Aline Bovard Rudaz is a Swiss photographer based in Geneva. She studied photography at the CEPV (Centre d’enseignement professionnel de Vevey). Through her artistic practice, she sees images as witnesses capable of conveying the concerns of her generation. For her, photography is a sensitive means of tackling the social, intimate and taboo issues of our society. She is particularly interested in forgotten histories, especially those relating to women's lives.
Tina Farifteh is a Dutch-Iranian artist based in The Netherlands. She obtained master’s degrees in Economics and a bachelor’s degree in Arts. Thanks to this academic and cultural background, she is used to seeing the world from different angles.
She is a visual researcher whose work lies at the intersection between arts, politics and philosophy. Her interest lies in human nature and the politicization of ‘life’ – particularly, the administration and control of life. She is inspired by the work of philosophers Agamben, Foucault and Arendt. Specifically their concepts of ‘bare life’ and ‘biopolitics’.
In her work, she reflects on the impact of man-made power structures such as nation states and corporations on the lives of ordinary people. Often focusing on people stuck between the ‘natural’ life and the ‘conventional’ life. People not only excluded from the privileges granted by the ruling political and economic systems, but often damaged by these to make the system ‘work’. Her photographic approach is research-based and conceptual. Often combining images, text and data. The goal is to seduce us to look at topics that we prefer to look away from because of their complexity or discomfort.
In her earlier project Killer Skies (2018), she explored the impact of the ‘dronisation’ of armies. Currently she is researching and reflecting on the situation of refugees on the move or stuck at European borders. This work focuses on borders, bodies, and the political language used to normalize the absurdity of how we are currently dealing with these topics.
Anaïs Boileau was born in 1992 in Nîmes. She is a photographic artist who works exploring Mediterranean cultures as a constant source of inspiration in her projects. She graduated from the art school of Lausanne, ECAL. She lives in the south of France where she alternates between photographic commissions and her artistic projects.Her work is presented in various group exhibitions and selected in several international festivals. In September 2017, she joins a year of master at Central Saint Martins school in London in photography. Since her first collaboration for M le magazine du Monde in 2015, she has worked regularly for the French and international press. Her work can be found in magazines and newspapers such as Le Monde, M le magazine du Monde, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Time or Vanity Fair.
Over twenty years ago, Jaakko Kahilaniemi, who was barely eight at that time, inherited 100 hectares of forest. The abstraction which this represents for a child, is followed by an indifference which it evokes for an adolescent. After all, this is hardly very exotic for a Finn: forest covers more than 70% of the country, totalling 26 million hectares. Fairly recently, this photographer decided to return to this heritage in order to explore its twists and turns. This series, called 100 Hectares of Understanding retraces his journey towards an appropriation of this land which is too big for a single – young – man. Photography thus becomes the location where the experience of the landscape can be filtered as it is travelled through, physically, mentally, and sentimentally. These explorations blend physical crossings and digital incursions, photographed panoramas and painted landscapes. The photographer combines these vast misty lands with a still life of a small wooden log resting upon a scale, or simple twigs upon a black background: from the infinitely big to the infinitesimal, each photograph constitutes a piece of an important memory game whose perimeter, one might imagine, increases as the photographer walks and the man grows up.
Arian Christiaens (°1981) has been working as a photographer, artist and photography teacher since graduating as a Master at KASK (Ghent, Belgium) in 2004 and participated in masterclasses with Max Pinckers, Paul Kooiker, Laura El Tentawy and Vincent Delbrouck from 2017 onwards.
Her work is centered around investigations of her family relations and the constructed nature of their identities.
In 2019 Christiaens published her first artist book ‘Xenia’ through APE (Art Paper Editions) in which portraits of her sister, who used to be her brother, float between documentary and fiction. The publication was shortlisted for the Arles Photobook Award.
Her most recent work ‘In Camera’, is the result of Christiaens comparing her own relationship, her own person and her own intimate photographical archive with the one of her mother. She questions the relation between man and woman, photographer and model, over time and within her own family history.
‘In Camera’ will be on show in FOMU (Fotomuseum Anwerpen) this summer as part of the exhibition ‘TIFF Emerging Belgian Photography’ and will be published as an artist book in 2022.
After graduating with a BA in geography and communications, she started studying photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX). She has worked at the Danish daily, Dagbladet Politiken and studied abroad at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (KABK). In January 2020 she graduated and is now working freelance and on personal projects.
Nanna is a Canon ambassador and member of Women Photograph. In 2020 she was nominated for the Joop Swart Masterclass held by World Press Photo, and for The 6x6 Global Talent Program in 2019. In 2017 she attended the Canon Student Development Programme at Visa Pour l’Image. Her work has been published in NPR, PHmuseum, Politiken, Information among others and she has won several prizes at CPOY, Danish Picture of The Year and others.
