The daughter of Chinese emigrants living in Canada, Teresa Eng had an imaginary and fantastical vision of China, until she decided to visit the country. The degree of difference between the Chinese dream that she had constructed and the reality of a country undergoing a frantic development, might have resulted in a documentary which would not have spared us the excessive nature of contemporary China. On the contrary, Teresa Eng, chose to avoid the obviousness of a documentary and the stylistic clarity this entails. Her China seems to evolve beneath a hazy veil. The here and now are erased, the signs of urban frenzy – abundantly illustrated in contemporary photography – are eluded, potentially treated as asides. An infinite head of hair confronts audaciously the curves of a modern architecture: Teresa Eng treads softly, turning her back on the injunctions of a modern China. Which, out of a rock standing in its ceramic pot, or a concrete pillar erected in the water, merits our attention? Teresa Eng’s China seems to navigate between the riverbanks of a capitalist progressionism (China Dream, the title of the series, is also a popular slogan for president Xi Jiping, which in turn refers to the American Dream) and that of an orientalist romantic nostalgia.
Claudiu Guraliuc (b.1977) is a fine art photographer and educator based in Cluj, Romania. His work specialises in fine art portraiture and nudes, inspired by the aesthetics of Old Master paintings from the Baroque period. Guraliuc holds a Licentiate from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and has achieved numerous international accolades for his work; in January 2022, he received the International Master Photographer of the Year Award. His images have been published by a range of international photography magazines, and his work is found in both private and public collections in Europe, Asia and the United States. Guraliuc is represented by Katsea Art Gallery, Baltimore, and Influx Gallery, London.
Tashiya de Mel is a photographer, environmental advocate, and communications specialist from Colombo, Sri Lanka who uses visual storytelling to create narratives that drive social change.
Her practice explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making and deals with themes such as colonial histories, representation, heritage, family, landscapes, and the climate crisis.
Tashiya is driven by a curiosity to forge connections with diverse disciplines such as art, history, academia and the environment. And find ways of bridging these disciplines through different forms of image-based media.
She was the recipient of the Visura grants for freelance visual journalists in 2023 for her project ‘Great Sandy River’ and received the Stroom talent award in 2024. Tashiya is a recent graduate of the ‘Photography and Society’ masters programme at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (NL). She is based between Colombo and the Hague.
In her works she often focuses on issues connected with migration or its destiny. She is mostly interested in the problematic of constructing identity and how people define themselves and the land of their origins. Recently she is involved in collective photographic research about polish migration to South America. It happens that she gets out of the material world and enters other dimensions of perceiving the world, exploring the paranormal events and believes not connected with any religious system. Finds collective creation as the best way for making photography as permanent process of putting individual thoughts in doubts.
She was born in 1990 by the Polish seaside in Gdańsk. Graduated in Photography on Academy of Arts in Poznań. She is also part of Ostrøv publishing collective.
Recent monographic exhibition includes: Untitled, ADN_ Sea(e)scapes, 2021 at galerie Salon H, Paris, and I, the Archive,2020, at Villa Vassilieff, Paris. Kala’s most recent group exhibitions include: This is Not Africa, unlearn what you have learned, 2021 at Aros Museum, Denmark, Un.e air.e de famille, 2021, at Museum Paul Elourd, Saint-Denis, France, Polyphony, 2021 at Gera Museum, Gera, Germany. Kala’s most recent performances include: Stranger, Danger, Wait it’s a Prayer Room, Centre Pompidou, 2019, Mackandal Turns into a Butterfly: A Love potion (2018), Le Pouvoir du Dedans, La galerie Cac de Noisy-le-Sec (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala Shows and Doesn’t Tell, galerie Saint-Severin (2018). She is the winner of the ADAGP/ Villa Vassilieff Fellowship 2019-2020, a finalist of the SAM art Prix (2018) and also a finalist for the prize for contemporary talent, François Schneider Foundation (2018). Kala’s work will be included in the 5th Casablanca Biennial, Morroco, and she an artist in residency at Urbane Kuenst Ruhr in Germany in 2019-2020. She is the founder and co-organiser of e.a.s.t. (Ephemeral Archival Station), a lab and platform for long-term artistic research projects, established in 2017.
Pauline Beugnies was born in Charleroi in 1982. She works on long-term personal photography projects. Recently, she start writing and directing films. She also works as a photojournalist for the press. She lived in Cairo for five years and studied Arabic there.
Pauline is focusing on the Arab and the Islamic world, trying to build bridges and to go beyond stereotypes. Her first book Génération Tahrir was published by Le Bec éditions in January 2016. She was the second recipient of the Camille Lepage award in Perpignan Visa pour l’Image festival in 2016.
