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.
Rita Puig-Serra Costa is a Barcelona-based photographer. With a background in Humanities and an MA in Comparative Literature, she later studied Graphic Design and Photography. Today, Costa works on personal projects alongside various commercial assignments. Her first project, Where Mimosa Bloom, was published by Editions du Lic in 2014. Her ongoing Anatomy of an Oyster project will launch in 2023. Closely related to literature, Costa’s work revolves around the concept of identity. Her investigations also explore the essence of human relationships, and the influence that love, death, luck or memories have on the construction of ourselves.
Sebastián has used different disciplines such as photography, writing, sound and video to explore a variety of topics related to fiction, poetic strategies and landscape.
He also has published two books of literary fiction. The first, Tartamudo, published in Colombia, addresses the issue of stuttering from a choppy and fractionated writing. The second, The Secret Sound of the Stars, published in Mexico, is a children's book that tells the story of a kid who doesn´t sound at all.
On the other hand, Sebastián has been a professor of photography and art processes in Colombia and México.
He lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
Pablo Lerma is a Spanish research-based artist, educator and publisher based in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).His work has been exhibited at Photoforum Pasquart (CH), Copeland Gallery (UK), IHLIA Heritage (NL), Deli Gallery (US), FOTODOK (NL), PhotoEspaña (ES), The Finnish Museum of Photography (FI), Flowers Gallery (US), Konstanet (EE), Centro Huarte (ES), New York University (US), Fotoweek D.C. (US), SCAN International Festival of Photography (ES), La Fábrica (ES), and Fundació Foto Colectania (ES) among others. His publications are in collections including the Guggenheim Museum (US), Museum of Modern Art – MoMA (US), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - SFMoMA (US), Aeromoto (MX), Centro de la Imagen (MX), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US), and the International Center of Photography in New York (US), among others. He has been awarded with the Cherryhurst House Fellowship MFA Houston (US), Grand Prize of Curators Award PDN (US), Fundació Guasch-Coranty (ES) and Sala d’Art Jove (ES). He has been selected for Pla(t)form FotoMuseum Winterthur (CH) and nominated for the First Book Award MACK Editions (UK), Critical Mass (US), and PDN 30’s (US). His work has been featured on Trigger FOMU (BE), Lens Culture (US), Photomonitor (UK), Unseen Platform (NL), British Journal for Photography (UK), Ain’t Bad Magazine (US), New York Foundation for the Arts (US), PDN Online (US) and PhotoInter China (CH).
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
Van Wyk is a member of the African Photojournalist Association with World Press Photo, Women Photograph and Black Women Photographers. Her work has been featured by the internationally based i-D, The Washington Post, Photo Vogue, Der Greif and The Times UK.
He grew up in a small post industrial town of Belgium where his grandparents as well as many other south Italian families emigrated to work in the coal mines.
He received his first camera from his father at 9 years old while visiting his family in Cameroon. From there, he starts documenting life around him, finding inspiration in the richness and texture of the communities that made him.
He wishes for his photography to be a modest look at his own experience of life.
She takes a colourful, chaotic approach to subjects like childhood, education and love. In her works, images of empty classrooms are interspersed with ones of student activities, learning tools and visualizations of discipline and uniformity that as children we were likely not aware of.
Yana Kononova (b. 1977) has an academic background in social sciences, and holds a PhD in sociology. She was born on Pirallahi island in the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan – now an important site of oil extraction. During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, her family emigrated to Ukraine. Having later relocated to the countryside of the Trachtemiriv peninsula, Kononova turned to photography. She graduated from the Photoschool of Viktor Marushchenko before following a photography course organised by the Image Threads Collective (USA). In 2019, Kononova won the Bird in Flight Prize in emerging Photography, and in 2022 was the recipient of the Hariban Award, presented by Benrido. Her works have been exhibited in Ukraine and abroad.
