Kristof Thomas’ (b. 1995, Belgium) work is radical and ruthless. Harsh colors, crisp images, manipulated to the unrecognizable. The visitor steps into montages of food and electrical wires, in unnaturally bright colors, chemically screaming, often digitally smeared and strongly edited. All indexical references are chopped and deconstructed, the work is much less about consumption than it is about the process. Not a traditional process, such as the analogue, which possesses the magical power of unpredictability. On the contrary, Thomas is in full control, he lets the beast sweat till it is down. He is not into magic but into sorcery. He creates artificial images, with no interest in reality as it manifests itself. His work is a confrontation with loops, errors and distortions that do not cause the system to fail but make it more flexible. He experiments, doubts his surroundings and tries out all his devices. He releases his work on paper, cardboard, sloppy, framed, sculptural, flat, on the floor, on the wall. Pushes out his uncertainty with cheeky confidence and leaves us guessing. Until we surrender and spin around the room.
Kristof Thomas received in 2019 a Bachelor’s degree in Photography from KASK The Royal academy of Fine arts Ghent, followed by a Visual Arts Master’s degree in 2022.
Her art practice focuses on the relationship between the human being and the landscape. She tracks the history of the ways of space use, of the actions and transformations that leave a series of dispersed marks behind. Including archival materials in her practice, she reveals the changeability of the space in time and constructs a visual essay about memory.
Noémi Napsugár Melegh was born in 1990 in Budapest, Hungary, and is currently a full-time photojournalist for telex.hu, one of the largest independent news portals in Hungary. Although she has been interested in photography since she was in high school, she worked as a health economist for several years after having obtained her BA and MSc in Economics. During the past two years, she has participated in several international training courses: she was a fellow of the VII Academy Level 1 and Level 2 Documentary Photography Seminar, a participant of the Magnum workshop organised by the Robert Capa Center in Budapest, and a fellow of the Canon Student Development programme and of the prestigious Eddie Adams workshop in Jeffersonville, New York. Her true passion lies in creating long-form documentary projects that focus on personal stories and presenting the lives of local, marginalised communities. In 2023, she won 2nd place in the Documentary Photography (Series) category of the Hungarian Press Photo Contest with her work titled as "Gábor and Kálmán", which tells the story of two men living on the margins of the Roma community. In the same year, she was awarded the Hemző-Károly Prize, a prestigious yearly award for a photographer under 35.
János R. Szabó (1992) was born and raised in Kömörő, a small village in the northeastern part of Hungary. This particular locale plays a major role in his inspiration as an artist.He completed her BA photography studies at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2018. He has been an active creator of the underground cultural segment of Budapest since 2018. Beyond his regular practice as a photographer he is in strong collaboration with the performance art scene of Budapest as performer and art director. He is invested in sociophoto and depiction of people, researching the patterns of human personalities, and the connection between memory and documentation.
Ligia Popławska (b. 1994, Poland) is a visual artist currently based in Antwerp, Belgium. Her work explores themes of senses, emotional states and human impact on environment. With a deep interest in natural phenomena, art history and sciences, her researchbased, speculative work focuses of human and morethan- human in the changing conditions of the (Post) Anthropocene. She graduated with honours from the Photography department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (BA and MA), previously gaining a BA in Art History from the University of Gdańsk (2016). Her project ‘Fading Senses’ won Decade of Change Series Award (2022) by the British Journal of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at PhMuseum Days International Photography Festival in Bologna, Italy (2021) and Photography Prize funded by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (2020). Ligia Popławska is a laureate of .tiff 2022 (FOMU Antwerp) and a recipient of a scholarship for Emerging Talents from the Flemish Government. She exhibited at Bienal’23 Fotografia do Porto, FOMU Antwerp, De Brakke Grond, Helsinki Photo Festival, among others. Ligia Popławska works as a freelance photographer and editor.
www.ligiapoplawska.com
"My work focusses on absence. Absence that we try to fill in with information. My mother found her biological family through a Dutch television show and even though she was reunited with relatives, many questions remain, including why she was given up for adoption. My mother was born in Spain in 1964, when dictator Francisco Franco was ruling. It always felt strange not being able to talk about my mother’s past simply because we don’t know exactly what happened. With my work, I’m there for exploring the process of reconstruction, and the distortion of narrative within memory.
The projects I make are dealing with the relationship between politics, media and citizens. How these three opponents feed each other, need each other, but also exist in a constant power struggle. I examine the reliability of the image in the post-truth era, it forms a grey area where fact and fiction live close to each other. This is the area from where I position myself.
My visual language is based on what I see in the media and comes from the connection I had with the tv show where we discovered my relatives. The show shaped and directed my memory so much and intrigued me a lot. I am therefore also specifically interested in that what has been manipulated.
I use artificial light in order to give a cinematic feeling to the work, which is based on emotions that tries to lure its audience into believing what is created in front of them.
In my work I take on the role of a director that investigates what truth means in modern times."
