Over time he acquired his own language, nourished by his own experience and the realization of several master classes with different photographers such as Antonio Heredia, Manu Brabo, Antoine d'Agata and Crisitna García Rodero.
Currently, he is dedicated to the realization of long-term photographic works related to social and human taboos.
Nazanin Raissi (b. 1981, Tehran) is a Swedish-Iranian artist and clinical psychologist based in Sweden. Centred on the medium of photography, her work ranges from site-specific installations to video animation and sculpture. Her research-based artistic practice explores themes of memory, loss, and displacement.
The project 'The lost paracosmist' is an animated short film by multimedia artist Josephina van de Water. Using digital photography, printed celluloid film, paint, digital scans, video montage, cardboard and extreme patience, she brings a fictitious world to life in fascinating detail. The film was made in the traditional, time-consuming way that requires particular dedication, with each frame individually handcoloured as was done in the first colour movies.
The imaginary island of Paperland is inhabited by a colourful collection of talking animals. Josephina van de Water wrote and narrated the dialogue, giving each animal its own voice, tone and place in her universe. The chronicle guides us through a logical, yet fictitious, tale, in which we learn about Paperland’s geography, history, language, culture and religion.
As in every good fable, imagination is closely accompanied by reflection. While The lost paracosmist focuses on the irresistible charms of storytelling, it also warns the audience to beware of stories. They have the power to contort our perception of the world and disturb our relationship with reality.
The endearing cardboard animals in their warm, glowing colours, and the gentle, motherly voice of the narrator, are reminiscent of children’s programmes. However, the topics covered in this allegory are anything but childish: territorial disputes, political and religious authority and mechanisms of exclusion and esteem all make an appearance, allowing inequality and frustration to creep into this seemingly safe cosmos.
- Text by Geert Goiris (.tiff)
Ebbesen works with reflections to create surreal effects in her work: "In my work, I aim to play with the sense of reality that we relate to the photograph by distorting the objects and space within the picture frame. With these effects, I aim to surprise and confuse and leave one with the question of what is real." Conceptually her works often deal with identity and the subconscious self affected by and interrelated with the surrounding world.
Born in Gran Canaria in 1973, living in Berlin.
Lorena studied fine art photography between 1992 and 1995 in Boston. Sometime later she went to Barcelona to study filmmaking but moved back to the island after one year in film school. Immediately she joined the team of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, this work got her closer to another one of her passions, films. Being so close to many radical authors and watching their personal films made an impact on her approach to photography.
Mum of 5 children. Since 2008 she has obsessively photographed and filmed her loved ones and their lives together developing over the years a coherent photographic work of a special intensity, building an ongoing project she titled Je reste avec vous. Her images reflects her daily life and focus on her most immediate universe.
She is one of the photographers from collective Temps Zero, an international group of artists working with photographs, films and sound presenting exhibitions and performances around Europe.
She recently published a book with Brazo de Papel/ Fotonoviembre called Himmelskörper, result of the last two years observing her younger children are growing and how their lives unfold fully in the space called Home, reflecting the moment in which we live and what happens outside.
Presently, Lorena diversifies her time between her artist activity and her work as a film programmer and advisor.
"Porosity is probably the concept that best characterises Etienne Courtois’s approach to his photographic work. One of the threads in his creative process is his distinctly plastic treatment of the medium through integrated and often barely noticeable interventions that are both sculptural and pictorial by nature. These interventions are evident in how he prepares his support as well as in the compositions themselves.
The interventions often originate from the confrontation between various random objects gathered by Courtois during his walks and rambles through the city or in nature, leading to surprising encounters that have a contemporary surrealistic quality, which is further accentuated by the treatment or plastic and pictorial transformations he applies. Courtois adds a subsequent layer of ambiguity to the reading of this process by creating sculptural forms - often in plaster, but also in wood - that are integrated into the images or applied in relief on the prints.
Occasionally, the ambivalence of the treatment is emphasised by multiple exposure of the same photographic negative, which modifies the chromatic values as well as the shapes in the initial image, creating the effect of a shift or spectral motion.
