Vassilis Pantelidis’ images provide a glimpse of an alternative reality, which consists of a series of conceptual self - portraits. The individual scenes adopt a theatrical approach where the abstraction, the paradox and the absurd as well as the repetitive weave and the claustrophobic thread around the human subject, without any sort of redemption or solution.
Sergey Melnitchenko was born in 1991 in Mykolayiv, Ukraine. Started photography in 2009. In 2018 – founder of school of conceptual and art photography MYPH. Member of UPHA – Ukrainian Photo Alternative. In recent years, he has participated in more than 100 solo and group exhibitions around the world. Winner of Ukrainian and international contests including “Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer” in 2017 (Berlin), “Photographer of the Year” in 2012, 2013 and 2016 (Kyiv, Ukraine), “Golden Camera” in 2012 (Kyiv, Ukraine). Shortlisted for Krakow Photomonth in 2013 and Pinchuk Art Center Prize in 2015, among others. Participant of “Paris Photo”, “Volta Art Fair”, “Photo L.A.”, Photo Basel, etc. Nominated on “Foam Paul Huf Award” in 2020. Sergey’s works are in private and public collections in USA, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, France, Germany, Belgium, Lithuania and Czech Republic.
The escalating crisis in her home country of Venezuela has motivated her to produce Trevale’s ongoing recent piece “Venezuelan Youth”, which has been widely exhibited notably at her solo show at ThePrintSpace in London and at Vogue Italia’s Photo Vogue Festival this year. Through the progress in her MA, she has taken a closer look at the women of her family. As her work carries a nostalgic density towards her home and family, she returned to her childhoods memories and recent events. By collaborating with her grandmother Rosa and mother Maria, she explores the past of her great grandmother Cayetana. With the intention to celebrate her bravery as an indigenous woman and her roots. By, observing the Latin essence the women of her life grew up with.
Szilvia studies at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and at the Athens School of Fine Art, in Greece.
Something flows, slowly, perhaps a syrup, yet nothing saccharin arises out of Sanna Lehto’s image, but rather a bittersweet background which rests tranquilly. At the heart of this muffled world, beneath a dome, a small flower has traded its innocence in order to come and pass away on the surface of faces, the fluid has abandoned its lightness and its movement in order to gain in weight. Air is rare in Sanna Lehto’s photographic world. The image sometimes blushes, at other times it pales: the chromatic palette varies from crimson red to pink, as if these faces encapsulated between the glass lens and the sensor were breathing gently. A sort of photographic herbarium, that is what she seems to evoke through these portraits and still lifes. The creative process is not that dissimilar: during her summertime walks she gathers and picks, flowers gleaned from the Finnish countryside; sometimes she buys them, guided by a vision of a coloured harmony rather than through any symbolism. Often, she dries them and awaits for a suitable visual frame in order to place them in the photographic field. We may imagine her, back in her studio, patiently pinning these specimens one by one, according to the fortunes of encounters and visual stimuli.
Szalai studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He also holds a degree in Art and Design Theory.
He was nominated for the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2020. In 2019, he was a winner of LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards. In 2018, he became the laureate of the Carte Blanche Award founded by Paris Photo. In the same year, he was selected for the 2nd cycle of PARALLEL - European Photo Based Platform and he was also awarded the grand prize at the Budapest Portfolio Review 2018.
Szalai’s work has been exhibited and published internationally. He is a member of the Carte Blanche Collective and the Studio of Young Photographers, Hungary. He lives and works in Budapest.
Studied Art History and Film Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In 2013 graduated from the Academy of Photography in Warsaw. From 2013 to June 2014 participated in the Mentorship Programme by Sputnik Photos. From 2015 to 2019 student of photography at the Institut of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. Participant of the 2nd cycle of PARALLEL - European Photo based Platform (2018-2019).
Her main projects are "Splinter", a story of people living in continuous disorder, "When Objects Are Always Similar” about visual parallels between pictures and „Firmly Pinch The Skin Together” about tension, pressure and balance in everyday life.
She has been changing places from Slovenia to Greece for nearly a decade and after to Paris - for a quest of a home while on the other side she was always urged by the necessity to move.This is also the main focus she explores in her work, the question of her home, geographically as well as emotionally. Tereza’s life can be read within her photographic motives, her work stretches between diary and documentary photography, characterized by a minimalist reality that grows into surreality. Based on intuition and on her everyday life, the images spread from the north of Japan to the south of her kitchen. She is a self-thought photographer, mostly using 35mm film.
In 2020 she was the winner of Fotofever prize, the photo fair held every year in the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. Her work was exhibited at Voies Off in Arles, La Nuu Photo Festival in Catalonia, at Institut Francais in Phnom Penh, Analixforever Gallery in Geneva, Inselgalerie in Berlin, Photon Gallery in Ljubljana, etc. She selfpublished photozines that were exhibited at Athens Photo Festival.
He has published several books with his photographic series. His work is held in a number of private collections nationally and internationally. In 2019, Andrii Dostliev was awarded the 3rd prize at the II Ukrainian Biennale of Young Art for his project examining the mythologization of memories of a territory lost due to a military conflict.
