In 2017 she obtained the PhotoEspaña scholarship to study the Master's Degree in photography "Theories and artistic projects". Ire Lenes attented workshops and seminars of Antoine D’ Agata, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roger Ballen, Eugenio Recuenco and Joan Fontcuberta.
Ire lenes has won several awards such as Ciudad de Alcalá, the DKV scholarship at the Photography and Journalism Seminar in Albarracín, lX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris or Julia Margaret Cameron among others. She has been selected to participate in festivals such as PhotoEspaña or Transeuropa Discovery Week. Her work Archipelagos has been exposed as a solo exhibition in several galleries in Spain and has been published in book format within the Kursala collection of Cádiz, which was recently exhibited at the ¡Hola! event in Taipei, Taiwan.
Currently her work is part of various public and private collections and she has given talks at PiC.A PhotoEspaña, Real Sociedad Fotográfica of Madrid and at the Infotografos conference in Alicante.
In 2017, her personal connection with Lithuania led her to embark on a long-term project, the analysis of ethnic minorities in the Baltic States and the understanding of the particular situation in each country, a trilogy approached from a sociological perspective and materialized through visual narrative.
"My interest lies in the role of narrative as a reference point in representing contemporary social issues. I work between editorial assignments and long-term projects, taking pride in immersing myself within the place and people that I photograph, working with communities over an extended period of time."
Past works have documented the socio-political effects of the Ukrainian revolution; explored notions of escapism along The English Riviera; living in hiding with Albanian families persecuted in the age old traditions of blood feuds, as well as celebratory traditions in Greece. Previously exhibited works have been included in The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, PhotoIreland Festival, Paris Photo, Magenta Flash Forward and The Renaissance Photography Prize and clients include The FT Weekend Magazine, The New York Times, TIME and National Geographic.
Vic Bakin (b. 1984) is a self-educated Ukrainian photographer. In Kyiv, the artist explores various local groups – queer and fashion scenes, rave and music culture, and even closed communities like student dormitories. In light of new and evolving local circumstances, Bakin’s focus has since shifted to the subject of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His diaristic personal projects use of analogue photography to probe at questions of identity; with Void, Bakin is currently working on his debut photobook.
Reinis Hofmanis (b. 1985) is a Riga-based artist and photographer. He studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany, and obtained an MA from the Visual Communication Department of the Art Academy of Latvia. His works are characterised by a socio-anthropological point of view – which manifests in an interest in typifying different groups of society, their behavioural pattern, and tier effect on the surrounding environment. Hofmanis won the main prize at Archifoto in 2012 and 2013, and was awarded 2nd place in the Architecture category of the Sony World Photography Awards. His works have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Der Spiegel, Esquire, Bloomberg, Le Monde, The Globe and Mail, and The British Journal of Photography
Recent monographic exhibition includes: Untitled, ADN_ Sea(e)scapes, 2021 at galerie Salon H, Paris, and I, the Archive,2020, at Villa Vassilieff, Paris. Kala’s most recent group exhibitions include: This is Not Africa, unlearn what you have learned, 2021 at Aros Museum, Denmark, Un.e air.e de famille, 2021, at Museum Paul Elourd, Saint-Denis, France, Polyphony, 2021 at Gera Museum, Gera, Germany. Kala’s most recent performances include: Stranger, Danger, Wait it’s a Prayer Room, Centre Pompidou, 2019, Mackandal Turns into a Butterfly: A Love potion (2018), Le Pouvoir du Dedans, La galerie Cac de Noisy-le-Sec (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala Shows and Doesn’t Tell, galerie Saint-Severin (2018). She is the winner of the ADAGP/ Villa Vassilieff Fellowship 2019-2020, a finalist of the SAM art Prix (2018) and also a finalist for the prize for contemporary talent, François Schneider Foundation (2018). Kala’s work will be included in the 5th Casablanca Biennial, Morroco, and she an artist in residency at Urbane Kuenst Ruhr in Germany in 2019-2020. She is the founder and co-organiser of e.a.s.t. (Ephemeral Archival Station), a lab and platform for long-term artistic research projects, established in 2017.
