Lukas Heibges (b. 1985) studied in Holland and Berlin and is currently doing a degree in photography and media in Bielefeld. He lives and works as an artist, shuttling between Berlin and Amsterdam. As a co-founder of a photography and a film collective he understands both photography and film as central tools to visualize social topics from an artistic point of view. He considers these media as the starting point of a wider expression, which combines theoretical considerations with societal debates. The result is a transfer of his artistic expression back to the intersection of theory and practice to question not only the subjects he is working on, but also the medium itself.
Although none of Stockburger’s works were actually shot in the United States, the country and its myths are central to his photographic work. By photographing the global outcome of the power projection of the United States Stockburger is mapping the country from the outside.
In his work „Why Quit Our Own To Stand Upon Foreign Ground?“ he is documenting the closure of the U.S. Army Garrison in his German hometown Schweinfurt. Stockburger’s follow-up work アメリカ(Amerika) examines the U.S. influence on post-war Japan.
Currently he is working on a photographic juxtaposition of the development and use of the atomic bomb.
Chai Saeidi (b.1998, pronouns: they/them) is a visual and story-telling queer visibility artist and photographer. They are currently based in Oslo, Norway, with a background from Tehran, Iran. Their work explores themes such as gender, community and visibility. Queer individuals often create their own communities, resulting in non-traditional forms of intimacy and relationships. This is often shown in their work. Chai's analog photography draws from a documentary tradition, more often touched with a free artistic expression.
Tamara Janes is an artist based in Bern. After studying photography at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and at the School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA), she completed a master's degree at the Institute of Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel University of Art and Design. She then returned to New York on a Studio Scholarship from the City of Bern to continue her research at the Public Library. Among others, her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Glarus, HeK Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Kunsthaus Baselland, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Stadtgalerie Bern, on the occasion of Plat(t)form15 at Fotomuseum Winterthur and at the Bieler Fototage. Her projects have been supported and awarded several times. Tamara Janes received the Swiss Design Award 2023 in the category photography with her work “Copyright Swap”. Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at the photography class, F+F School of Art and Design, Zurich.
Artist Statement
In my work I deal with the conditions of digital images. I take a critical view of current photographic behaviour because our perception and our handling of images is increasingly determined by technology and algorithms. Mostly we unreflectively consume images every second and strive for more and more unrealistic sharpness and brilliance. This development is at the same time thought content and friction surface for my work. By shifting through and contextualizing my own and other people's visual material, I want to create new perspectives and visual commentaries.
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.
Exploring the boundaries between sculpture and photography, Vincent likes to gets his hands dirty. Among all the wood cut and the nail hammered, what he likes the most is to make you scratch your head. Let’s face it; we all get bored on the internet. Remember those magic hours spent playing with a woodstick when you were just a kids? Vincent is calling that up.
Dea Botica (b. 1995) holds a BA in Cinematography and an MA in Photography, which she completed at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. Her artistic work uses photography as a medium to explore topics of everyday life, identity, family heritage and tradition. Thus far, Botica’s work has been exhibited at several group and solo shows in Croatia and beyond. She has participated in several residency programmes – most recently in 2021, as part of the European Union art-research project, Island Connect.
Rebekka Deubner's work is full of narratives of metamorphosis, as close as possible to the earth and the bodies it carries. From the prefecture of Fukushima, where she made her first visit in 2014 and will return on several occasions, she has brought back indexical images, faces taken from encounters, seaweed and other living organisms she came across while wandering on the edge of the forbidden zone. Scattered into fragments by the catastrophe, they are traversed by the same palpable quivering, exuding signs of persistent vitality. The material of these bodies, the fluids that emanate from them and that they exchange, framed as closely as possible, are at the heart of the work entitled En surface, la peau, produced in the intimacy of the artist's love life. The act of photographing retains desire, counters its volatility, and ward off its loss. From this intimate exploration of the body and its profound movements, she moves on to the body as political territory, with Les saisons thermiques, an ensemble dedicated to male contraception. Here we find her way of slowly approaching the body and restoring its tender plasticity. In these bodies standing close to her, an alternative representation of masculinity is embodied. Framing and squeezing again with Strip, a work in progress made up of photograms and videos in which the artist attempts to become one with her late mother. Dressing her clothes and underwear, like counter-forms that still carry within them the latent trace of the body and epidermis that inhabited them, slipping into them and, in video performances, tying them up, patching them up and covering herself in them. Alongside these short films, Rebekka Deubner combines a collection of photograms of clothing, also fragmented, which, reassembled on the wall, sketch out the contours of a vast, warm body.Rebekka Deubner (1989), based in the Paris region, graduated in 2013 from the École de l'image Les Gobelins, Paris. She combines her personal practice with press and commercial photography, and teaches photography at ENSBA in Lyon.
