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)
In her most recent work, Rie Yamada stages self-portraits through other people, finding her source matter in family photo albums acquired from Japan, her homeland, and Germany, where she now lives, recreating scenes in her own likeness. Highlighting gender stereotypes and social archetypes, her often humorous work questions not just the family, but the changing role of photography itself in expressing how we want to be perceived. The images are, in a sense, a search for her own image, in the same way a family photo is intended to define and project their identity.
Most of her long-term projects are focused on the aftermath of loss. Experiencing it herself she wants to draw attention to the issues people face. Projects on this theme include "Self-portrait with my mother", "Lost", "Reborn", and "Little Poland". Her long-term projects were nationally and internationally awarded. She won Magnum & Ideas Tap award and completed the internship at Magnum Photos office in New York City.
Karolina is an award-winning photographer with a master's degree in photography from the Polish National Film, Television and Theater School in Lodz. She is based in Poland and works on verity of her projects both locally and internationally.
He debuted as a photographer in 2016 at Krakow Photomonth with the “Olympia’s Diary” project. From 2017 to 2019, he was part of art collective Fashion House Limanka, whose works were presented as individual exhibitions in the Museum of Art in Łódź and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He currently works at the Museum of Art in Łódź, where he is curating the “Save as a draft” program of Instagram art residencies.
Her work has been recently exhibited in numerous venues, including JAP vitrine, Brussels (2023), IKOB Museum, Eupen (2023), Antwerp Art Weekend (2023), CIAP, Genk (2022), Centrale Vitrine, Brussels (2021), Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France, Dunkerque (2021-22), and S.M.A.K Museum, Ghent (2021). She has also gained international recognition through exhibitions in Paris, Germany, Athens, and Caracas.
In recent years, Padilla has been granted numerous residencies and awards including the Fiminco Foundation residency in Paris (2022-23) and long-term residency at Moussem Nomadic Art Centre in Brussels (2023-). She received the Sabam prize of ArtContest in Brussels in 2020, the prize of the Watch This Space biennial in Lille in 2022, and was one of the laureates of the Friends of S.M.A.K prize in Ghent in 2021. Her work is currently on view at The Kunstverein Friedrichshafen in Germany. In 2024, Padilla was selected for the MINO Female Artist Mentorship program with mentors Otobong Nkanga and Léonard Pongo, and will be part of the MLeuven residency program at Cas-co in Leuven and Morpho residency program in Antwerp.
Julius Schien came to photography in his late 20s and studied documentary photography at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
In his photography, he is primarily looking for answers to the question of what it means to confront Germany's political legacy and the country's right-wing continuity in the 21st century. In doing so, he aims to highlight long-forgotten stories of right-wing violence that lie beneath the surface of everyday life in seemingly sombre landscape and city portraits. His works are created on analog large format.
For three years now, he has been working on the research and realization of his long-term project »Rechtes Land«, in which he documents all the actual places where people have died through acts of right-wing violence since the German reunification.The publication fund of the Kulturwerk Foundation supports the conception and realization of the visual archive. Furthermore, the work was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Swiss »TruePicture« funding program in 2023 and received »Best Portfolio 2024« at the Open Portfolio Walk at Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Schien is also part of the »Masterclass On Documentary Photography 2024/2025« at the PhMuseum in Bologna, Italy.Julius lives and works in Hanover, Germany.
Graduated in Political Science and Urban Sociology, his work unfolds in territories left, maintained or deliberately built on the fringes of our cities. In an attempt to exhaust these places, he takes them on over a long period of time and draws up a personal cartography, walking a fine line between documentary and fine art photography. He attaches particular importance to form, colour and material, which serve as points of encounter with his mental universe. In this way, he constructs a visual language that is both frontal and polysemous, offering a singular vision in which human frailties are transfigured by new lines of force.His work is regularly exhibited at festivals in France and abroad, like Athens Photo Festival, Tbilisi Photo Festival, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles or Circulation(s). He was awarded the Maison Blanche Prize in 2021.
Ugo Woatzi’s photographs reference real and imagined spaces caught between the worlds of freedom and constraint. He reveals and yet conceals, as a chameleon changes colour to blend in and survive. Ugo’s collaborative process is a reflection of the desires and struggles of his community. Together they create a more sensitive and accepting world, one that both escapes from and confronts the harsh realities of divisive heteronormative structures. The images, tender yet defiant, transmute feelings of love and of conflict, a relatable and universal sense of longing. His sensuous, quietly intimate gaze taps into subtler aspects of human desire — and yet these seemingly accessible emotions are simultaneously blocked in an act of obfuscation. His concealment of faces and identities evokes the fear, censorship and stifling experienced by queer communities across the globe.
Ugo invites us to consider and celebrate a range of masculinities, performative bodies, psyches, and experiences, as he explores the idea of “visibility” as one fraught with both fear and excitement. This duality is embodied powerfully in Ugo’s work, which is both a performance and a lived reality, the speaking of truths and the creating of fictions. That is the nature of photography: to create new worlds from fragments of previous ones. It is in this new world, in the sensitivity of Ugo’s gaze, that we finally access a space of acceptance.
- Text by Michelle Harris (.TIFF)
"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."
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
He is committed to capturing the inner world of his subjects as well as creating a recognisable visual language to reflect softness, power and vulnerability. Bodgan's work has been featured in international publications such as 032c, I-D, Highsnobiety and Vogue and exhibited in numerous galleries in Moscow.
Marcin Kruk (b. 1982) lives and works in Rzeszow, Poland. With a background in Archival and Historical Studies, he currently studies Photography at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. A Fujifilm Poland ambassador, Kruk is also a member of the Archive of Public Protest (A-P-P). His practice revolves around a series of long-term documentary projects.
Chai Saeidi (b.1998, pronouns: they/them) is a visual and story-telling queer visibility artist and photographer. They are currently based in Oslo, Norway, with a background from Tehran, Iran. Their work explores themes such as gender, community and visibility. Queer individuals often create their own communities, resulting in non-traditional forms of intimacy and relationships. This is often shown in their work. Chai's analog photography draws from a documentary tradition, more often touched with a free artistic expression.
Gonçalo C. Silva (b. 1997) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. He has studied at both the Faculty of Fine-Arts in Lisbon and at Atelier de Lisboa, and is currently pursuing an MA at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities from NOVA University of Lisbon. In his work, which applies an artistic approach to photography, Silva addresses themes related to the representation of the landscape, and to the relationship between humans and nature. In his projects, the interconnection of images from different contexts creates new meanings and narratives with a strong symbolic character, related to the artist’s personal experiences.
Petra Slobodnjak is an artist from Croatia who graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, studying graphic product design, in Zagreb in 2012. Since 2014, Petra has been working as a freelance graphic designer and photographer. She is a Croatian Freelance Artist Association member and has exhibited her work regularly since 2008. For work DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7, she received the Ivan Kožarić award for the best young artist, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City of Zagreb (in 2022) and award for the Best Young Artist in 2022 awarded by the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts. The mentioned work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art collection in Zagreb. Her artistic work intertwined with her personal life, examining the boundaries between these two aspects. She explores the dynamics of society in her works, emphasizing personal responsibility in shaping the environment. Through artistic expression, she fosters awareness of an individual’s impact on broader societal changes, encouraging reflection on one’s actions and relationship to the surroundings. She is currently based in Zagreb.
In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.
“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”
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.