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
Just as much a physical experience which disturbs the tranquil surface of the photograph as a workshop narrative with a documentary character, Laetitia Bica’s series Cream, cannot be confined to a single genre. Following two years of collaborations with the CREAHM workshop in Liège (Creativity and Mental handicap), she undertook two months of intense research with the workshop’s artists, the result of which is this corpus of disruptive and vibrant photographs. Collaboration, a creative process which is a daily part of this photographer’s life as she typically works on commission in the areas of fashion, music, and design, in these photographs is transmitted through the body. Gestures, colours and materials become elements of language during their creative exchanges. Thus unfolds a series of figures covered in paint with thick and bold features and accents that are at times wild, at times warlike. A few of the images, placed in a sequence, follow an artist’s movement, rendering the in progress nature of this experiment and indicating Laetitia Bica’s double position on what takes on the appearance of almost ritualistic practices: at the same time actor and master of ceremonies.
Kwabena Sekyi Appiah-nti (b. 1994) is a Belgian-Ghanaian photographer based in Amsterdam. Straddling the boundaries of documentary and fashion photography, his projects reveal a fascination for people who face societal prejudice, aspiring to cut through the clichés of stereotyped representation. Delving into his subjects’ worlds and observing their behaviours, Appiah-Nti documents their true essence; he describes ‘boyhood’ as the overarching theme in his work.
Her art practice focuses on the relationship between the human being and the landscape. She tracks the history of the ways of space use, of the actions and transformations that leave a series of dispersed marks behind. Including archival materials in her practice, she reveals the changeability of the space in time and constructs a visual essay about memory.
He graduated from the Film and Theatre Faculty of the “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, majoring in Cinematography, Photography and Media. He published his first photo album called “Beyond light and shadows” in 2017, an album comprising miscellaneous pieces of his work up to that time. Just like Nietzsche he believes that life without music would be a mistake. Films, books and cats are just some of the activities he likes to indulge in. His daughter Ida was born in 2018 bringing about a totally different perception of life and the way he looks at the stars.
Damien Caccia (b. 1989) studied at the École supérieure d’arts des Rocailles, and then at the École Supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes. His creative approach is based on narration: viewers are drawn into a fictional visual world, playing their own role in its creation. Using various materials – acrylic paint on glass, concrete, plaster, bleached tarps and fabrics – Caccia works at the frontiers of abstraction, with light, shape and colour offering rhythm to his creations. A co-founder of Grande Surface, an artist-run space in Brussels, his work has been exhibited by a range of institutions in France and Belgium.
damiencaccia.com
@damien.caccia
'June', Červeňová’s most recent body of work, is an autobiographical response to the EU referendum. The month of June in 2016 signified a rupture where the meaning of home and future plans were suddenly thrown into limbo. Coinciding with the beginning of her MA at the RCA, she spent the following two years documenting daily life. Taken in various locations across Britain and Europe, each image is titled simply by the location and date in which it is made, the significance of which becomes apparent when read on mass. When viewed in retrospect, the work emerges as not only a record of daily events, but also a timeline of significant dates that will, or have already become, marker points in history.
The core of the work became an artist book, in which the work has been translated into 24 booklets (each representing one month) collated together with an opening ring – a metaphor for the easily breakable union, where the beginning and the end can be manipulated and the linearity of historical events shifted. Červeňová’s artist book 'June' was amongst 10 shortlisted titles in MACK First Book Award 2019 and was presented at Photo London 2019. June is now in the permanent collection of TATE Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum.
In 2019, Červeňová was nominated for the prestigious FOAM Paul Huf Award. She is a 2017 Bloomberg New Contemporaries Alumni. She regularly collaborates with The FT Weekend and Telegraph Magazine.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at Red Hook Labs (NYC), Unseen Photo Fair (Amsterdam), Addis Foto Fest (Addis Ababa), the International Centre of Photography NYC) and at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair( London). Mann’s personal and commissioned work has been published internationally including The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Artsy, British Vogue, The British Journal of Photography, and National Geographic.
Her award winning series ‘Drummies’ exploring female drum majorette teams in South Africa, has been selected as a winner of the Lensculture emerging photographer prize (2018), the PHMuseum Women’s ‘New Generation’ prize for an emerging photographer (2018). Four images from the series were awarded first place at the prestigious Taylor Wessing portraiture prize (2018). Mann was also the recipient of the Grand Prix at the 34th edition of the Hyeres International Festival of Fashion and Photography (2019).
Suzette Bousema graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL) in 2019. She exhibited at a.o. museum Singer Laren (NL), Foam (NL), Art Rotterdam (NL), Photoville (NY), Fotobok Festival Oslo (NO), COP 25 (ES) and The Scientific Center Kuwait (KW). Her work has been published in a.o. NRC (NL), de Volkskrant (NL), Foam magazine (NL), Harper’s Bazaar (NL), Financial Times (UK), Der Spiegel (DE), Die Zeit (DE) and Liberatión (FR).