In her work she explores the boundary between truth and fiction. Using reality as a starting point, her image-making anchors the subject matter in her own personal perspective. Depicted themes include technology, internet culture, sexuality and identity. Alongside her practice she has initiated and developed short-films, exhibitions and a film festival. She is the co-founder of the independent film festival Cinema Underexposed - a The Hague based platform aimed for new voices and perspectives.
After graduating from The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, she is now attending the master program at the Norwegian Film Academy in Oslo. In 2020 she attended the Canon Student Development Programme at Visa Pour l’Image. Her work has been shown at Eye filmmuseum and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. San Mei Gallery in London, Grimstad short film festival in Norway, gallery CK13 in Serbia and cultural platform Page Not found in The Hague, among others. She has been published in Morgenbladet, Aftenposten and Zweikommasieben magazine.
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.
Camarda’s artistic practice focuses on and explores themes such as the construction of identity, and collective phenomena that affect and define the lives of each single individual. Creating a series of dreamlike and suggestive images, he wants to ask questions and trigger reflections, rather than giving simple answers. His works have been exhibited, among others, at the Triennale of Milano and CAMERA of Torino.
http://www.domenicocamarda.com/
Bundurakis’ work focuses on how it feels to be a living organism in this era that lies between the primal, the modern & the post natural-world. Images collide and divide according to the situation. Drawings, video and haikus are incorporated. Extracting fragments of the bodies that surround her and her own, she layers the pure with the artificial and the thirst for something truly crisp with loss and boredom, aiming to create cosmic and organic sensations.
In her project Eating Magma, Elena focuses on 4 ‘F’s: her Flesh, her Food, Fauna, and Flora. Creating an interconnecting universe, by combining these 4 ‘F’s, whose roles and existence, constantly shift and mutate into each other, she attempts to find an emotional and ethical position within a society ruled by control systems.
www.freethecelery.com
Born in 1991 in Willemstad, Curaçao
Lives and Works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gilleam Trapenberg (1991, Willemstad, Curaçao) moved to the Netherlands at the age of nineteen and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2017. He participated in multiple group exhibitions, such as In The Presence of Absence at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020). In 2017 he published his first photo book Big Papi and in 2018 he was one of the nominees for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He’s the fourth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis grant (2020). His first solo exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam opened in 2021. Gilleam Trapenberg lives and works in Amsterdam. Through his work, Trapenberg reflects on the contradictions that are part of the social landscape in Curaçao, were the idea of a utopian paradise is diametrically opposed to the realities of post-colonialism and tourism. He explores stereotypes and tropes that have manifested themselves through social culture and the Western media.
Daria is a lens-based artist currently living and working between Kyiv and Paris. Originally from Odesa, Ukraine, Daria came to France to pursue an M.A. in Photography & Video at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Paris, graduating in 2023.In her artistic practice, Daria explores the connections between past and present, focusing primarily on the youth and cultural, social and political contexts in which young people live.Her work was exhibited across Europe and the U.S., including La Villette (Paris), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Hangar (Brussels), Mystetskiy Arsenal (Kyiv), The Gallery atDobbin Mews (New York). Daria is a finalist of the 39th Hyères festival (2024), Palm* Phot Prize (2022) and a recipient of Beyond the silence grant by Magnum Photos & Odesa Photo Days (2024), as well as a grant for contemporary documentary photography from CNAP.