Charlotte's work is being published by outlets internationally and her personal projects on migration and women were shown in solo exhibitions in the United States, Turkey, Austria and Japan. She speaks six languages and is currently based in Berlin.
http://www.charlotteschmitz.com/
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
The daughter of Chinese emigrants living in Canada, Teresa Eng had an imaginary and fantastical vision of China, until she decided to visit the country. The degree of difference between the Chinese dream that she had constructed and the reality of a country undergoing a frantic development, might have resulted in a documentary which would not have spared us the excessive nature of contemporary China. On the contrary, Teresa Eng, chose to avoid the obviousness of a documentary and the stylistic clarity this entails. Her China seems to evolve beneath a hazy veil. The here and now are erased, the signs of urban frenzy – abundantly illustrated in contemporary photography – are eluded, potentially treated as asides. An infinite head of hair confronts audaciously the curves of a modern architecture: Teresa Eng treads softly, turning her back on the injunctions of a modern China. Which, out of a rock standing in its ceramic pot, or a concrete pillar erected in the water, merits our attention? Teresa Eng’s China seems to navigate between the riverbanks of a capitalist progressionism (China Dream, the title of the series, is also a popular slogan for president Xi Jiping, which in turn refers to the American Dream) and that of an orientalist romantic nostalgia.
Kristina Õllek (b.1989, Estonia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She is working in the field of photography, video and installation, with a focus on investigating representational processes, geological and ecological matter, and the human-made environment. In her practice she frequently uses situations when fact and fiction, synthetic and natural, copy and original intertwine with each other and become a hybrid object / matter to obtain new and reconsidered meaning.
Her works are often site-sensitive, analysing the exhibition location and format, questioning modes of presentation and installation politics, viewing it from different perspectives — from a historical museum to online space.
Kristina Õllek has graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts (BA degree in 2013, MA degree in 2016; at the Photography Department, Fine Arts). She has also studied at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016) and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2012). She’s been the laureate of the Estonian Academy of Arts Young Artist Prize 2013 (BA) and 2016 (MA). In 2019 she received the Art Proof Production Grant. Her works have recently been shown in various international group and solo exhibitions in Estonia and abroad. Her works can be found in private and public collections.
www.kristinaollek.com
The addictive force of the internet is real, and no one knows this better than Aurélie Bayad. In a post-internet world, where IRL increasingly merges with URL, new possibilities of being are creeping into our daily lives. In her versatile art practice, Bayad uses video, photography and performance to confront us with the messy, dirty thoughts and desires of our hyperreal (what is real?), cultivated identities, as we try to live up to the new rules and standards set by the digital sphere of fake likes and dark web eroticism. Bayad uses her camera, her own and other bodies, and texts she wrote to create a fresh aesthetic language for the new desires of contemporary culture. In slimy and gooey, ugly and disgusting, cheap and glittery settings, we watch her unfold the personae of her filmed and photographed subjects. She hides her models behind the soft, nostalgic hues of the kitschy eighties and nineties; includes erratic and ecstatic sequences in her films, with heart-pounding soundtracks; and fearlessly looks back into the lens, as if asking us: ‘What is your real personality? What is real beauty? What is your true desire, your fetish? Who do you want me to see?’ With her otherworldly beauty standards, her visceral and vomitous but lively encounters with food and other quotidian objects, and her frank interrogations of intimacy, giving and receiving, love and abuse — so pertinent that they can make you tremble with self-doubt — Aurélie Bayad shares with us her search for personal grounding in this confusing, networked world.
- Text by Zeynep Kubat (.tiff)
Olgaç has most recently been featured in British Journal of Photography's "Ones to Watch" photographers of 2019, and Aperture’s "Element of Style" issue, that investigates the role of style, dress, and beauty in the formation of individual identity. His work has also been published such as M Le Monde, New York Times Style Magazine, Dazed, Dust, Replica.
https://www.olgacbozalp.co.uk/
Giya Makondo-Wills is a British-South African documentary photographer. Makondo-Wills is concerned with identity, race, colonisation, the western gaze and systems of power. Her practice continues to develop and pushes to engage and collaborate with marginalised communities. She holds a BA (hons) and a MA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales (formerly Newport). In 2021 she began teaching on the BA Photography at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). She lives and works between the U.K and The Netherlands. She also works with other educational institutions as a visiting lecturer. She has exhibited her work internationally, some highlights include; Lagos, Johannesburg, Dusseldorf, Milan and Paris as well as widely within the UK. Featured in several ‘graduate of the year’ profiles, she has won an IFOR documentary photography award and been shortlisted for other prizes.She was nominated for the 2019 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and in 2018 selected as one of the '31 women to watch out for' by the British Journal of Photography. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Royal Photographic Society journal, It’sNiceThat, Unseen Magazine and Source Photographic Review, amongst others. Her first photobook was released in 2020 They Came From The Water While The World Watched is available via the Lost Light Recordings. In 2022-2023, Makondo-Wills is commissioned by FOTODOK to produce the body of work about Utrecht communities, with which she will partake in a group exhibition opening FOTODOK at the new location of De Machinerie.
As an artist, João Ramilo aims to document human intervention in the world, capturing theinteraction between them. The essence of his work is to portray social and economic issues through images and immortalize those moments in time.Currently, he resides in Lisbon and works as a freelance photographer.