Laure has exhibited her work internationally in Berlin (DE), Reykjavik (IS), Brussels (BE), Paris (FR), and soon in Stockholm (SE), Luxembourg (LU), and Osaka (JP). Her work has entered the collection of several foundations, such as the Fondation des Arts du Luxembourg and the Palais de Liège (BE).
Agnieszka Sejud is an interdisciplinary visual artist operating between Hamburg and Wrocław. She holds a Master’s degree in Law from the University of Wrocław and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Silesian University in Opava (Czech Republic). In her artistic practice, Sejud engages with various media as tools for critical reflection on identity, the notion of individual freedom, and the oppressive structures that constrain human autonomy. Her work aims to deconstruct and dismantle these mechanisms through an experiment-driven artistic approach. She works with photography, both digital and analog collage, artist publications, installations, and video art. A distinctive feature of her aesthetic is the deliberate deformation of the image, which serves as an expressive vehicle for conveying complex ideas and emotions. Sejud’s works have been exhibited in numerous international contexts, affirming their universal resonance and significance within the discourse of contemporary visual art.
Richard Kiss (b. 1994) holds a BA in Photography from Budapest Metropolitan University. He is currently an MA student in Photography at the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As society and visual culture change rapidly, Kiss uses new media to grasp at the essence of our saturated present, focusing on changes triggered by the internet and their effects on contemporary art. In his projects, Kiss often strips photographs of their original contexts and meanings, transforming them into entirely new artworks. Throughout his projects, Kiss seeks to question the relationship between the spectator and artwork and the reasons behind an image’s production, thus making the act of photography a subject of reflection.
Website: kissrichard.com
Instagram: r_ch_k.ss
After finishing his studies as an interior architect, he was eager to learn to work the camera. In an auto-didactic way, he developed his own unique vision on fashion photography and later on managed to fuse his moroccan roots, tradition and culture with the western world he grew up with. The last years his Moroccan DNA is flowing more and more through his veins and his works. The urge to show this rich moroccan heritage through an artistic eye is present in everything he portraits and the inspiration he gets from his motherland is endless.
https://mousmous.com/
Kwabena Sekyi Appiah-nti (b. 1994) is a Belgian-Ghanaian photographer based in Amsterdam. Straddling the boundaries of documentary and fashion photography, his projects reveal a fascination for people who face societal prejudice, aspiring to cut through the clichés of stereotyped representation. Delving into his subjects’ worlds and observing their behaviours, Appiah-Nti documents their true essence; he describes ‘boyhood’ as the overarching theme in his work.
Joana Dionisio (b. 1993) is a Portuguese photographer based in Porto, where she works as a freelancer on various commissioned and personal projects. Having first studied Audiovisual Communication Technologies, she completed an MA in Artistic Photography in 2021. Dionisio has exhibited her work in a range of solo and group exhibitions, whilst she was recently selected for FRESH EYES – a publication showcasing emerging European Photography Talent by GUP Magazine.
Barbara Debeuckelaere (BE) is a visual artist and photographer. She is a master in Visual Arts, Photography (KASK Ghent, 2021), a master in International Politics and European Law (VUBrussel, 1992) and a master in Economy (KULeuven, 1991). She started her career in Dutch Guyana (Suriname) as a junior professor at the University of Paramaribo. After that she worked as a journalist, for newspapers De Standaard and De Morgen and from 2002 on she was recruited by the VRT-newsroom. First she worked for radio (Voor de Dag, Radionieuws) and from 2007 on for television (Terzake). For VRT she made reports and traveled regularly to countries like Iran and to the Middle- East. In 2014 she quit the VRT and decided to turn away from the news industry to focus on a more poetically driven perspective on the world, through visual art and photography. In her work she is searching to explore power relations, systemic thinking, capitalism and climate change, trying to avoid the general craving for the exotic. Her life partner is Koen with whom she has 3 children: Ambroos, Jeanne and Cecile.
