Raised in Sofia, Bulgaria and trained as a painter from an early age, his work arises from an early fascination with the Renaissance and Medieval eras. Stamenov utilizes computer graphic imagery as his primary medium, often to render the uncanny side of a simple event or a movement in a composition, exaggerating its insignificance in an extraordinary manner.
George Stamenov was born in 1988 and lives and works in London, United Kingdom. He completed undergraduate studies at Willem De Kooning Academie and postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art. His work was featured in The Bloomberg New Contemporaries for two consecutive years (2018, 2019); NOT A LIVE SHOW Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2018); Working Projects - Inhabiting the Dome at Whiteleys Shopping Center (2018); Water Tower Festival Bulgaria (2012).
Her work retraces her personal family history drawing on her Togolaise heritage, and the idea of origins. The theme of family is explored through self-portraits in which she plays her mother and father, narrating their experience of migration from Togo to Italy. Her images are partially informed by the West African studio portrait tradition.
Coline Jourdan, born in 1993, lives and works in Rouen, Normandy. She graduated from the National School of Art in Dijon in 2017. Her work has been shown in group and personal exhibitions (Nicéphore Niepce Museum as part of the Ateliers Vortex Photographic Print Prize in 2019 ; La Gacilly Festival, Baden, Austria, 2021; Artefacts, (Residence 1+2), Chapelle des Cordeliers, Toulouse, 2020; Les noirceurs du fleuve rouge, Full B1 Gallery, Rouen, 2019). In 2021, she received she received the Support for contemporary documentary photography from the CNAP, as well as individual aid for creation from the Normandy Region. The same year, she won the 50CC Air de Normandie artist grant.
Vic Bakin (b. 1984) is a self-educated Ukrainian photographer. In Kyiv, the artist explores various local groups – queer and fashion scenes, rave and music culture, and even closed communities like student dormitories. In light of new and evolving local circumstances, Bakin’s focus has since shifted to the subject of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His diaristic personal projects use of analogue photography to probe at questions of identity; with Void, Bakin is currently working on his debut photobook.
With a background in sociology, Alejandra is interested in individuals and how the communities to which we belong define or identifies us. This is a very popular issues today with so many social movements, political instabilities, a constant search for identity or even the questioning of women role in society, but the interesting thing of this artist is how she takes these issues into concrete cases, but the lecture of her work could be elevated to more global concepts. Her particular artistic approach and experience make this photographer an ideal choice for supporting her projection.
Ieva Raudsepa (b. 1992, Latvia) holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Latvia and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been featured in i-D, The Guardian, Wallpaper, It’s Nice That, the Latvian Photography Yearbook, and elsewhere. Her series Cruise was part of the exhibition MIXTAPE at the Riga Photomonth 2016, while the book dummy was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award 2016, Amsterdam, and is now released by Milda Books. In Spring 2018 her work was part of Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe at the Calvert 22 Foundation, London. Her exhibition It Could Just Swallow You Up at the ISSP Gallery in Riga opened July 2019.
In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.
“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”
Alessandro Zoboli (b. 1990) graduated from the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia in 2014. Between 2015 and 2019 he worked in Alex Majoli’s studio as an assistant, refining his skills as a photographer, printer and retoucher. In 2019 he joined Cesura Agency as an official member. Over the past years he has worked on a number of different long-term projects exploring the relationship between North Africa and Europe. Zoboli has also documented the Covid-19 pandemic and housing crisis in Italy; travelling the country from North to South, he photographs the conditions of inequality that characterise western societies, highlighting the forgotten discomfort experienced by millions of families. His ongoing Shine On project explores the multifaceted and elusive face of today’s Britain: a liquid form, constantly changing and contradicting itself in search of a new identity.
Kristina Õllek (b.1989, Estonia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She is working in the field of photography, video and installation, with a focus on investigating representational processes, geological and ecological matter, and the human-made environment. In her practice she frequently uses situations when fact and fiction, synthetic and natural, copy and original intertwine with each other and become a hybrid object / matter to obtain new and reconsidered meaning.
Her works are often site-sensitive, analysing the exhibition location and format, questioning modes of presentation and installation politics, viewing it from different perspectives — from a historical museum to online space.