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).
I'm a photographer based in Brussels. After a stint at the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie in Arles, France, I have developed my practice with the support of various art institutions, including Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Centre photographique d'Île-de-France, FOMU in Antwerp, and Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire in Dakar. My work operates at the crossroads of official history, erased memory, and personal narrative, exploring the ecological, social, and spiritual transformations that marked the Brazilian Amazon at the turn of the 20th century. Through my practice, I examine the philosophical and phantasmal framework that sustain the ideals of discovery, conquest, and supremacy central to Western modernity, offering a subtle yet incisive reflection on their enduring impact.
Giulia Vanelli (b.1996) is an Italian photographer based in Tuscany whose work explore concepts such us memory and identity, always driven by an evocative approach. She uses symbols as a causal link between visible and invisible, capturing the most enigmatic and hidden aspect of reality. She graduated from the BA Photography at Libera Accademia di Belle Arti of Florence in 2019 after spending a schooling period at Stephen F. Austin University, Texas. In 2020 she was selected for the artistic residency at Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center. In 2023 she was selected by the British Journal of Photography as one of the fifteen most promising emerging photographers from all over the world. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibition in international festivals and galleries, including Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2021), Galerie Joseph Le Palais (Paris, 2022) and 1014 Gallery (London, 2022). In 2024 her first book The Season has been published by Witty Books.
Julius Schien came to photography in his late 20s and studied documentary photography at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
In his photography, he is primarily looking for answers to the question of what it means to confront Germany's political legacy and the country's right-wing continuity in the 21st century. In doing so, he aims to highlight long-forgotten stories of right-wing violence that lie beneath the surface of everyday life in seemingly sombre landscape and city portraits. His works are created on analog large format.
For three years now, he has been working on the research and realization of his long-term project »Rechtes Land«, in which he documents all the actual places where people have died through acts of right-wing violence since the German reunification.The publication fund of the Kulturwerk Foundation supports the conception and realization of the visual archive. Furthermore, the work was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Swiss »TruePicture« funding program in 2023 and received »Best Portfolio 2024« at the Open Portfolio Walk at Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Schien is also part of the »Masterclass On Documentary Photography 2024/2025« at the PhMuseum in Bologna, Italy.Julius lives and works in Hanover, Germany.
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.
The work of Thomas Nolf examines the ways in which national myths are formed, instrumentalised and frequently suppressed. Confounding fiction and documentary, fabled event and scientific enigma, his work looks into how nation-building ideology influences modes of storytelling, and vice versa. Nolf handles his subjects with a close appreciation of narrative and its ambiguous relationship with veracity and considers the ways in which heritage and eroded beliefs can be re-established and repurposed.
For his long-term project Peculiar Artefacts in Bosnia and Herzegovina - an imaginary exhibition, for example, Nolf’s point of departure was the so-called “Bosnian pyramids” and other disputed historical sites and artefacts, including stone spheres and medieval monuments. Juxtaposing his own documentary work with kitschy acrylic paintings of dream-like, bucolic landscapes and an assortment of found photographic footage —including shots of a triangular mountain looming over a scenic village and a shepherd carrying a sheep on his back — Nolf keeps adding elements to our already confused reading of the phenomenon, its emergence and reception. By doing so, he revives the public controversy over the existence of an ancient civilisation in the region.
Drawing on the mythological dimension of the triangle-shaped hills, Nolf proposed an exhibition that would exploit the stories and objects surrounding the “Bosnian pyramids” to the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, in 2012, had temporarily closed its doors due to a lack of state funds. If myths and legends have proven to be valuable assets in branding a particular place as a unique tourist experience, its effectiveness in generating local informal economies might as well be explored.
Even if Nolf’s project-based practice is driven by a pragmatic desire to formulate alternatives to the status quo, he poetically engages with particular sites and times, carefully tending to a range of subjects — from the promise of a desirable ancient past to the current funding realities devastating cultural institutions in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina — while, at the same time commenting on photography's rhetorical qualities and its — at times deceptive — relationship to representation and truth-telling.
Text by Laura Herman