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)
If Hélène Bellenger's work could be associated with a single tool, it would not be a camera, but one of those fine, precise instruments of the forensic scientist, so diligent is the artist in dissecting the workings of an imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Preferring the act of collecting and transforming to that of shooting, she approaches images that are inert and out of use. For the Dazzled project, she collected a series of faces on the internet that had been obliterated by a flash of light - the now famous form of the selfie with the flash in the mirror - forming a kind of digital sun that contaminates the image and prevents the portrait. Another collection is that of advertisements for anxiolytics and antidepressants taken from specialist magazines, which she assembles into a frieze to display the litany of tense faces and slogans in the form of injunctions to happiness. Earlier, in Right color, she diverted a collection of magazines, posters and photograms from reels of films featuring actresses from the 1920s to the 1950s, reviving the make-up that was applied to them to reconstruct their faces and modify their plasticity for the black-and-white screen of the time. With her recent Bianco ordinario, her torsos of Apollo and busts of Venus, she continues her archaeology of the canons of beauty. Through a play of superimposed forms and supports, she links the geological time of the Carrara marble quarries, its extraction in Antiquity for sculpture, and today's massive extraction of marble powder to whiten the packaging of our cosmetics and cleaning products. The ensemble consists of a collection of unfolded packaging cartons on which the artist prints images of antique busts and quarry landscapes. In turn, the images themselves will be extracted from their support by the acidity of the marble powder contained in the cardboard, washing them ‘whiter than white’. The history and fortunes of the Western concept of whiteness are at the heart of the work the artist is currently developing in the Mediterranean basin.Hélène Bellenger (1989) lives and works between Marseille and Paris. After studying law and art history, she specialised in photography and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles in 2016. Bianco Ordinario was supported by Aide à la Création 2021 from the Drac PACA and produced at the Centre Photographique Ile-de-France as part of the 2022-2023 research and post-production residency.The artist would like to thank Isabelle Carta, Roland Carta, Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France, Nathalie Giraudeau, galerie Marguerite Milin and Francesco Bi
The daughter of Chinese emigrants living in Canada, Teresa Eng had an imaginary and fantastical vision of China, until she decided to visit the country. The degree of difference between the Chinese dream that she had constructed and the reality of a country undergoing a frantic development, might have resulted in a documentary which would not have spared us the excessive nature of contemporary China. On the contrary, Teresa Eng, chose to avoid the obviousness of a documentary and the stylistic clarity this entails. Her China seems to evolve beneath a hazy veil. The here and now are erased, the signs of urban frenzy – abundantly illustrated in contemporary photography – are eluded, potentially treated as asides. An infinite head of hair confronts audaciously the curves of a modern architecture: Teresa Eng treads softly, turning her back on the injunctions of a modern China. Which, out of a rock standing in its ceramic pot, or a concrete pillar erected in the water, merits our attention? Teresa Eng’s China seems to navigate between the riverbanks of a capitalist progressionism (China Dream, the title of the series, is also a popular slogan for president Xi Jiping, which in turn refers to the American Dream) and that of an orientalist romantic nostalgia.
Tina Farifteh is a Dutch-Iranian artist based in The Netherlands. She obtained master’s degrees in Economics and a bachelor’s degree in Arts. Thanks to this academic and cultural background, she is used to seeing the world from different angles.
She is a visual researcher whose work lies at the intersection between arts, politics and philosophy. Her interest lies in human nature and the politicization of ‘life’ – particularly, the administration and control of life. She is inspired by the work of philosophers Agamben, Foucault and Arendt. Specifically their concepts of ‘bare life’ and ‘biopolitics’.
In her work, she reflects on the impact of man-made power structures such as nation states and corporations on the lives of ordinary people. Often focusing on people stuck between the ‘natural’ life and the ‘conventional’ life. People not only excluded from the privileges granted by the ruling political and economic systems, but often damaged by these to make the system ‘work’. Her photographic approach is research-based and conceptual. Often combining images, text and data. The goal is to seduce us to look at topics that we prefer to look away from because of their complexity or discomfort.
In her earlier project Killer Skies (2018), she explored the impact of the ‘dronisation’ of armies. Currently she is researching and reflecting on the situation of refugees on the move or stuck at European borders. This work focuses on borders, bodies, and the political language used to normalize the absurdity of how we are currently dealing with these topics.