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
His artistic work is closely related to the technological workshop, experimentation and the search for suitable means of expression to communicate content. He is interested in the interpenetration of the fields of art, where sound, image and space can provoke impulses through which intuition complements logical thinking – where the exposure to a work of art builds the experience of art.
Bartłomiej Talaga is a graduate of and teacher at the Film School in Łódź. In his work, he shares his own experience with students and focuses on the purposefulness and legitimacy of gestures that lead to personal and authentic expression. He is also a co-founder of the TON magazine (ton-mag.pl) and a designer of photography books.
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Carolina Tardin (b. 1994) is a Brazil-born photographer, currently based in Portugal. Her artistic practice explores diaristic and poetic writing, as well as the manual processes of analogue photography. After obtaining a BA in Communication at Brazil’s Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, Tardin studied Contemporary Photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon. Her projects have since been exhibited in a series of group shows in Portugal: in 2021, her work featured in the Intermitências exhibition at Lisbon’s A Homem Mau gallery as part of the Imago Lisboa Festival. In 2022, Tardin participated in Lisbon's Photobook Fair.
A self-taught photographer, he has built his creative practice by travelling around Kazakhstan and shooting uncanny, unpredictable vistas.
Giulia Parlato (b.1993) is an Italian visual artist based in London and Palermo.
She graduated from the BA (Hons) Photography at London College of Communication in 2016 and from the MA Photography at the Royal College of Arts in 2019.
Her practice delves into histories, myths and cultural heritage, involving photography and video. She analyses the historical use of photography as a document of truth, specifically in its scientific and forensic uses, and challenges this language, by creating a new space in which staged scenes take place. The melancholic and frustrating state, caused by humans’ impossibility to understand the past constitutes the foundation of her work.
Giulia’s work is shown nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions including Podbielski Contemporary Gallery (Milan, 2021), Photo London Fair (London, 2020), Photo Fringe (Brighton, 2020), Palazzo Rasponi 2 (Ravenna, 2020), Galleria Cavour for Photo Open Up (Padova, 2020), Gare Du Nord for Paris Photo (Paris 2019), Kunstgebaude for Soft Power Palace Festival (Stuttgart, 2018); and featured extensively in printed and online publications. She is the recipient of the BJP International Photography Award (2021), the Innovate Grant (2020), Camera Work Award (2020) and the Carte Blanche Éstudiants Award (2019).
Talks and Commissions include Paris Photo, The Photographers' Gallery, Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts, and Art Licks.
She is a founder member of Ardesia Projects, a curatorial platform dedicated to contemporary photography, and of the Carte Blanche Collective.
Giulia's work is held in public and private collections.
I currently live in Paris, and I'm finishing my last year of a double master's degree at La Cambre Bruxelles and Ecole d'art de Cergy. It was music and black life that brought me to different environments and countries in 2021, like Chicago, where I worked with local communities for four months. There have been several venues where I have presented my work, including Treize in 2021 and Cherish in 2022. Earlier this year, I self-published a book of photos and texts, "2 strong for 2 long".
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.
Andrei Budescu has been fascinated by cameras and photography since he was a young boy. Over the last 10 years he has been experimenting with different photographic processes (Polaroid, Wet Plate Collodion) and different cameras (4x5, 5x7, 8x10 cameras). Andrei uses different cameras for his processes and recently he started refurbishing a mammoth camera for his Wet Plate Collodion Process which will be added to his collection.
Duchateau is an artist who mainly works with photography. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies. His photos are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he makes work that generates diverse meanings, associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
His works are characterised by the use of everyday events in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role.
By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense. His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. He makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented.Lars Duchateau currently lives and works in Hasselt and Ghent.
"Porosity is probably the concept that best characterises Etienne Courtois’s approach to his photographic work. One of the threads in his creative process is his distinctly plastic treatment of the medium through integrated and often barely noticeable interventions that are both sculptural and pictorial by nature. These interventions are evident in how he prepares his support as well as in the compositions themselves.
The interventions often originate from the confrontation between various random objects gathered by Courtois during his walks and rambles through the city or in nature, leading to surprising encounters that have a contemporary surrealistic quality, which is further accentuated by the treatment or plastic and pictorial transformations he applies. Courtois adds a subsequent layer of ambiguity to the reading of this process by creating sculptural forms - often in plaster, but also in wood - that are integrated into the images or applied in relief on the prints.
Occasionally, the ambivalence of the treatment is emphasised by multiple exposure of the same photographic negative, which modifies the chromatic values as well as the shapes in the initial image, creating the effect of a shift or spectral motion.
The work of Etienne Courtois clearly surpasses the dichotomy between figurative and representational art. The ambiguity in interpreting and understanding these interventions leads to completely new and surprising formal encounters between everyday objects in a whimsical, alienating atmosphere. Courtois’s work is marked by a distinctly free, singular and often witty approach that evokes the pictorial work of Walter Swennen or the sculptures of Koenraad Dedobbeleer."
Text by Emmanuel Lambion
The project 'The lost paracosmist' is an animated short film by multimedia artist Josephina van de Water. Using digital photography, printed celluloid film, paint, digital scans, video montage, cardboard and extreme patience, she brings a fictitious world to life in fascinating detail. The film was made in the traditional, time-consuming way that requires particular dedication, with each frame individually handcoloured as was done in the first colour movies.
The imaginary island of Paperland is inhabited by a colourful collection of talking animals. Josephina van de Water wrote and narrated the dialogue, giving each animal its own voice, tone and place in her universe. The chronicle guides us through a logical, yet fictitious, tale, in which we learn about Paperland’s geography, history, language, culture and religion.
As in every good fable, imagination is closely accompanied by reflection. While The lost paracosmist focuses on the irresistible charms of storytelling, it also warns the audience to beware of stories. They have the power to contort our perception of the world and disturb our relationship with reality.
The endearing cardboard animals in their warm, glowing colours, and the gentle, motherly voice of the narrator, are reminiscent of children’s programmes. However, the topics covered in this allegory are anything but childish: territorial disputes, political and religious authority and mechanisms of exclusion and esteem all make an appearance, allowing inequality and frustration to creep into this seemingly safe cosmos.
- Text by Geert Goiris (.tiff)
Arian Christiaens (°1981) has been working as a photographer, artist and photography teacher since graduating as a Master at KASK (Ghent, Belgium) in 2004 and participated in masterclasses with Max Pinckers, Paul Kooiker, Laura El Tentawy and Vincent Delbrouck from 2017 onwards.
Her work is centered around investigations of her family relations and the constructed nature of their identities.
In 2019 Christiaens published her first artist book ‘Xenia’ through APE (Art Paper Editions) in which portraits of her sister, who used to be her brother, float between documentary and fiction. The publication was shortlisted for the Arles Photobook Award.
Her most recent work ‘In Camera’, is the result of Christiaens comparing her own relationship, her own person and her own intimate photographical archive with the one of her mother. She questions the relation between man and woman, photographer and model, over time and within her own family history.
‘In Camera’ will be on show in FOMU (Fotomuseum Anwerpen) this summer as part of the exhibition ‘TIFF Emerging Belgian Photography’ and will be published as an artist book in 2022.
Something flows, slowly, perhaps a syrup, yet nothing saccharin arises out of Sanna Lehto’s image, but rather a bittersweet background which rests tranquilly. At the heart of this muffled world, beneath a dome, a small flower has traded its innocence in order to come and pass away on the surface of faces, the fluid has abandoned its lightness and its movement in order to gain in weight. Air is rare in Sanna Lehto’s photographic world. The image sometimes blushes, at other times it pales: the chromatic palette varies from crimson red to pink, as if these faces encapsulated between the glass lens and the sensor were breathing gently. A sort of photographic herbarium, that is what she seems to evoke through these portraits and still lifes. The creative process is not that dissimilar: during her summertime walks she gathers and picks, flowers gleaned from the Finnish countryside; sometimes she buys them, guided by a vision of a coloured harmony rather than through any symbolism. Often, she dries them and awaits for a suitable visual frame in order to place them in the photographic field. We may imagine her, back in her studio, patiently pinning these specimens one by one, according to the fortunes of encounters and visual stimuli.
