His installations, exhibited among others at Maxxi (Rome), at the BlueProject Foundation (Barcelona) and at the Casino de Luxembourg, investigate the dynamics of memory and how History interferes with private fates.
His book The First Day of Good Weather was shortlisted for “The First Book Award 2015” and published by Skinnerboox the same year.
In 2015 he won the Leica Prize at the Biennial Images of Vevey together with Anush Hamzehian.
The perfect skin and the smooth image which accompanies it, Eva O’Leary knows all too well the different ingredients and recipes of commercial photography. She too, as a teen, ate this cake which now, as an artist, she presents to us on a plateau. In a refrigerator rests a sponge cake, accompanied with printed icing: a saccharine young woman with perfect blow-dried hair watches us. Since it is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, this is the fate which the photographer reserves for the young blonde haired woman with the Colgate smile and her diktat. She grew up in the United States of America in a campus town whose name is almost an order – Happy Valley – and remembers her years spent masking her Irish head in the hood of a must have Abercrombie sweatshirt. The series, Happy Valley, is rooted in her town and her adolescent memories, describing an environment which is intrusive and worrying, modelling individuals whose self identity has been traded for a generic body. With the more recent Spitting Image, it is the years before, the adolescent vulnerability which are exposed. Young girls, around fifteen years old, present themselves to us, tightly framed on a vibrant blue backdrop which permits neither an escape for the gaze, nor breathing room for the model. Eva O’Leary accompanies these photographs with videos: perched upon a stool, we watch them searching for the person they hoped to find in the mirror. In this interval the photographer reopens the field of representations and with it, the freedom to be complex, different, uncertain, unique, human.
Andrea Torres Balaguer’s work is influenced by dreams and surrealism, exploring the relationship between femininity and nature through the symbolism and dream transcription technique. Inspired by references to psychoanalysis theory and magic realism, her pictures experiment with the conscious-subconscious. Thinking about the scene-action concept, she creates pictures that suggest stories and invites the spectator to interpret them, searching to experiment with the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Erola Arcalís (Menorca, 1986) graduated from MA Photography at the Royal College of Art (2017) and is currently based in London. Recent exhibitions include: Rehearsing the Real, Peckham24, London, May 2019; Paisajes Esenciales, JustLX, Lisbon, May 2019; A Corner With Erola Arcalís, solo, A Corner With, London, May 2018.
Arcalís uses the lyricism of the black and white photograph to create fictional narratives that navigate between the stage and the encountered. Her practice combines abstract landscapes and sculptural still life to generate different voices. Arcalís’ images are inspired or make use of poetic text to construct fictions that revolve around myth, dream and personal experience. Central to her process is the materiality of the large format analogue print and the slowness of the 5x4 camera.
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.
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.
Hanna Rédling was born in Pécs in 1993 and now divides her time in Budapest and Rotterdam. She holds a BA and MA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Budapest) and studied Photography at Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam). Her works focus on the uncertainty of present existence and understanding and defining individual and collective nostalgia. Her photographs show childish curiosity and optimism merged with anxieties of unpredictability of the future and virtual world simultaneously. The attitude, that analyses the memories of the past at once, and the fever dream-like present and future at other times, calls forth an alternative world that converges in space and time. The elastic and jelly-like texture keeps recurring on Hanna’s photographs and this element carries the possibility of both ascension and ‘sinking in mud’ feeling. Her main aim is to image those spiritual and physical in-between states that we experience in our lives - during these experiences we have departed already but have not reached our objective yet. She received the scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers in 2020 and won the Pécsi József Photography Grant in 2021 and 2022. Her most recent works were exhibited at Unseen Photography Fair in Amsterdam in autumn 2021. She has been represented by Erika Deák Gallery in Budapest since April 2021.
redlinghanna@gmail.comwww.hannaredling.com @hannaredling
For her photographic adventure I am just a scenic spot, Pauline Niks made two long journeys to China, travelling the entire country to photograph so-called landmarks. Her particular focus was on replicas of iconic tourist attractions from other countries, such as the Eiffel Tower and the White House. The idea behind the undertaking was the manipulative nature of documentary photography: it is often seen as a reliable reproduction of reality when in fact it creates its own reality.
www.paulineniks.com
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/
Anna Aicher (b. 1993) is a documentary and portrait photographer from Germany. After studying photography in Berlin, she became a team member at Salzburg’s Gallery Fotohof in 2018. She is currently following a Masterclass at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin. Exploring traces of old traditions and rituals in contemporary society, most of Aicher’s projects have an auto-biographical dimension. She travels constantly between the city and the countryside, turning up stories nestled in distinct communities. Besides her personal projects, Aicher regularly works on assignments for various newspapers and magazines.
