Katerina Tsakiri was born in Athens in 1991 and she is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied Photography and Audiovisual Arts in Athens and has an MFA in Photography from the University of Gothenburg. Since 2015 she has been working part-time as a visual artist and part-time as a commercial photographer. From 2019 she has been devoting her time to her artistic practice. She works with self-portraiture and her subjects are mainly autobiographical. The theme of her work is the female identity in Western culture with a focus on the female body. Her practice expands from staged photography to video performances and sculptures. In her latest project, she uses documentary photography to share the journey of her breast cancer treatment. She unravels through the photographic medium her body’s fragility and the impact of the illness on her female identity.
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.
With his interest in the glorifying and influential nature of photographs and images, Jeroen Bocken investigates the increasingly prominent role of hyper-idealised aesthetics in today’s world. Bocken is fascinated by natural science, human criteria and calculations and the limitations of the camera. He combines a variety of digital processes with natural patterns and algorithms. This experimental and associative process results in illogically constructed images. The photographer alternates these with classic “documentary” images – often iconic and familiar – to create an ambiguous context.
The interplay between real and constructed images requires vigilance. By playing these extreme methods off against each other, Bocken reminds us that an image never really shows the ultimate reality but is only capable of representing it. The image is a documentation, a snapshot and a notion of reality. It has the unequivocal power to steer our interpretation and perception in one direction.
New digital advances, such as 3D renders, mean that hyper-constructed images are being unleashed on the world at a dizzying rate. These immaculate, aesthetic and fabricated renderings are increasingly wrong-footing us and impacting on our perceptions. It is only with effort that we can distinguish the “picture perfect” from reality. Bocken is very intrigued by this ironic and surrealistic fact. By twisting and distorting the technical processing of his own images, and embracing the faults, Bocken explores the boundaries of our sense of reality.
Text by Eléa De Winter
With his tableaus Hardy welcomes the viewer to a multitude of worlds. In his creative process he draws from a web of observations, memories and imagination, and responds to both large and small events in the world. He explores the complexity of life in an idiosyncratic and compassionate way and in doing so, aims to increase our social sensitivity.
Hardy studied Architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology and afterwards Photography at the Willem de Kooning Academy. He is nominated for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2021 (UK), and launches Vivarium in the accompanying exhibition. His first solo is planned for the end of 2021 in museum MOYA (NL). In 2019 he showed his work for the first time on an international stage during Photo Basel.
Cristina Galán (b.1992, Spain) is a visual artist working mainly with photography and video. Her work explores the subversion of identity and the appearance of the sinister beneath the visually polished surface of reality, reflecting on the search for individual identity through collective identity. Galán builds in each work a universe with its own symbols and codes where everything that is there is there to be seen. Galán's work has been exhibited in Festivals and art centres such as Festival F2, Dortmund, Germany / Photo Israel, tel Aviv, Israel / CEART (Art Center Tomás y Valiente), Madrid, Spain / ProyectArte 19, Sevilla, Spain / Athens Photo Festival, Athens, Greece / XVI Bienal internacional de fotografía de Córdoba, Spain / 2018 Muestra de Arte Joven, La Rioja, Spain. She was also selected in ViPhoto Fest, Vitoria, España / Encontros da imagen, Discovery Awards and Emergentes, Braga, Portugal / Fotonoche, Art Center Alcobendas (CAA), Madrid, España. In 2018 PAUL received the Silver Prize in Fine- Art-Portrait category in TIFA. Tokio, Japón.
Paul was also published in Pewen photography notebooks (publishing house Muga) #38 and in Revista VA! #4.
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.
With a mindful approach she seeks stillness and hidden messages in ordinary life, often exploring society, human-made landscape and nature.
Dorota Franková is a Czech photographer finishing her studies of photography at the Libuše Jarcovjáková’s studio at the Faculty of Design and Art Ladislav Sutnar in Pilsen. She is engaged in various professions such as social worker in nursing home. In 2022, she devoted a photographic series in a hospice, where she encountered the passing of people to the other side. Here she interviewed dying people and documented their last moments. She has also been working on a documentary about her ailing grandmother for several years. She enjoys fashion photography and loves collaborating with musicians on their album booklets. A core part of her work is self-reflection and understanding emotional states and their reflection in photography.
His documentary approach uses photography as a link between a habitat and its inhabitants, as well as between the inhabitants themselves. In so doing, he questions notions of territorial, social, architectural and industrial identity.
In 2020, he co-founded La Nombreuse ASBL, a cultural space in Saint-Gilles, Bruxelles dedicated to emerging and contemporary photography. Since 2019, he has been driving a truck transformed into a camera obscura to meet the inhabitants of northern France.
He graduated from the BTS photo de Roubaix (fr) in 2015 and from ESA Le75 in 2018, where he has been teaching since 2023.