Born in Miskolc in 1989, Zsuzsa Darab graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME), in photography BA. In 2012, she obtained a scholarship to study painting and fine art in Denmark. In 2014, she studied at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Finland under the ERASMUS programme. In 2015, she graduated from MOME's photography MA department, then in 2016 from the design and visual arts teaching MA department. Same year, she did her photography internship in Reykjavik, Iceland. From 2017 till 2018, she was working as Jón Páll's photo assistant at SuperStudio. From 2018, she lives in Hungary and works as a destination freelance photographer. She has been a member of the Hungarian Assocation Of Young Art Photographers since 2011, and the Women Photograph database, since 2017. Her works are usually personal, conceptual, staged and also experimental. She has already exhibited several times in Budapest and abroad as well, e.g. New York, Rome, Nizhny Tagil, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Istanbul, Warsaw, etc. In 2013, she participated in the Present Continuous art project at the Mai Manó House. In 2016, she was chosen by Photo Botie as one of the 30 under 30 women photographers. She won the NKA Scholarship in 2018, 2022, 2023 and the Pécsi József Scholarship in 2021.
Pauline Hisbacq was born in 1980.
After a master's degree in philosophy, she joined the ENSP in Arles, from which she graduated in 2011. She continued the same year with a post-graduate degree at the ICP in New York.
Since then, her work has been presented at the Rencontres de la Jeune photographie Internationale de Niort (2014), at the Ecureuil Foundation for Contemporary Art in Toulouse (2019), at the Image Satellite in Nice (2018), at the friche belle de Mai in Marseille (2017), and in Paris at Jeune Création (2013), at the Photo Paris Saint Germain festival (2017), at the Bal (2019), at the Rouen Normandie Photographic Center (2021).
She published Natalya at 7 Editions (2016), Le feu at September books (2017), Amour adolescente (chants d'amour) at Rayon Vert . édition (2019), Cadavre Exquis, fanzine co-published by Le Bal Books and September Books (2021), Songs for women and birds at September books (2021).
In 2017, she was awarded the CNAP's Soutien à la photographie documentaire contemporaine grant for the project La fête et les cendres. In 2021, she received the Aide Idividuelle à la Création from the Drac Ile de France for the project Rimorso. She is also the winner of the national commission Les Regards du Grand Paris initiated by the CNAP and the Ateliers Médicis, with the project Pastorale.
She is currently a photographer at the Rodin Museum, and editor at September Books.
Claudiu Guraliuc (b.1977) is a fine art photographer and educator based in Cluj, Romania. His work specialises in fine art portraiture and nudes, inspired by the aesthetics of Old Master paintings from the Baroque period. Guraliuc holds a Licentiate from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and has achieved numerous international accolades for his work; in January 2022, he received the International Master Photographer of the Year Award. His images have been published by a range of international photography magazines, and his work is found in both private and public collections in Europe, Asia and the United States. Guraliuc is represented by Katsea Art Gallery, Baltimore, and Influx Gallery, London.
Her work retraces her personal family history drawing on her Togolaise heritage, and the idea of origins. The theme of family is explored through self-portraits in which she plays her mother and father, narrating their experience of migration from Togo to Italy. Her images are partially informed by the West African studio portrait tradition.
If Hélène Bellenger's work could be associated with a single tool, it would not be a camera, but one of those fine, precise instruments of the forensic scientist, so diligent is the artist in dissecting the workings of an imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Preferring the act of collecting and transforming to that of shooting, she approaches images that are inert and out of use. For the Dazzled project, she collected a series of faces on the internet that had been obliterated by a flash of light - the now famous form of the selfie with the flash in the mirror - forming a kind of digital sun that contaminates the image and prevents the portrait. Another collection is that of advertisements for anxiolytics and antidepressants taken from specialist magazines, which she assembles into a frieze to display the litany of tense faces and slogans in the form of injunctions to happiness. Earlier, in Right color, she diverted a collection of magazines, posters and photograms from reels of films featuring actresses from the 1920s to the 1950s, reviving the make-up that was applied to them to reconstruct their faces and modify their plasticity for the black-and-white screen of the time. With her recent Bianco ordinario, her torsos of Apollo and busts of Venus, she continues her archaeology of the canons of beauty. Through a play of superimposed forms and supports, she links the geological time of the Carrara marble quarries, its extraction in Antiquity for sculpture, and today's massive extraction of marble powder to whiten the packaging of our cosmetics and cleaning products. The ensemble consists of a collection of unfolded packaging cartons on which the artist prints images of antique busts and quarry landscapes. In turn, the images themselves will be extracted from their support by the acidity of the marble powder contained in the cardboard, washing them ‘whiter than white’. The history and fortunes of the Western concept of whiteness are at the heart of the work the artist is currently developing in the Mediterranean basin.Hélène Bellenger (1989) lives and works between Marseille and Paris. After studying law and art history, she specialised in photography and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles in 2016. Bianco Ordinario was supported by Aide à la Création 2021 from the Drac PACA and produced at the Centre Photographique Ile-de-France as part of the 2022-2023 research and post-production residency.The artist would like to thank Isabelle Carta, Roland Carta, Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France, Nathalie Giraudeau, galerie Marguerite Milin and Francesco Bi
Her work is dominated by authentic recording of everyday situations with poetic- geometric narrative overlaps. The themes touch on temporality, imagination, fiction, and the search for new image contexts (re-evalution of image). Unformal documentary images are diversfield with abstract or stylized „cut-outs“ of the everyday colors. ". The conscious disruption of the timeline opens up the possibility of individual interpretation, which the viewer can understand as he or she wishes - without time constraints. Barbora in last years is interested in the relationship between static image and the moving image. Her inspiration often comes from eastern Slovakia,personal experience, the theme of growing up and aging, home, landscape,spending leisure time and health care.