Since 2008 she is based in Spain where she works as a freelance photojournalist, combining her personal projects with the teaching of photography. She has published in BuzzFeed News, El Pais, XL Semanal, L'Obs, Equal Times, 5W magazine, Interviú, El Periódico de Cataluña, 7k magazine, Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka among others.
Her projects address discrimination and societal dysfunctions in western society. She also works on youth radicalization and the raise of right-wing movements in Europe. Lately she has started to investigate the construction of national identity in post-Soviet regions in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She has won different awards, such as the Third Prize in POY Latam 2015 (Mexico); she has been awarded with the Grant Programa Crisálidas Signo Editores Grant 2019 (Spain), with a Helge Humelvoll Scholarship (USA 2017) and with the “Photojournalism Grant 2015” (GrisArt International School of Photography, Barcelona), among others.
Finalist of the Grand Press Photo 2019 and 2012 in Poland and of the 19th FotoPres la Ciaxa (2013); she was also nominated in 2018 and 2017 Edition of Photography Magazine Grant (London). She has participated in festivals such as PhotOn 2019 and 2018 (Spain), Imaginaria 2019 (Spain), UCL Festival of Culture in London (2017), FOTONOVIEMBRE Tenerife (2015) and the VIII Biennal de Xavier Miserachs (2014) among others.
The polish photographer Natalia Kepesz (*1983) lives and works in Berlin. After studying cultural studies and art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she graduated in 2021 with a degree in photography at the Ostkreuzschule Berlin. Since 2016 she has been working as a freelance photographer. She is a member of bbk Berlin, VG Bild and Women Photograph.
Natalia Kepesz got third place in the World Press Photo Contest 2021 (Portrait Series). She also won the residency prize in the Portraits Hellerau Photography Award 2021, Les Jour Prix at Les Boutographies - recontres photographiques de Montpellier 2021 and was named GUP Fresheyes Talent 2021, among others.
Her works have been exhibited at the Belfast Photo Festival, Helsinki Photo Festival, Festspielhaus Hellerau Dresden, Münzenberg Forum Berlin, Noorderlicht Photo Festival and the World Press Exhibition Foto Tour, among others.
Laura San Segundo (b. 1990) studied Fine Arts at Madrid’s Complutense University, followed by an MA at Efti International School of Photography and Cinema. Her personal projects have since run alongside commissioned work and a series of teaching roles. A recipient of various scholarships and residencies, Segundo’s projects have been exhibited internationally. With a playful but thoughtful methodology, her work makes conceptual connections between different image types, exploring their many layers of meaning – and how their meaning can be altered by visual strategies like cropping, fragmenting and decontextualising.
Jonas Yang Tislevoll (b. 1993) was born as Jin Sub Yang in the city of Daegu. At 4-months old, he was given a new name by his adoptive parents in Fitjar, a small farming town in Western Norway. After studying photography in Oslo from 2019 to 2021, Yang Tislevoli moved back to South-Korea in the hope of finding his biological mother. This laid the foundation for the series, Take care of yourself son, your mom loves you. The project explores themes of identity, belonging, social issues, women's rights and adoption in South Korea. Yang Tislevoli does not see himself as a photographer, but as an individual who uses the medium of photography to tell stories that deserve to see the light of day.
@jonastislevoll
www.jonastislevoll.no
Younès Klouche is a photographer living and working in Paris and Lausanne. His personal projects pursue new solutions to re-define the documentary genre owing to a conceptual and reflexive approach. ADer graduating with honours from ECAL in Switzerland, Younès Klouche's commercial practice soon expanded to Paris; where he maintains strong connections with clients, producers and art directors. At the occasion of Art Basel 2022 & the Swiss Design Awards, he presents for the first
Jan Durina is a Slovak interdisciplinary artist who utilizes a diversity of medium to develop personas and grow the complex narratives they exist in. Through performance, photography, and sound Durina unfolds the nuance of each narrative, grappling with themes of loneliness, loss, the boundaries between nature and the body, and the distortions of the human mind as experienced within an ever developing gender and identity. Through this process Durina produces art works in the form of music, performance, lm, and photography, seamlessly and con dently moving between exhibitionary to performance contexts.http://jandurina.com/projects/recent-works/cute-tragic/
At the heart of a grey spectre, from moonlight to basalt, from transparency to deep obscurity, bodies, all female, reveal their plasticity. Forget lascivious poses, postpone conventional attitudes or a complacent light: this is not her subject. Pascale Arnaud disturbs appearances, because in this age which she wishes to depict, defined implicitly between the ages of adolescence and adulthood, there is little room for clear lines and distinguishable outlines. She thus undertakes an exploration which is properly photographic, it is in the matter of the image itself that she sets about translating the reality of this age of becoming and emergence. No clue of the subject’s identity exudes from this grey envelope. The young girls are symbolic figures, caryatides of silver salts which brandish their desires. Tight compositions upon fragmented bodies, contorted poses and unmasked faces: this photographic manner brings to light, from these grey zones, the strength and the vulnerability at play, at a time when an individual enters alone into the world to find its foundation. A colossus with clay feet is seen from a low angle, reminding us of all of the ambivalence and uncertainty due at a time of great expectations.