Helcel received an honorable mention in the European art thesis competition START POINT Prize 2020. He is a co-founder and active member of the theatre group Akolektiv Helmut.
Nolwenn Brod is a French artist based in Paris. She has studied humanities and social sciences, and trained in photography in London and at the Ecole des Gobelins in Paris. She is a member of the Vu Agency and represented by the eponymous gallery in Paris since 2016.
She develops her projects most often in the context of creative residencies in France and Europe where she mixes photography and video; and responds to commissions for the press and institutions. Her works are regularly exhibited in France and Europe and are included in the collections of the Bnf (French National Library), the Cnap, the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, the Museum of Brittany, the Villa Noailles, the Agnès b. collection, the Neuflize OBC Foundation, art libraries and private collections.
Her first book was published by Poursuite Editions in 2015, the second is in preparation.
My research that for formality can be described as photographic due to the medium used, even if the dimension that belongs to me is more related to the image, to what it communicates to us and how it is perceived. Like the graphic design my photographs tend to a clear reading, which privileges functionality to pure aesthetic beauty, to finalize the reading to a deeper stage of cognitive perception. I have two different aspects: the construction of the image by the sculpture, and the archiving of the photos that I collect in certain carefully chosen environments. It’s very important to me to return many times to the settings that I selected. Both approaches are always formalized and captured through photography.
In 2019 I was finalist of the FFF Fondazione Francesco Fabbri award. My work has been featured in many national and international exhibitions: Audi Studio by Nevven Gallery, Stockholm; Villa Vertua Masolo, Milano; Spaziosiena, Siena; LOFT, Lecce; Las Palmas, Lisbon; Galleria Giuseppe Pero, Milano; BASIS, Frankfurt; Spaziobuonasera, Torino.
In Maria Baoli’s series, linearity is constantly broken up. The stories she tells are diffracted; space and time overlap; images are shot through with cracks and scratches like broken mirrors. Although it is clear that the photographer is attached to human situations, to stories and environments charged with life and memories, these devices make us focus on the stylistic elements of the images and stimulate an open and complex interpretation of them. This is particularly true for one of her most recent projects, Chez moi loin de chez moi [At Home Far Away From Home], which explores the Maison Africaine in Brussels, a community home for students.
Maria Baoli’s images are balanced between the depth of their intention (archive, memory, time, love, dreams, etc.) and the surface. This plays a primordial role and in so doing forms a highly personal (and unique) response from the artist to the contemporary use of the snapshot.
Through an uninhibited use of flash, which flattens shadows and adds drama to the composition even in the most mundane and stripped-down environments; through her preference for the close-up or dense landscapes that block the horizon; through the frontality of her perspective; through her use of collage, which disrupts the documentary by introducing a fascinating graphic dimension, Maria Baoli relies on the figures of discontinuity that she turns into loyal servants of reality.
Text by Anne-Françoise Lesuisse
Ebbesen works with reflections to create surreal effects in her work: "In my work, I aim to play with the sense of reality that we relate to the photograph by distorting the objects and space within the picture frame. With these effects, I aim to surprise and confuse and leave one with the question of what is real." Conceptually her works often deal with identity and the subconscious self affected by and interrelated with the surrounding world.
Josh Kern (*1993), currently based in Leipzig, Germany, graduated with a bachelor's degree in photography at the FH Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2022. Between 2018 and 2021, Josh Kern has published three books: "Räuber" (Eigensinn Publishing), "Love Me" (Eigensinn Publishing), and "Fuck me" (dienacht Publishing).