She has participated in joint exhibition projects in France, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Rupublic and others. She participated in Pla(t)form 2020 in the Swiss Fotomuseum Winterthur, where she was selected along with 42 artists. Barbora Bacova actually lives and works in Košice.
Dea Botica (b. 1995) holds a BA in Cinematography and an MA in Photography, which she completed at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. Her artistic work uses photography as a medium to explore topics of everyday life, identity, family heritage and tradition. Thus far, Botica’s work has been exhibited at several group and solo shows in Croatia and beyond. She has participated in several residency programmes – most recently in 2021, as part of the European Union art-research project, Island Connect.
Lucas Leffler revisits the past. Starting with stories rooted in reality, his projects focus on silver as a source of inspiration and discovery.
Zilverbeek (or Silver Stream) (2017–2020) is a dreamlike investigation of a man who collects mud from a stream in order to extract the precious white metal from it. The silver was the result of years of photosensitive emulsions being discharged into the water from the Agfa-Gevaert factory. The artist documents, deconstructs then reconstructs, history, brilliantly reshaping time and our perception of it to give us an oblique look at photographic materials.
His second work, Crescent (2019–2020), is a speculative study of the scientific and esoteric significance of silver. Here, the artist delves into something that fascinates him: the moon’s influence on the metal. His attempts to synthesise it result in photograms of sculptural objects and the sky — as though the heavens were being radiographed.
For Lucas Leffler, the shoot provides tangible evidence that a fantastical story — the pretext and context for his journeys — is true. He subjects this evidence to an experimental process involving chemicals and manipulation of the film and the subjects, thus creating a synthetic version of reality: one that transcends facts, muddies the path, and allows viewers to come to their own conclusions.
- Text by Emilia Genuardi (.TIFF)
Maria João Salgado, was born in Portugal, in 1992 and has studied at the Portuguese Institute of Photography (IPF) and at Institute of Cultural and Artistic Production (IPCI) in Porto. Since 2015 she has been focusing on Documental Photography, mainly developing projects on human rights and alternative living communities. Currently, she is focusing on a more artistic approach, developing themes on personal issues.
Tomasz Kawecki (1993) is a photographer living and working between Cracow and the Warsaw (Poland). He is studying at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava (Czech Republic), and studied in the Faculty of Architecture at Cracow University of Technology.
Tomasz's work comes from his inner space. Using elements of performance and installation, he mixes fiction with reality, which results in quasi-documentary outcome. In his works, he uses universal symbols that are archetypes in the collective thinking of society. Out of the chthonic of nature, out of its chaos, he intuitively selects fragments from which he creates images. The leitmotif of Tomasz’s works is the dualism present in nature and man.
Tomasz's works has been exhibited and published internationally. Among others, he is a winner of LensCulture ArtPhotography Awards (US), Cracow Photomonth ShowOFF section (PL), Grand Prix IMAnext “Dream” (JPN) and Reframing History Photo Vogue Italia.
Exhibitions include: 'Making Strange' 2019 Grand Prix Eyes on Talent in Photography & Sustainability, opened on 6th November during Paris Photo (2019) / 'Making Strange' Hyeres International Festival of Fashion and Photography (2019) / 'Labs New Artist III' Red Hook Labs (2019) / ‘There’s Life in it Yet’ (2016), with Kieran Kilgallon / ‘The Fighting Irish’ (2016) at Drop Everything Festival on Inís Oirr Island, Galway / ‘Resonate’ (2015) at Gallery of Photography, Dublin / 'Apparitions' (2015) at NCAD, Dublin / ‘Thread’ (2012) at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin.
Eva Maria Bouillon (b. 1997) currently lives and works in Bruges, Belgium. In 2019, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts and Photography from the LUCA School of Arts, followed by a Master’s degree in 2020. Her work probes at the relationship between storytelling, family history and personal experience. In recent years, her work has featured in several group exhibitions and international film festivals.
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.