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
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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Andi Galdi Vinko is an internationally acclaimed artist working in photography. She studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and at Esag Penninghen in Paris, as well as art history and aesthetics at ELTE University in Budapest. Her work draws visual analogies between intensely personal and intimate experiences of motherhood, womanhood, and universal human experiences of coming of age, ageing, loss, and the conflict between western and eastern European ideologies. Using both staged and documentary photography, Andi is a vivid visual storyteller who assembles her snapshots and studio photos into unconventional and unexpected narratives, juxtapositions that are playful and humorous but also elicit pathos and absurdity. Her photographs are both empowering and intimate at the same time and are often published in the form of zines or editorials. She also works as a director and member of Kinopravda.tv. Andi GV has been published and commissioned by M Le Monde, Die Zeit, i-D, Dazed, Vice, The New Yorker, Tate etc, Vogue.it among others. Her personal work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows. Recent exhibitions include: “Birth” at TJ Boulting, London; “Variations of Reality, Circulations” at Fetart, MAC, Paris; “Golden Boundaries”, Robert Capa Center, Budapest. Her first book “Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back” will be published by Trolley Books in 2022.
M.D.C. always starts a conversation about Reference Guide with the last photo in the book, and this time is no exception. He took the photograph in question in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
He enjoys telling the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine, a collection of 18th-century fake fossils — known in English as Beringer’s Lying Stones — of which some can be found at the abovementioned museum. In 2017, H.V., who was in charge of managing the science collection, gave M.D.C. and L.K. a guided tour of the museum and told them of all kinds of curiosities to be found there, including the famous Lügensteine. In the early 18th century, two palaeontologists were keen to play a trick on an arrogant colleague, a certain Johann Beringer. They buried a large part of around 2,000 fake fossils — featuring suns, stars, snails, shells and even Hebrew inscriptions — and sent a beautiful young woman, who pretended to be a doctorate student, to visit Beringer with the rest of the stones. He fell into the trap and went in search of the fossils. He found them, believed the hand of God to be the only explanation for these — what were referred to back then as — ”figure stones”, and wrote a scientific article about them.
Things ended badly for everyone. Beringer realised too late that he had been tricked. He took his colleagues to court and won the case; however, his own name will always be associated with the Lügensteine. M.D.C. grins as he tells the story but is no longer sure whether the young lady’s role in it is true.
We read about the entries in Reference Guide at the back of the publication: “The collection demonstrates a surprisingly high interest in characters and phenomena along the sidelines of these episodes and displays a severe tendency to digress”. A few days later, L.K. calls H.V. just to check the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine. It was most likely two small boys who first brought the stones to Johann Beringer.
- Text by Lars Kwakkenbos (.TIFF)
Olgaç has most recently been featured in British Journal of Photography's "Ones to Watch" photographers of 2019, and Aperture’s "Element of Style" issue, that investigates the role of style, dress, and beauty in the formation of individual identity. His work has also been published such as M Le Monde, New York Times Style Magazine, Dazed, Dust, Replica.
https://www.olgacbozalp.co.uk/
Their ongoing work focuses on the relationship between climate change, development, environmental degradation, human rights and geopolitics through which they consider how documentary film and photography inherently reveal the presence of pervasive power relationships , power structures and the mechanism of othering within the political landscape of our globalized society. Through a study of the landscape, the portrait and the still life they consider the shifting cultural meaning of nature, how this is changed by the definition of the Anthropocene and how we may decolonize nature.
They have worked extensively in climate change stress zones producing work in China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Uganda and Laos PDR. Their work has been exhibited internationally including exhibitions at Krakow Photomonth (2016), Fotofestiwal (2014), Fotograf festival (2014), Mpm Gallery (2015) and The Grey House Foundation (2016).
Hunor Tóth (b. 2000) is a visual artist from Romania, currently residing and creating back and forth between Budapest, his home village of Tăureni (RO), and Odorheiu Secuiesc (RO). In 2024, he graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest with a Master's degree in Photography.
In his artistic practice, he consistently focuses on rural life and its various aspects. Primarily, he engages in the photographic exploration and documentation of rural existence, aiming not only to dispel stereotypical images of the countryside but also to draw attention to the significance of contemporary rural culture and the various ways the concept of the village can be interpreted. He is interested in how rural communities redefine themselves, adapt, and change in response to contemporary challenges such as urbanization, modernization, and globalization.
His work combines staged and documentary photography. This combination is a defining element of his artistic practice.
Pavo Marinović (b. 1995) is a photographer and visual artist who lives and works between France, Switzerland and the Balkans. In 2020, he graduated with a BA in Photography from Lausanne’s ECAL. His work has since been shown at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Paris Photo, amongst others. Traversing fields of identity, conflict, and collective memory through photography, video and installation, Marinović’s practice explores the state of a territory in transit, as well as its social effects.
Róbert Nunkovics (1993) examines the relational systems of urban life, exploring naive artistic attempts appearing in public spaces, graffiti, and the acts of their reception through the medium of photography and video. In his own images, he presents urban space as various, freely usable surfaces for artistic creation. He sensitively combines research-based mediums - objects, memories, drawings, or collective photography - with works coming from his own observations, delicately examining the issues of our environment and social groups.