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.
In 2016 she published her first photo book, eden, thanks to the Fiebre Dummy Award. Since 2010 she lives in Madrid, alternating her work as a photographer with her personal projects.
She directed her first short film, documenting the 'Fair' cashmere project which supports livelihoods of nomadic herding communities in the remote Gobi desert. Kerry has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally, and has been selected as part of the 34th edition of the International Festival of Fashion, Photography, and FashionAccessories in Hyères.
Mahalia Giotto, aka taje (b. 1992), is a Lausanne-based visual artist working across photography, performance, installation, and archives. Originally trained in international relations at the University of Geneva, they later turned to photography, earning a Master’s degree from ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne in 2022.
Their work is deeply shaped by their personal journey as a trans non-binary person. Fascinated by androgynous figures in animated series, taje experienced gender fluidly in childhood. However, adolescence imposed binary expectations that never felt right. Their transition, including starting hormone therapy in 2020, profoundly influenced their life and artistic practice.
Among their notable projects, existential boner merges photography, collage, text, and scans to construct an intimate yet radical self-portrait. Studio portraits, vernacular snapshots, and handwritten annotations create a raw, urgent narrative—part personal history, part deconstructed archive. Their installations increasingly incorporate text and graffiti-like interventions, turning space into a site of both personal reflection and public confrontation. The project was exhibited at Images Vevey, in a solo show at SPBH Space in Milan, and won the Swiss Design Awards in 2024. It was published as a book by ECAL and SPBH in July 2023.
Currently, taje is developing, on the verge of becoming completely forgotten, a three-part project examining masculinity as a force that is both protective and isolating.
Duchateau is an artist who mainly works with photography. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies. His photos are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he makes work that generates diverse meanings, associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
His works are characterised by the use of everyday events in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role.
By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense. His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. He makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented.Lars Duchateau currently lives and works in Hasselt and Ghent.
Ieva Baltaduonyte (b.1988 in Kaunas, Lithuania) is a lens based artist and graduate of thePhotography BA programme at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Informed by her own personal experience of displacement, her artistic practice engages with topics and issues relating to migratory culture. Central to her work are the psychological consequences of migration, such as displacement trauma, as well as the concepts home, identity and the in-between state. After spending seventeen years living in Dublin, Ireland, Ieva has recently returned to her native Lithuania, where she is currently based. Transnational migration is perhaps the most highly contested issue across Europe. For new migrants spatial and temporal displacement is potentially traumatic, resulting in shifting identities where home can no longer be understood as a fixed knowable entity. Ieva is preoccupied with revealing personal and collective narratives where trauma, identity and memory encourage a deeper engagement with cross-cultural dialogue. By using photography for both personal expression and to foster a critical dialogue with contemporary society, she invites the viewer to participate in societal debates, foregrounding human experiences, and exposing what is otherwise obscured or ignored. Her carefully constructed projects combine politics and aesthetics inviting a dialogical relationship with the viewer.
'June', Červeňová’s most recent body of work, is an autobiographical response to the EU referendum. The month of June in 2016 signified a rupture where the meaning of home and future plans were suddenly thrown into limbo. Coinciding with the beginning of her MA at the RCA, she spent the following two years documenting daily life. Taken in various locations across Britain and Europe, each image is titled simply by the location and date in which it is made, the significance of which becomes apparent when read on mass. When viewed in retrospect, the work emerges as not only a record of daily events, but also a timeline of significant dates that will, or have already become, marker points in history.
The core of the work became an artist book, in which the work has been translated into 24 booklets (each representing one month) collated together with an opening ring – a metaphor for the easily breakable union, where the beginning and the end can be manipulated and the linearity of historical events shifted. Červeňová’s artist book 'June' was amongst 10 shortlisted titles in MACK First Book Award 2019 and was presented at Photo London 2019. June is now in the permanent collection of TATE Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum.
In 2019, Červeňová was nominated for the prestigious FOAM Paul Huf Award. She is a 2017 Bloomberg New Contemporaries Alumni. She regularly collaborates with The FT Weekend and Telegraph Magazine.