Kristina Õllek has graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts (BA degree in 2013, MA degree in 2016; at the Photography Department, Fine Arts). She has also studied at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016) and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2012). She’s been the laureate of the Estonian Academy of Arts Young Artist Prize 2013 (BA) and 2016 (MA). In 2019 she received the Art Proof Production Grant. Her works have recently been shown in various international group and solo exhibitions in Estonia and abroad. Her works can be found in private and public collections.
www.kristinaollek.com
Anaïs Boileau was born in 1992 in Nîmes. She is a photographic artist who works exploring Mediterranean cultures as a constant source of inspiration in her projects. She graduated from the art school of Lausanne, ECAL. She lives in the south of France where she alternates between photographic commissions and her artistic projects.Her work is presented in various group exhibitions and selected in several international festivals. In September 2017, she joins a year of master at Central Saint Martins school in London in photography. Since her first collaboration for M le magazine du Monde in 2015, she has worked regularly for the French and international press. Her work can be found in magazines and newspapers such as Le Monde, M le magazine du Monde, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Time or Vanity Fair.
Rami’s work is visually striking. The objects of his portraits are statuesque, almost sculptural and hold a quiet dignity, these aforementioned fabrics (the Veil, the Durag) are elevated from their utilitarian role into markers of adornment. A hijab becomes a royal veil, a durag transforms into the crown of a young, anonymous king, A portrait becomes a painting.His use of colour elevate the text in a variety of ways. His work brings a dynamic element of emphasis, playing on the themes of alienation, anonymity and the question of belonging. the pops of vivid colours bring a sensation of playfulness, while some images use the richness of deep blues, purples and gold tones that bring forth a sense of mystery, a world where the viewer is not entirely welcomed but granted a glimpse of what the (un)veiling allows. He presents his family, his source of inspiration with deference, honouring them in portraits that beam with a sense of pride. The questions of stigmatisation and alienation starts in ‘Hooyo’, and re-occurs in his ongoing series « Durag », taking a step back in Indaha qurbaha, (In the eyes of the diaspora) by showing his subjects up close and personal as well as in their contextual spaces respectively.
Stefania Orfanidou was born in 1989. She is a photographer and an architect currently living and working in Athens, Greece. She has lived in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Madrid, Rotterdam, L’Aquila and Chania. In January 2019 she founded the architectural atelier CHORA. In her work, a personal experience or event, real or imaginary, is the starting point for fragments’ stitching and the composition of tales, where the irrational, the reasonable, the uncanny and the secret may coexist harmoniously. Her photographic work has been featured in magazines, galleries and festivals in Greece and abroad. In February 2019 she published the book ‘Pendulum’, a visual recounting of a return journey to the city of L’Aquila in central Italy. In 2020 she received the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. In 2021 she published the book ‘Cold Turkey’ and she created the art installation ‘Daidala’ at Yali Tzamisi at Chania, Crete.
Paolo Ciregia (b. 1987) is an Italian artist. After experience as a reporter at the forefront of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, in the last five years his artistic research has been focused on Ukraine context, manipulating and reworking his personal archive in a new way. Investigating and deconstructing both archives symbols and language, Ciregia aims to reveal the atrocities behind the war, destroying the propaganda patina through installations and sculptures. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Among the major prizes are Winner of Talent FOAM Amsterdam 2016, Winner of “LOOP, Giovane Fotografia Italiana”, Festival Fotografia Europea 2017, “Honorable jury Mention” at Premio Francesco Fabbri 2016, TU35 at the Museo Pecci in Prato 2017, Winner of Leica Talent 2012.
http://www.paolociregia.eu/
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.
Claudiu Guraliuc (b.1977) is a fine art photographer and educator based in Cluj, Romania. His work specialises in fine art portraiture and nudes, inspired by the aesthetics of Old Master paintings from the Baroque period. Guraliuc holds a Licentiate from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and has achieved numerous international accolades for his work; in January 2022, he received the International Master Photographer of the Year Award. His images have been published by a range of international photography magazines, and his work is found in both private and public collections in Europe, Asia and the United States. Guraliuc is represented by Katsea Art Gallery, Baltimore, and Influx Gallery, London.