Her latest project, "Behind The Sun", mixing photos, videos and documents was exhibited at BPS22 in 2018. Recently, she start writing and directing films. Her first documentary film "Lessa Aichin"(Still Alive) was selected at FIFF, Dok Leipzig and nominated at Magrittes du Cinema in 2018.
www.paulinebeugnies.com
It’s been seven years since I left Poland, my native country. The departure created the need to question my homeland. It swings constantly back in my mind and in my works. What I try to understand is why Poland resonates in me. Why do I constantly look for it abroad whereas all I wanted was to escape from it? Finally, how can I free myself from it? Answers never come; only more questions appear. Somewhere between past and present stories, speculations; an opportunity for me to wander through different identities.
My practice mixes photography, physical presence, text, installation and sound. Our My work in progress, Dom* [EN house, home], lies between performance and theatre play, not suiting plainly to either of them. It engages two performers and me, a setting that is being constructed during the show and numerous stories that come along with it. What I explore is the visual mean in which a story, a memory, or an image is transmitted throughout a performative act.
* Dom is written by Wiktoria Synak, directed by Wiktoria Synak and Erwan Augoyard and performed by Wiktoria Synak, Anouk Boyer-Mazal and Olga Wyszkowska.
In 2015, she received her Bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography-Videography at the Art and Design College, West University of Timisoara and, in 2017, her Master's degree in Publicity Graphics. In December 2015, she had her first personal photography exhibition in Timisoara, followed in the next few years by several personal and group exhibitions. In 2016, Oana was selected for the Professional shortlist in the Staged category of the Sony World Photography Awards.
Currently she is participating in the Masterclass at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. Her work revolves around the relationship between humans and animals in context with animal agriculture.
Elena Helfrecht (b. 1992) is a German visual artist based in Bavaria. She graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2019, having previously studied Art and Image History at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität, and Art History and Book Science at Erlangen’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universität. With a dark, eerie aesthetic, Helfrecht’s work navigates thresholds of fiction and reality, exploring existential questions of mortality, trauma, memory and post-memory. With Void, Helfrecht will launch her first solo monograph in the fall of 2023.
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/
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.
Bärbel Reinhard (b. 1977) is a German artist, teacher and curator based in Tuscany, Italy. After graduating in Art History, Sociology and Modern German Literature at Humboldt-University Berlin, she followed a three-year photography programme at Florence’s Fondazione Studio Marangoni. Her work has been exhibited in various shows in Italy and abroad, whilst her images have been published by the likes of Liberation, La Republica and Phroom. The main focus of Reinhard’s work lies in the characteristics and limits of photography as a time-space-tied medium. Moving between observational photography, mixed media installations, assemblages and collages with both her own and found material, she works primarily on long-term projects.
Instagram: thefoxisred
Website: www.baerbelreinhard.com
Polina Davydenko works mostly with the medium of photography overlapping with the media of video, audio and text. The key theme of her work is narrative and its various forms. She focuses on human-animal relationships and cultural stereotypes related to the issue. These become the starting point for playing out other contexts, which the author visually sensitively connects into one disturbing message.
Polina was born in Ukraine, but since childhood she lives in Czech Republic. She completed study at the Ivars Gravlejs’ Photography Studio at the FFA BUT in Brno. She has furthered her education at KASK in Gent, FAMU in Prague and at the FFA’s Studio Environment.
https://polidavydenko.tumblr.com/
Noémi Napsugár Melegh was born in 1990 in Budapest, Hungary, and is currently a full-time photojournalist for telex.hu, one of the largest independent news portals in Hungary. Although she has been interested in photography since she was in high school, she worked as a health economist for several years after having obtained her BA and MSc in Economics. During the past two years, she has participated in several international training courses: she was a fellow of the VII Academy Level 1 and Level 2 Documentary Photography Seminar, a participant of the Magnum workshop organised by the Robert Capa Center in Budapest, and a fellow of the Canon Student Development programme and of the prestigious Eddie Adams workshop in Jeffersonville, New York. Her true passion lies in creating long-form documentary projects that focus on personal stories and presenting the lives of local, marginalised communities. In 2023, she won 2nd place in the Documentary Photography (Series) category of the Hungarian Press Photo Contest with her work titled as "Gábor and Kálmán", which tells the story of two men living on the margins of the Roma community. In the same year, she was awarded the Hemző-Károly Prize, a prestigious yearly award for a photographer under 35.
Her works have been on exhibition widely in Finland and abroad. Her photobook won the Nordic Dummy Award 2013 –and was published by Kehrer Verlag with a title When the Sense of Belonging is Bound to a System of Movement in 2014. In 2014 Savolainen was a nominee of Fotofinlandia prize. She is also a founder of Maanantai-collective.
She is an artist who is not only interested in photographic work, but also the installations and the space are additional elements that enrich her projects. Her approaches are conceived from various perspectives through the handling of different objects and languages and works from photographic concepts by themselves, such the light, but she extrapolates it into a more abstract proposals, that why it makes her so interesting for us.