The work of Etienne Courtois clearly surpasses the dichotomy between figurative and representational art. The ambiguity in interpreting and understanding these interventions leads to completely new and surprising formal encounters between everyday objects in a whimsical, alienating atmosphere. Courtois’s work is marked by a distinctly free, singular and often witty approach that evokes the pictorial work of Walter Swennen or the sculptures of Koenraad Dedobbeleer."
Text by Emmanuel Lambion
With a background in sociology, Alejandra is interested in individuals and how the communities to which we belong define or identifies us. This is a very popular issues today with so many social movements, political instabilities, a constant search for identity or even the questioning of women role in society, but the interesting thing of this artist is how she takes these issues into concrete cases, but the lecture of her work could be elevated to more global concepts. Her particular artistic approach and experience make this photographer an ideal choice for supporting her projection.
“Can a cardboard disc be mistaken for the moon? Could a streak of paint be perceived as a beam of light?” In her series Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent experiments, fails, plays around and messes with our perception of reality. We are confronted with familiar scenes that we often fail to notice: a puddle of water, a sunbeam on the pavement… In Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent sets out to recreate these fleeting moments in her studio and capture them in photographs. The appearance of a rock in the sand is replicated using industrial chemical components. Each image is painstakingly produced, the result of a tireless pursuit of the right materials, lighting conditions and framing. The process is chaotic but the final image seemingly perfect. Bringing the work to the exhibition space, Vincent continues her game: she cleverly places the photographs in unexpected corners, behind a staircase or floating in front of a window. The photographs become sculptural and encourage the viewer to move around and discover what lies beyond the image.
Ann Vincent plays a trick on us, and in doing so, touches upon one of photography’s most fundamental properties: its disturbing relationship with reality. This body of work is an illusion, disclosing its poetic magic only to the attentive viewer.
www.annvincent.be
Léonie Pondevie's photographic form is composite, arranged by the aggregation of clues: contemporary shots, collected archive images and shared personal documents sit side by side on the wall like evidence of an ongoing investigation into complex and evolving realities. In Un point bleu pâle, Léonie Pondevie contemplates the sky and observes the weather. In the same way that her father would obsessively record rainfall levels and temperatures in small notebooks, she assembles particle images, waiting to be analysed. She subjects these images to a kind of poetic decantation: her father's notebooks and his measurements from another age, archive images of the village where he was born, press cuttings from the 1970s, the clouds in front of us at sea, a hand caressing an antediluvian granite and raindrops on the hood of a relative. The stratospheric and the extremely close, immensity and intimacy, impassive geological time and climatic urgency, it's all there, under the same sky. Placing her observation post at the heart of her family history, Léonie Pondevie eludes the Manichean demonstration: the photographic project, though wide-ranging, does not claim to elucidate anything, but sets itself up as a humble hypothesis. What Un point bleu pâle portrays is the act of human experience; not the thing, the climate, but the ways in which we take it into consideration, from the observer who guesses at its insignificance and modestly records the life of the clouds in little notebooks to the way they are boxed up by geo-engineers, neo-demiurges. From these decanted images, the reflection of a distant land, with which we have lost contact, rises. The simultaneous and paradoxical measure of our insignificance and ourpower to cause harm.
Léonie Pondevie (1996) graduated from the École européenne supérieure d'art de Bretagne in Lorient in 2020. She is a member of the Collectif Nouveau Document and is based in Lorient.
A common thread throughout his practice is an interest in the metaphorical potential of photographs. His project, ‘John’s Notebooks’ (2020-2021), pulls on the symbolism present with the landscape of the home to touch on the emotions and memories connected to the childhood loss of his father. Whereas his most recent work ‘Murmurations’ (2020-21), employs the starling murmuration as a symbol to reflect on the current global crisis and the act of coming together and converging as a group.
Barraclough is a recent graduate of the MA Photography programme at Bristol UWE and is due to exhibit his master’s project, ‘John’s Notebooks’, at the 2021 Bristol Photo Festival.
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.
His work has been exhibited in different countries, such as Austria, Poland, China and Denmark. His recent project ¥€$U$ was showed at Hamburg Triannale in 2018.
Varvara Gorbunova is a portrait and documentary photographer based in Prague, Czech Republic. Her work often centres around intimacy and connection exploring themes such as longing, sensuality, family and identity. She is dedicated to representing her subjects with honesty and openness, highlighting their humanity and providing viewers with various ways to connect with their stories. Varvara’s photography invites to experience the raw, unfiltered moments of her subjects' lives, creating powerful narratives that resonate across cultures and backgrounds.
Varvara earned her BA in Photography at the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) where she continues to study in pursuit of her Master’s degree. Her work has been featured in collective exhibitions across the globe including Prague (CZ), Rome (IT), Toronto (CA) , Amsterdam (NL) and shortlisted for various awards and festivals (Belfast Photo Festival, Fresh Eyes International Talents, Palm Photo Prize).
Pongo’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the USA and published in WSJ, The Guardian UK, The Washington Post, National Geographic and several other international publications. He was chosen as one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016 and recipient of the Getty Grant in 2018. His work is also part of institutional and private collections. Pongo was a member of Noor agency from 2017 until 2019.
He is based between Brussels and Kinshasa and shares his photographic career between his long term projects in Congo DR, teaching and assignment work.
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.
During Photo London in 2018, They were my landscape (MACK) was launched.
Kiely was nominated for the Paul Huf Award, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award and selected to be in the British Journal of Photography Ones to Watch, Talent issue (2018).
Yu Shuk Pui Bobby (b. 1994) is a visual artist based between Hong Kong and Oslo. With a collaborative approach to her practice, her work conjures the physical, tangible and affective phenomena associated with biotechnology through combinations of video, text, installation, sculpture, and performance. She often uses speculative fiction to tackle questions of human genetic engineering, reconfiguring perceptions of gender, body and historical discourses of identity. Bobby holds a BA from Hong Kong Baptist University and an MFA from Oslo National Academy of Fine Art. Her works have been in Hong Kong, Norway, Japan, China, Iceland and the USA.
The focus of my work in the past years has been human violence and poverty: how its constant reception can restructure the society and the self. I live and work in Mexico with the aim of completing my visual research on this topic, where I look for cultural movements, group activities, individual destinies which exist as consequence of the persistent violence and repress. My goal is to be engaged from an intimate closeness in order to witness, capture the essence of these realities, emotionally, mentally strongly involve the viewer into the topics I'm working with, to give the audience another perspective on the reasons why their lifestyle may often appear to be controversial and condemned, where I believe the key always lies in a brutal social and political system. I aim to give voice and visibility for people who are social outcasts, victims of injustice, showing contemporary social conflicts in a different context and narrative other than the newspapers. The photograph's focal point is a physical remnant of violence – a scar, a bruise, or a symbolic conduit, landscape – while the non-physical remnants of aggression are left to the viewer to interpret through a gaze, expression or pose and in physical space accompanied with text, interviews, even sound, so the story can become a whole, questioning faith, the nature of human and it's behavior.
More: http://koladel.org/
Born in Belgium in 1989, Lionel Jusseret is a documentary photographer. After finishing his studies at INSAS in 2012, a Belgian film school, he photographed children with autism in the French association J'interviendrais. In the search for unpredictable images, Jusseret works in the intimacy of his subject. The approach is anthropological. After seven years of immersion, he finished his first series Kinderszenen.
Lionel Jusseret lives and works in Brussels.
Characterized by a penchant for sheer entropy and excess, my practice pushes the poetics of chaos to the very limits of the photographic medium. From landscapes and bodies, to human connection, to infrastructure and interior worlds, anything can be sucked into my process and churned back out, transmogrified and transformed through chemical manipulations and surreal photo-collages.
Part travel diary and part love letter to the cities of Tokyo and Osaka, In Bloom is a searing, hyper-visual journey into the heart of Japanese underground culture and an ode to the overwhelming experience of seeing a place with the eyes of a stranger for the first time. The project reads as a frenetic dream sequence, as if the countless nights he spent in the belly of the city have folded into a single never-ending one.
Printing my images onto plastic paper so the ink never quite dries, I then uses water and chemicals to transform the surface of the prints, abstracting and blurring them as if the scenes are melting away.