Website: www.anna-aicher.com
Pleun Gremmen (NL, 1992) is an artist and designer researching ways to create narratives through a variety of media reflecting mainly on internet subculture and politics while pushing the boundaries of her practice.
She graduated in 2018 from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (Master Media Design, Experimental Publishing), and in 2014 from ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (Bachelor Graphic Design). Since graduating in Arnhem she has been freelancing as an artist, designer and researcher and has been connecting and collaborating with artists and institutions in Rotterdam.
The work “Alt Reality Lexicon” (2018) explores the language neologisms of the Alt-right and Manosphere subcultures, acting as a translator between realms of reality. The performance installation “R.E.S.T”(2017) explores contemporary physical and digital expressions of escapism in a politically turbulent time.
Peters Jurgis (b. 1991) is a new media artist currently based in Riga, Latvia. He holds both a BSc in Digital Media Technology and an MSc in Cyber Security from the University of Birmingham, and an MA in Audiovisual Arts from the Art Academy of Latvia. His work comprises visual explorations into the impact of various phenomena caused by advances in technology. As such, a main focus of his work is Artificial Intelligence (AI) – both as a medium and on a conceptual basis. New developments in AI have sparked a series of heated debates, ranging from whether we can entrust critical tasks to AI, to conversations on the role of the human creator in an age of AI-generated content. With a background in machine learning algorithms, Jurgis believes that the future will bring AI and human co-creation – where algorithms are used to enhance a human artist’s capabilities. In his own practice, Jurgis applies new technologies as tools for visual storytelling, and as a means to speculate on future scenarios.
Scarlat’s work has been recognised and awarded in several national and international competitions, such as PHotoEspaña, the Emerging Photographer Fund (Magnum Foundation), World Nomads, Promoción del Arte at Tabacalera Cantera, Visa pour l’image, Matera European Photography, Artistas Novos, and Creación Injuve. In 2021 he received a bookmaking scholarship at Magnum Photos. This year he also has received a long-term mentorship scholarship at Magnum Photos, and he is currently working with Gregory Halpern and Alessandra Sanguinetti for this project.
Scarlat has always been interested in working with his family from Romania. After leaving in 2005 at the age of 11 and having spent 15 years away, his relationship with them has changed. In his projects, he like to insist on those tensions and conflicts that have arisen as a result of moving to Spain. He is interested in Eastern Europe, Romania, alcoholics, his mother, religion, death, the traces of communism on people's faces, gypsies, children, the cemetery, the lake, wedding dresses, unmarried women, dead girls in wedding dresses, dead horses, boys playing soccer, abandoned dogs, funerals, weddings, enchantments, women who are going to clean the graves in the cemetery, flowers, gold…
She has been working for German media outlets since 2014 and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Documentary Photography.
In her personal projects she focuses on taboo topics, feminism and relationships. She likes to combine different media and material such as video, photography, archive images, sound and objects. In 2018 she was chosen as one of the most promising newcomers in German photography, the year after she was nominated for the C/O Berlin Talent Award. Her work ‚IGNOSCENTIA’ has been shown in numerous exhibitions internationally and she regularly gives talks and speeches.
Sina lives and works in Berlin.
Barbara Debeuckelaere (BE) is a visual artist and photographer. She is a master in Visual Arts, Photography (KASK Ghent, 2021), a master in International Politics and European Law (VUBrussel, 1992) and a master in Economy (KULeuven, 1991). She started her career in Dutch Guyana (Suriname) as a junior professor at the University of Paramaribo. After that she worked as a journalist, for newspapers De Standaard and De Morgen and from 2002 on she was recruited by the VRT-newsroom. First she worked for radio (Voor de Dag, Radionieuws) and from 2007 on for television (Terzake). For VRT she made reports and traveled regularly to countries like Iran and to the Middle- East. In 2014 she quit the VRT and decided to turn away from the news industry to focus on a more poetically driven perspective on the world, through visual art and photography. In her work she is searching to explore power relations, systemic thinking, capitalism and climate change, trying to avoid the general craving for the exotic. Her life partner is Koen with whom she has 3 children: Ambroos, Jeanne and Cecile.