‘Snow White’ was awarded 16ème Prix National Photographie Ouverte and NuWork Award for Photographic Excellence. She was awarded the Nikon Press Award in 2014 and 2016 for most promising young photographer. The British Journal of Photography selected De Wilde as one of 'the best emerging talents from around the world' in 2014 and recently received the Firecracker Grant 2016, PHmuseum Women's Grant and de Zilveren Camera award for 'The Island of the Colorblind'.
She has been internationally published (Guardian, New Yorker, Le Monde, CNN, Vogue) and exhibited (Voies OFF, Tribeca Film Festival, Circulations, Lagos Photo, Lodz Fotofestiwal, IDFA, STAM and EYE). Since 2013, De Wilde works with the Dutch newspaper and magazine De Volkskrant, in Amsterdam the Netherlands and joined the photoagency NOOR as a nominee in 2017.