Laura Paloma (*1995) is an artist and writer based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Her practice questions the relationship between image, object, text, language, and play online. She is interested in the détournement and misuse of corporate social media platforms, as well as the negotiations that take place between the user and the platform. She works with DIY, lo-fi, and self-publishing techniques, as well as with found or recycled physical and digital materials. Her projects address ideas of authorship, materiality, and performativity of digital and networked images and texts. Context-based and site-specific, her practice explores various formats, ranging from installations to online and print publications, as well as long-duration social media performances. She has exhibited her work in several off-spaces in Switzerland, made a live desktop performance for Screen Walks (Photographers’ Gallery London & Fotomuseum Winterthur), was nominated for Prix Photoforum 2023, and has published a zine with Edition Taberna Kritika, Bern. In 2024 she was artist-in-residence at hangar.org in Barcelona and house guest at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.She holds a Master’s in Contemporary Arts Practice in Literary Writing from Bern Academy of the Arts, where she worked as assistant from 2021 to 2023.
She graduated with a Master in the Fine Arts at KASK in Ghent (BE) with great honours in 2012. Her photo series 'The Dwarf Empire' was rewarded with the Photo Academy Award 2012 as well as the International Photography Award Emergentes DST in 2013. Her serie ‘Snow White’ was awarded 16ème Prix National Photographie Ouverte and NuWork Award for Photographic Excellence. She was awarded the Nikon Press Award in 2014 and 2016 for most promising young photographer. The British Journal of Photography selected De Wilde as one of 'the best emerging talents from around the world' in 2014 and recently received the Firecracker Grant 2016, PHmuseum Women's Grant and de Zilveren Camera award for 'The Island of the Colorblind'.
She has been internationally published (Guardian, New Yorker, Le Monde, CNN, Vogue) and exhibited (Voies OFF, Tribeca Film Festival, Circulations, Lagos Photo, Lodz Fotofestiwal, IDFA, STAM and EYE). Since 2013, De Wilde works with the Dutch newspaper and magazine De Volkskrant, in Amsterdam the Netherlands and joined the photoagency NOOR as a nominee in 2017.
Yana Wernicke is a German photographer. In 2021 her first photo-book, Zenker, a collaboration with Jonas Feige, was published by Edition Patrick Frey. She is currently working on a new project on the concepts of species loneliness and interspecies relationships.
Max is a documentary and portrait photographer who focuses on stories about society, social and ecological chances. He is a founding member of DOCKS collective.
Nolwenn Brod is a French artist based in Paris. She has studied humanities and social sciences, and trained in photography in London and at the Ecole des Gobelins in Paris. She is a member of the Vu Agency and represented by the eponymous gallery in Paris since 2016.
She develops her projects most often in the context of creative residencies in France and Europe where she mixes photography and video; and responds to commissions for the press and institutions. Her works are regularly exhibited in France and Europe and are included in the collections of the Bnf (French National Library), the Cnap, the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, the Museum of Brittany, the Villa Noailles, the Agnès b. collection, the Neuflize OBC Foundation, art libraries and private collections.
Her first book was published by Poursuite Editions in 2015, the second is in preparation.
In 2015, she received her Bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography-Videography at the Art and Design College, West University of Timisoara and, in 2017, her Master's degree in Publicity Graphics. In December 2015, she had her first personal photography exhibition in Timisoara, followed in the next few years by several personal and group exhibitions. In 2016, Oana was selected for the Professional shortlist in the Staged category of the Sony World Photography Awards.
Noémi Szécsi (b. 1998) is a half-Hungarian, half-Romanian photographer, currently living in Budapest. She studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, from which she holds an MA. A member of the Studio of Young Photographers, Hungary, Szécsi’s projects are centred on specific groups of people living on the margins of society – from gravediggers to far-right protesters, to the witches she is currently working with. Her conviction is that the medium of photography offers no universal truths, but it does maintain a mediating and sensitising power. For the artist, the camera is a passport to the places where she interacts with people, allowing her to experience these different positions.
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.