To make a photograph, you need a specific apparatus. The most obvious would be a camera. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to consider the camera as a mere tool that works strictly according to the intentions and desires of the photographer. Nobody, not even the operator, knows exactly what is going on inside the box after the button has been pressed. This question seems to haunt the work of Calixte Poncelet. Instead of aiming his camera at the world, he scrutinizes the photographic recording device itself. In Useless Gesture, GX680, a series of 90 images, he slowly moves around a camera, capturing it from all sides as though it were a treacherous thing that needs to be closely observed. Offscreen Interaction, GX680, is a photograph of one camera observing another one: the watcher being watched. But a third camera is also present, the one that took the picture we’re looking at now, acting as the silent observer of the two other cameras. Throughout these and other works, the camera appears as a wild, ferocious animal, as the prowling predatory system that Vilèm Flusser conjures up in his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Mimicry, a 9-minute-long video, reinforces this idea of the camera as hunter. As we stand in front of it, we look straight through the lens into its entrails. Now and then, the shutter is released, creating a bright red circle of light. The camera is transformed into an eerie Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey) lookalike. Like that computer gone rogue, the camera tells us that we humans have no business here.
Text by Eveline Vanfraussen
Giaime Meloni is a visual researcher with a PhD in Architecture, currently living between two islands: Île-de-France and Sardinia. The aim of his work is to explore the role of the photography as a sensible instrument to narrate the space complexity. His researches has been published in various publications (MAM Saint Etienne, INTRU). In 2017, he was shortlisted for Premio Graziadei with his long-term project Das Unheimiliche. He teaches photography as an instrument of the making of the architectural design between France and Italy.
My practice is conceived as an act capable of questioning the nature of places.
The images provide a tangible proof of my presence in the territory, in a certain way they documented it. However I would like to take distance compared to the documentation – and strictly documentary photography – in order to provide a more universal reflection on our relationship with the space.
The photographic action that I develop aims to questioning the restitution of ordinary space in search of a visual and spatial connection with the subject. The specific interest of this practice is to investigate, by theory and practice, the photographic instantaneity and the message that it carries.
The paradox of images is that they pretends to reproduce things which are only themselves. But this is only an illusion, a conviction that is a part of the magic contemplation. In fact, during the act of photographing, I realize that things denying their existence by the image.
What it remains frozen into the fragments is the (artificial) reflection of reality as an intention of my gaze.
Every photos prove that there is an implicit message exceeding the limits of the image itself. I accept that the message of the images can be corrupted / destroyed at any time by the viewer / reader.
www.giaimemeloni.com
In addition to her art and research, she works on commission for architects and public institutions. She is regularly published in architectural magazines (including Casabella, Domus, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui, Le Moniteur). She gives tertiary lectures (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Florida International University, Polytechnic University of Milan, University of Genoa, Italian Institute of Culture - Addis Ababa) and leads workshops at a university level.
Her projects have been exhibited internationally, in art galleries and public institutions, such as La Triennale, Milan, Venice Architectural Biennale, Cornell University, Ithaca, MAO Ljubljana, and Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art, Genoa.
Anna is based in Genoa, Italy.
Fred Mungo (b. 1994) is an Italian photographer and visual artist, currently based between London and Bologna. Born in Rieti, she first moved to London in 2013 to study. Mungo holds a BA in Fashion Photography from London College of Fashion (University of the Arts of London), and an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths University. Her artistic research sits within the framework of visual sociology.
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.
Paolo Ciregia (b. 1987) is an Italian artist. After experience as a reporter at the forefront of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, in the last five years his artistic research has been focused on Ukraine context, manipulating and reworking his personal archive in a new way. Investigating and deconstructing both archives symbols and language, Ciregia aims to reveal the atrocities behind the war, destroying the propaganda patina through installations and sculptures. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Among the major prizes are Winner of Talent FOAM Amsterdam 2016, Winner of “LOOP, Giovane Fotografia Italiana”, Festival Fotografia Europea 2017, “Honorable jury Mention” at Premio Francesco Fabbri 2016, TU35 at the Museo Pecci in Prato 2017, Winner of Leica Talent 2012.
http://www.paolociregia.eu/
His work has been shown in various galleries and festivals including The Saatchi Gallery, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Dubai Design Days, Vienna Photobook Fair, Backlight Photo Festival and Budapest Art Market. His work has been published in magazines including Wallpaper Magazine, IGNANT, Self Publish Be Happy, Thisispaper, Waterfall Magazine, The Room Magazine and Der Grief.