Poly’s art practice is merging her previous experience in documentary and staged photography. The photographer interprets cultural and visual codes of typical Ukrainian everyday life, predominantly in the fields of eroticism, fashion, and novel notions of beauty. The artist states that she finds herself constantly inspired by “trivial things, everyday events, stories from the lives of friends, and own experience”.
Julie Poly’s exhibitions serve as a continuation to her artistic message. Her ‘mockumentarian’ and slightly grotesque projects often come back to the areas of their genesis, like railway station (Ukrzaliznytsia series) or arcade centres (Kosmolot playing cards).
Alice Pallot is a French photographer who lives and works in Brussels. She graduated with honors from the photography section of ENSAV La Cambre (BA and MA) In July 2018 and participated in the Erasmus program at Ecal in Switzerland. In the same year, she won the Roger de Conynck prize for her series L’Ile Himero, also exhibited at The Voies Off Festival in the context of Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.In 2019, Alice Pallot self-edited a book untitled Land which was included in Belgian Photobook at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, Le Bal in Paris and at the Wiels Art Book Fair in Brussels. Her photographic series Oasis was included in the 4th edition of the PhotoBrussels Festival 2019 at Hangar Art Center. This body of work was also shown in collaboration with the Satellite Gallery at En Piste ! in Liège and in Dans quel monde rêvons-nous ? curated by the collectif Xeno at Bozar in Brussels. Alice Pallot’s work was included in several places in Brussels, such as Le Botanique, Gallery Été 78, Adaventura, Vertigo Gallery, La Réserve and La Vallée. She also exhibited in France; in Paris, at Immix Gallery, N’Oblige Gallery and in Dieppe at the Diep-Haven Festival.In 2020, she presented with the Gallery Satellite a new display of L’Île Himero - accompanied with a book edited by Page Works - at the Biennale de L’Image Possible in Liège. Laureate of the PhotoBrussels Festival 05, Alice Pallot presented a new series; Suillus, part of the exhibition «The World Within» at Hangar Art Center in 2021.In September 2021, she presented her Suillus series at the Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam, with Hangar Gallery. In january 2022, Suillus was presented in La Caserne and at Immix Galerie in Paris. Alice Pallot has been published in Libération, La Libre, Fisheye Magazine, Vice and others.
Main topics in her practice are: life in province, religion, connections between mythology and identity, her private relations with the world and her own country, with life and death. Her working method — continuous travels to small towns. She looks for something unique — people, communities, as well as place sand objects they produce. Elena says that provincial towns can be compared to separated islands, which are far enough from the mainland for evolution to goin a very unique way. She collects peculiarities of local cultures, since is sure they are on the edge of extinction, caused by globalization as well as just poverty.
Her project “Grandmothers on the Edge of Heaven” is a private family story, but also a reflection on the gap between generations. Which is multiplied in her case by the gap between two countries and two political systems: Soviet Union and modern Ukraine.
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.
Nina Medioni (b. 1991) lives and works in Marseille. In 2015, After graduating with an MA in Literature, she enrolled at the National School of Photography in Arles. Here, she developed an interest in documentary photography; in the image as a tool to meet the ‘other’. In 2019, Medioni spent several months with her Jewish Orthodox family in Tel Aviv, marking the start of her series, The Veil. The project has since been exhibited in both France and Israel. In 2022, she began the Un été au Prépaou series, which charts her encounter with a working-class neighbourhood in the city of Istres. She is currently editing her first film, Le Chalet, which studies the complexities of a neighbourhood surrounding her uncle's house – a seemingly misplaced cottage in the Parisian cityscape.
website: nina-medioni.com
Instagram: @ninamedioni
Zoe Natale Mannella was born in 1997 in London and raised in the south of Italy. She is a self-taught photographer whose projects investigate questions of intimacy and sexuality, particularly in relation to women. Her work combines elements of reportage with an interest in staged photography.
www.zoenatalemannella.com
@zoenatalemannella
Andrey Anro (born 1987 Smarhon, Belarus) Lives and works in Berlin, Germany / Minsk, Belarus. His basic tools are painting, photography, digital collage, and installation. Anro explores topics such as collective memory, historical heritage, politics, dictatorship, religion, disappearance and death. He is author of the photobook "Happy Death Society", 2019.
The artist's works are in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow(MOCAK), Poland, in the ART4 Museum in Moscow, in private collections in Lithuania, Sweden, Canada, Russia, and the USA. In 2007 he graduated from MMT L.B. Krasina (Moscow, Russia), speciality "Advertising".
Julius Thissen (1993, the Netherlands) lives and works in Arnhem, NL. Their work investigates themes of community and representation, masculinity, sports, and competition. Originating from their background as a performance artist, Thissen's photographic practice aims to create narratives that explore the fine line between performing and failing. These themes are closely tied to contemporary performance-driven culture and the influence of societal expectations on behavior. Their work is deeply rooted in personal experiences as a genderqueer and transmasculine individual. Thissen strongly opposes the restrictive and often binary narratives imposed on transgender and queer individuals.Thissen has been nominated for the Hendrik Valk Prize, Arnhemse Nieuwe, and the Warsteiner Blooom Awards. In 2023, they received the Artist Basis Fund and, more recently, a Mondriaan Fund Artist Project Grant for their new project Bones of Graphene, Skin of Kevlar.
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
Eva Vei (b. 1996) is a Greek visual artist whose projects revolve around notions of communication and intimacy within everyday interactions. Through quasi-documentary strategies and non-linear visual narratives, she tackles issues of identity and belonging whilst probing at the boundaries of the photographic medium. Vei holds a BA in History and Theory of Art from the Department of Fine Arts and Art Science at the University of Ioannina. She is also a graduate of Athens’ Focus School of Photography and New Media.
Helcel received an honorable mention in the European art thesis competition START POINT Prize 2020. He is a co-founder and active member of the theatre group Akolektiv Helmut.
Sofie Flinth (b. 1996) is a Copenhagen-based visual artist with a BA in Art & Design from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Working primarily with portrait and staged photography, her works touch upon themes of nostalgia, vanity and manipulation. By combining storytelling with everyday life, Flinth creates semi-docu scenarios featuring herself and the women close to her. Her projects explore the imaginary, asking to what extent images portray reality. In 2020, Flinth’s graduation work When the Sun Sets was part of two group exhibitions in Amsterdam; one at Galerie Ron Mandos and another at Foam Fotografiemuseum. In 2022, she was named as one of the Fresh Eyes Talents with her ongoing series, A Million Dollar View.
sofieflinth
sofieflinth.com
His work often revolves around territory. In Ramo it was his ancestor’s Calabria, in Jardin the mythical space of the garden, found in the streets and parks of Madrid. In his new project, Massao is working on around the Mediterranean coasts, cradle of many civilisations, using the journey of Ulysses as a loose guideline. The scope of his work is profoundly political, as it is rooted in the need to explore how humans relate to the spaces (both cultural and geographical) they inhabit.
The work Jardin was awarded the BOZAR Nikon Monography Series Award 2016. In 2017, he was nominated and be part of the .TIFF by FOMU Antwerp.
In July 2019 his first book Jardin has been published by Witty Kiwi and L'éditeur du dimanche.
Massao'work is part of the prestigious collection of the Foundation A Stichting. He is currently a fellow of the Fondation A Stichting for a project around the Mediterranean which will be exhibited there in September 2020.
From September 2019 Massao started as teacher in the Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts.