Mahalia Giotto, aka taje (b. 1992), is a Lausanne-based visual artist working across photography, performance, installation, and archives. Originally trained in international relations at the University of Geneva, they later turned to photography, earning a Master’s degree from ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne in 2022.
Their work is deeply shaped by their personal journey as a trans non-binary person. Fascinated by androgynous figures in animated series, taje experienced gender fluidly in childhood. However, adolescence imposed binary expectations that never felt right. Their transition, including starting hormone therapy in 2020, profoundly influenced their life and artistic practice.
Among their notable projects, existential boner merges photography, collage, text, and scans to construct an intimate yet radical self-portrait. Studio portraits, vernacular snapshots, and handwritten annotations create a raw, urgent narrative—part personal history, part deconstructed archive. Their installations increasingly incorporate text and graffiti-like interventions, turning space into a site of both personal reflection and public confrontation. The project was exhibited at Images Vevey, in a solo show at SPBH Space in Milan, and won the Swiss Design Awards in 2024. It was published as a book by ECAL and SPBH in July 2023.
Currently, taje is developing, on the verge of becoming completely forgotten, a three-part project examining masculinity as a force that is both protective and isolating.
Michaela Nagyidaiová (b. 1996) is a Slovakian photographer based in Bratislava. Her work analyses connections between landscape, memory, identity, migration, and the topographies of Central and Eastern Europe. Interested in how ideologies and political systems influence layers of personal life – and drawing inspiration from both past events and contemporary issues – Nagyidaiová works on long-term projects that combine images with text, archival material and video. She holds an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication, and is a member of Women Photograph. Her Transient Ties project was exhibited at Fotograf Festival in Prague’s National Gallery, and at a series of further shows in Czechia, Slovenia and Austria. In 2021, Nagyidaiová participated in the Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London & Fotohof in Salzburg, as well as in the British Journal of Photography’s Open Walls ’21: Then and Now exhibition at Galerie Huit in Arles.
Her personal work is often photographic, but this is not an exclusive relationship. On the basis of her projects, there is very often a question: How do the campers manage the nearness with their peers (Hidden Living)? Why do some Chinese prefer to live in a false Parisian avenue rather than in a traditional hutong (Abroad is too far)? What is the counterpart that urges a person to gulp down mass amounts of food enough to hurt their body (Rotten Potato)? Where is our relationship with food and our body rooted (To tell my real intentions, I want to eat only haze like a hermit)? Behind these questions lies a desire to understand a social phenomenon. And humor is not excluded.
She also pays very special attention to actively involve people she works with in the construction of the projects.
Her work has been awarded with various prizes, publications and exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. She also took part in artistic residencies (China, France, Japan).
Monika Orpik (b. 1997) is a visual artist from Poland, based in Hamburg. She holds a BA in Photography from London College of Communication, and is currently pursuing an MA in Photography at Hamburg’s Hochschule für bildende Künste. Approaching questions of reconciliation and dialogue in post-traumatic societies, her practice is research based, making use of archival materials, interviews, oral histories and artefacts. Her methodology involves working with specialists across various disciplines, including ethnography, anthropology, film and music. Since March 2022, Orpik has been a member of ABC (Artists’ Book Cooperative).
Website: monikaorpik.com
Vika Eksta (1987) is an artist based in Riga, Latvia. In her long-term projects, Vika combines the documentary and fictional. Most of her work reflects upon the artist's personal experiences - be it an exploration of a fictional identity or of a Latvian rural landscape. Vika's choice of medium depends on the idea of the project. She is skilled in photography, analogue photo lab work, performance for the camera and audiovisual archive research. Vika is the winner of the ADC Young Guns, FK Portfolio and Riga Photography Biennial awards for young Baltic photographers, and has been nominated for the Purvītis Prize. Since 2014, she has participated in exhibitions in Latvia and abroad, including at the Latvian National Museum of Art (2020, 2022), kim? Contemporary Art Centre (2019), Gallery Alma (2019, 2021), ISSP Gallery (2018), Kaunas Photography Gallery (2017) and many various festivals. Her work is held in the collections of Latvian National Museum of Art, Latvian Museum of photography and private collections.
www.vikaeksta.comhttps://www.instagram.com/ekstavika/
Lia Darjes was born in Berlin in 1984 and grew up in Hamburg. She studied with Ute Mahler at HAW in Hamburg and then as a master class student with Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, where she started teaching in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, France, Canada, Russia and Switzerland and published in national and international media such as M, le Monde, and CNN. She has received various scholarships and awards, including the young talent award of the Art Prize of the Lotto Foundation Brandenburg.
Her work 'Tempora Morte' is an authentic documentary still-life study from the unofficial roadside-market of Russia's little exclave Kaliningrad.
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.
