Karim El Maktafi (Desenzano del Garda, 1992) is an Italian Moroccan photographer based in Milan. In 2013 he graduated at the Instituto Italiano di Fotografia in Milan. In 2016, he obtained a one-year scholarship at Fabrica, Benetton's communication research center in Treviso.
During his residency period, El Maktafi made the project Hayati and, one year later, won the PHMuseum 2017 Grant - New Generation Prize. With the same project, El Maktafi has been finalist of the CAP Prize 2017 (Contemporary African Photography prize) and second prize at the Kassel Dummy Award 2018. In 2017 he won a mentorship with the American photographer Maggie Steber (VII Agency), while in 2018 he gets the Magnum Photos scholarship with Alex Majoli.
Karim works on long-term projects between Italy and Morocco exploring concepts as identity and sense of belonging through documentary and portrait photography. His work has been exhibited at La Triennale Museum in Milan, Museum in Der Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, Macro Testaccio Museum in Rome and in other photography festivals in Europe, as well has been published, among others, on The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic USA, Internazionale, Vice, GEO.
www.karimelmaktafi.com
Charlotte's work is being published by outlets internationally and her personal projects on migration and women were shown in solo exhibitions in the United States, Turkey, Austria and Japan. She speaks six languages and is currently based in Berlin.
http://www.charlotteschmitz.com/
Sergey Melnitchenko was born in 1991 in Mykolayiv, Ukraine. Started photography in 2009. In 2018 – founder of school of conceptual and art photography MYPH. Member of UPHA – Ukrainian Photo Alternative. In recent years, he has participated in more than 100 solo and group exhibitions around the world. Winner of Ukrainian and international contests including “Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer” in 2017 (Berlin), “Photographer of the Year” in 2012, 2013 and 2016 (Kyiv, Ukraine), “Golden Camera” in 2012 (Kyiv, Ukraine). Shortlisted for Krakow Photomonth in 2013 and Pinchuk Art Center Prize in 2015, among others. Participant of “Paris Photo”, “Volta Art Fair”, “Photo L.A.”, Photo Basel, etc. Nominated on “Foam Paul Huf Award” in 2020. Sergey’s works are in private and public collections in USA, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, France, Germany, Belgium, Lithuania and Czech Republic.
A combination of experimental analogue and digital photography, research-based, documentary elements and scientific imagery searches for the supposed truth content of photography and deals with the ecological effects of human action. Photography is used as an aesthetic object, medium and object of investigation.
After his apprenticeship at the Lette Verein Berlin until 2010 he studied from 2015 at Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in the class of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and from 2017 in the master class of Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in July 2017 and continues with the MFA at HfbK.
The newest work 'blast from the past' clashes two time scales: Amber is being examined as a time capsule and its possibilities to function as a photographic negative which shows snapshots of insects, frozen in its movement 20 million years ago. But the seabed of the Baltic Sea also keeps bombs and ammunition which were dumped after WWII in order to get rid of it, irrespective of the ecological disaster.
Sanja Bistričić Srića is a Zagreb-based multimedia artist, photographer and cinematographer. Exploring the possibilities of image, sound and text through various media – film, video, photography, collage – her work explores personal themes in a range of diaristic forms. Srića holds a Master’s degree in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. Her works and films have been widely exhibited in Croatia and abroad, whilst her images have been published by the likes of Elle, Vice and Interview. She is a co-founder and member of the multidisciplinary collective RA’AH, which explores intersections of fashion, art and music.
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.
Her aim is to make the spectator observe and to be observed at the same time. While we watch others, we are being watched too. The desire of observing one another, of having insight into the lives of others posits a system of norms based on which we define ourselves compared to others. We want to confirm that we have similar problems as others, that we are better than or just as good as they are. In other words, that we only deviate from the average on an average scale.
Her works explore how we can describe our body in the most objective manner possible, to represent it without any intimacy whatsoever. Looking at these so-called anti-intimate states, the works examine all the subtle and complex relationships our physical extension forms with our environment, and how social expectations shape our appearance. Personal stories and critical observations regarding the body are represented along with abstract objects and intertwined sculptural bodies. Her fundamental medium is photography that she often combines with other disciplines, such as objects, photobooks or video.