Wathne studied Visual Arts at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art and Photography at the Norwegian School of Photography.
Naina Helén Jåma (b. 1991) is a south Sami photographer, vytnesjæjjah and storyteller from Snåase, Norway. With an education in photojournalism – she has worked as both a photojournalist and photo editor for various newspapers and news agencies in Norway and Sweden – documentary approaches characterise much of her work. Among others, her images have featured in VG, Aftonbladet, Aftenposten, The New York Times, The Guardian, Huffpost, and Dagens Industri. Jåma is also a member of the Sami Artist Association.
Benedek Bognár (1986) lives and works in Budapest. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. In 2012 he studied performance and video art at the Estonian Academy of Art in Tallinn on an Erasmus scholarship. His series of works address issues related to current social phenomena, aiming to create unusual or new perspectives. He is primarily concerned with the symptoms of virtuality, digitalization, and the age of image-based communication. In his work, he often reflects on photography itself as a medium capable of creating the illusion of an objective representation of the world and its role in the process of human cognition. In his recent work, he has been concerned with modern myths and the general human need for irrational stories to explain the world. In his thesis, Genesis, he examined how the entertainment and advertising industries use the patterns, archetypes, and topoi from which humanity’s ancient great myths were built, from the perspective of the functioning of consumer society. In his work CUI PRODEST, which he is working on under the József Pécsi Photography Scholarship, he deals with the pseudo-news and disinformation of the world, which are based on irrational contexts and enemy images instead of scientific paradigms.
Susanne Fagerlund (b. 1969) graduated with an MFA in Fine Arts from Gothenburg’s Valand Academy in 2021. She is currently following a post-master course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. As a lens-based artist, Fagerlund explores the extended complexities and boundaries of the medium. Her installations oscillate between photography, video and digital technologies – with the subject of human and nonhuman relationships an underlying current throughout. Since 2021, Fagerlund’s works have featured in several group and solo exhibitions in Sweden. In collaboration with Hasselblad Center, a forthcoming venture will mark the 100th anniversary of Gothenburg's Natural History Museum; using AI to process the museum’s photographic archive, the project establishes a speculative future where images of new plants and species are formed.
Instagram: susannefagerlund
Website: susannefagerlund.com
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
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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In my ongoing series I photograph myself in dialogue with my late sister’s dresses. Through performative acts and self-portraiture I address the complex process of grief and healing after my sister passed away seven years ago. As a part of this self-recovery, I am leaning to my family’s legacy of rug-making; the cutting of clothes of the deceased to weft. In my family what could not be used was remodelled, deconstructed and reconstructed, as a form of pragmatic exorcism. And by cutting, sewing and weaving I am working through the dresses, taking back authority of my fate.
Essential in my work is the juxtaposition of a living body and the materiality of textiles. The images portray a play between seeing and touch, the form and the tactility. Using my body and the dresses of my sister I examine the relationship of memories and materialities. Can objects harbor emotions? And can one access these enclosed emotions by intervening with their materiality? In the past years these works have become a tool of finding my identity in the world. The combination of the female nude and the aggressive act of cutting have grown to represent liberation from far more than just grief.
Zsuzsi Simon (b. 1988) is a photographer and videographer living and working in Budapest. In 2015, she graduated from the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Her research interests cover questions of feminism, body image and activism. The ways in which women think about the world is also central; she is particularly interested in the image of the female body and the expectations that come with it. Through close collaboration with groups of women – and a trademark blend of humour, provocation, irony and honesty – Simon aspires to break down various taboos. More recently her work has explored masculinity, and the role of the male muse from a female perspective. Simon is a member of Secondary Archive, which brings together women artists from Central and Eastern Europe for greater visibility.
Website: linktr.ee/zsuzsannasimon
Instagram: zsuzsi___simon
Over twenty years ago, Jaakko Kahilaniemi, who was barely eight at that time, inherited 100 hectares of forest. The abstraction which this represents for a child, is followed by an indifference which it evokes for an adolescent. After all, this is hardly very exotic for a Finn: forest covers more than 70% of the country, totalling 26 million hectares. Fairly recently, this photographer decided to return to this heritage in order to explore its twists and turns. This series, called 100 Hectares of Understanding retraces his journey towards an appropriation of this land which is too big for a single – young – man. Photography thus becomes the location where the experience of the landscape can be filtered as it is travelled through, physically, mentally, and sentimentally. These explorations blend physical crossings and digital incursions, photographed panoramas and painted landscapes. The photographer combines these vast misty lands with a still life of a small wooden log resting upon a scale, or simple twigs upon a black background: from the infinitely big to the infinitesimal, each photograph constitutes a piece of an important memory game whose perimeter, one might imagine, increases as the photographer walks and the man grows up.