Patricia Morosan studied photography at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. In her visual poetic work, she negotiates the duality of intimacy and identity. Represented by Galerie Franzkowiak in Berlin, her work has been exhibited internationally, among which at Les Rencontres de la Photographie d‘Arles Voies Off, Fotohaus Paris-Berlin; Les Boutographies, Pavillion Populaire Montpellier; at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest; Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin; ICR Gallery Lisabon; Kommunale Gallery Berlin; Metamatic TAF, TV Control Center (KET), Athens; Atelier Varan, Paris; at 12-14 contemporary/FotoWien, Vienna; the Noorderlicht International Festival, Netherlands and at the Foto Forum, Bolzano. 2019 she won the Jury Award from Les Boutographies, Montpellier; and the Courage Prize of the Association of Women Journalists in Germany. She was nominated for the Art Prize of the Haus am Kleistpark in Berlin (2019), for the Wellcome Photography Award (2020), the Documentary Prize Wüstenrot (2020), Gomma Grant (2021), BUP Award (2022). She received various grants from: Initial Stipend from the Academy of Arts Berlin (2021) and various grant from the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe. Her work is part of public collections, as the MNAC collection in Bucharest and the Ville of Montpellier, France and in several private collections in Europe.www.patriciamorosan.com
Sofie Flinth (b. 1996) is a Copenhagen-based visual artist with a BA in Art & Design from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Working primarily with portrait and staged photography, her works touch upon themes of nostalgia, vanity and manipulation. By combining storytelling with everyday life, Flinth creates semi-docu scenarios featuring herself and the women close to her. Her projects explore the imaginary, asking to what extent images portray reality. In 2020, Flinth’s graduation work When the Sun Sets was part of two group exhibitions in Amsterdam; one at Galerie Ron Mandos and another at Foam Fotografiemuseum. In 2022, she was named as one of the Fresh Eyes Talents with her ongoing series, A Million Dollar View.
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The DUNA group is an open collective of artists (Lenka Bakes, Ladislav Kyllar, František Svatoš) focusing on themes of the future topics such as ecology and technology. Adaptus is a speculative project in which we explore the borders of humanity and complexity of fragile relationship network between various entities.
DUNA has presented in a number of solo exhibitions, presented the first volume of the Adaptus series in 2019 as part of the 4+4 Days in Motion festival in Prague, and has continued to develop the series through the NoD exhibition in Prague and online platforms. The Duna group was included by the French publication NONFICTION 02 on Nature, among a selection of artists born after 1980 setting the trends of the future, with recent works presented by Duna in the exhibition HOLY MATTER at Below Grand in NYC and in the exhibition Baitball at Polignano a Mare Italy.
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Aurélie Scouarnec created her series, Anaon, in the monts d’Arrée, in the Finistère region of Brittany. It is a delicate exploration on what she calls “the margins of the visible” in this legendary land. Inspired by the texts of Anatole Le Braz and François-Marie Luzel, she undertook a photographic investigation, in search of the rites and ancient tales amongst this rocky mountain range. Gateway to hell, according to some beliefs, here she crosses the phantom presence of several animals, called psychopomps, in charge of escorting souls in the kingdom of the dead. In other places, she plays with the syncretism particular to this hilly land and combines in a single stroke veiled female silhouettes – immediately associated with Christianity – and monumental woodland silhouettes, places of pagan worship. The abyssal green of moss and the deep black of the night are at times awoken by the cry of the moon and the animals perhaps surprised by the movement of these heavy fabrics. Stories read, heard, relics of ancient rites and forms of contemporary druidism, all are invited here to take their place in this phantasmagoric narrative which Aurélie Scouarnec constructs, photograph after photograph.
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.
Having worked for several years in various media as a photojournalist, he made the decision to turn in their work and personal lives mainly developing projects of human and environmental fields.
He is currently also as a photo guide in Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Norway and Ukraine.
Sasha participated in the 5th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art in MMoMA, previous year took a part of “Somewheres & Anywheres: Young Photography from Eastern Europe” exhibition in Berlin gallery EEP and join BERLIN PHOTO WEEK.
His short film “Swallowed by the Routine” was selected for the Fashion Film Awards 2019 by SHOWstudio X HARRODS and was shown in London last October.
The main themes explored by Sasha now are the struggle with the language, because words controls us and reduces our worldview; queer theory, that means infinite pluralism of identities, meanings without hierarchy, ever-changing flexible self-definition; and criticism/decentration of the concept of truth.
This three ideas are really close to each other like the liberation from automatisms, habits and the aspiration to independent, affective perception and action.
After graduating with a BA in geography and communications, she started studying photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX). She has worked at the Danish daily, Dagbladet Politiken and studied abroad at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (KABK). In January 2020 she graduated and is now working freelance and on personal projects.
Nanna is a Canon ambassador and member of Women Photograph. In 2020 she was nominated for the Joop Swart Masterclass held by World Press Photo, and for The 6x6 Global Talent Program in 2019. In 2017 she attended the Canon Student Development Programme at Visa Pour l’Image. Her work has been published in NPR, PHmuseum, Politiken, Information among others and she has won several prizes at CPOY, Danish Picture of The Year and others.
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.
He debuted as a photographer in 2016 at Krakow Photomonth with the “Olympia’s Diary” project. From 2017 to 2019, he was part of art collective Fashion House Limanka, whose works were presented as individual exhibitions in the Museum of Art in Łódź and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He currently works at the Museum of Art in Łódź, where he is curating the “Save as a draft” program of Instagram art residencies.