Can we consider photography as a tool for extended cognition? Krystyna examines this issue in her earlier work, which also explores the interaction between people and space, and provides insight into the different areas of perception with the tools of photography. While studying the human cognitive function, she takes steps to get to know herself. Krystyna sees photography as a reconnaissance tool. For getting acquainted with the unknown areas, she stretches the possibilities of the medium and experiments with frontier topics.
At first, through personal topics, she outlined herself with photography, and later on, the characteristics of the medium and its relation to human and reality began to interest her. She explores the subject of her current interest in details, in many different methods, experimenting with various media to understand the topic as a whole picture. At the moment, she is interested in the directed viewpoint created with images and the features of image reading.
She was represented in several national and international exhibitions. From 2016, she is a member of the Studio of Young Photographers. In 2017 she was awarded the Photography Scholarship by The Association of Hungarian Photographers. From 2018 she is a member of The Studio of Young Artists’ Association. In 2019 she won the Budapest Portfolio Review and she is part of the Futures Photography platform.
Vassilis Pantelidis’ images provide a glimpse of an alternative reality, which consists of a series of conceptual self - portraits. The individual scenes adopt a theatrical approach where the abstraction, the paradox and the absurd as well as the repetitive weave and the claustrophobic thread around the human subject, without any sort of redemption or solution.
She is a student of the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava (the Czech Republic), winner of the PDN Emerging Photographer, last year's laureate of the Konrad Pustoła's Remembrance Scholarship, winner of the Sputnik Photos Project titled "As you can see". Her works have been published e.g. in The Calvert Journal, Culture.pl, FK magazine.
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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.
Corso began working as a documentary photographer in 2011, publishing in media outlets like National Geographic, Al Jazeera, TIME Lightbox, GEO magazine, MO, Il Reportage, VICE, El País, and or Revista 5W. Among the cultural centers that have hosted and exhibited his projects, the following stand out: The Cervantes Institute in New York, the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Palau Robert (Barcelona), Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), the International PHOTON Festival (Valencia), Photo Romania Festival and the LUMIX Festival (Hannover). His work is part of the traveling exhibition "Creadores de Conciencia", curated by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto and Chema Conesa, which compiles the work of 40 authors under the topic "committed photographers".
His documentary work has been recognized by the International PHOTON Festival, BANFF Photo Essay Competition, Prix de la Photographie Paris, Moscow International Foto Awards, International Photography Awards and as a finalist of other contests such DAYS JAPAN Photo Awards, the World Reporter Award, the Contemporary African Photography Prize, the Siena International Photography Awards, the Balkan Photo Awards and the LUMIX festival, among others.
In 2018 he is nominated for the World Press Photo 6x6 Global Talent Program and his project MATAGI received the National Geographic Society Explorer Grant.
www.javiercorso.com
Nazanin Raissi (b. 1981, Tehran) is a Swedish-Iranian artist and clinical psychologist based in Sweden. Centred on the medium of photography, her work ranges from site-specific installations to video animation and sculpture. Her research-based artistic practice explores themes of memory, loss, and displacement.
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.
Pablo Lerma is a Spanish research-based artist, educator and publisher based in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).His work has been exhibited at Photoforum Pasquart (CH), Copeland Gallery (UK), IHLIA Heritage (NL), Deli Gallery (US), FOTODOK (NL), PhotoEspaña (ES), The Finnish Museum of Photography (FI), Flowers Gallery (US), Konstanet (EE), Centro Huarte (ES), New York University (US), Fotoweek D.C. (US), SCAN International Festival of Photography (ES), La Fábrica (ES), and Fundació Foto Colectania (ES) among others. His publications are in collections including the Guggenheim Museum (US), Museum of Modern Art – MoMA (US), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - SFMoMA (US), Aeromoto (MX), Centro de la Imagen (MX), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US), and the International Center of Photography in New York (US), among others. He has been awarded with the Cherryhurst House Fellowship MFA Houston (US), Grand Prize of Curators Award PDN (US), Fundació Guasch-Coranty (ES) and Sala d’Art Jove (ES). He has been selected for Pla(t)form FotoMuseum Winterthur (CH) and nominated for the First Book Award MACK Editions (UK), Critical Mass (US), and PDN 30’s (US). His work has been featured on Trigger FOMU (BE), Lens Culture (US), Photomonitor (UK), Unseen Platform (NL), British Journal for Photography (UK), Ain’t Bad Magazine (US), New York Foundation for the Arts (US), PDN Online (US) and PhotoInter China (CH).