Stefania Orfanidou was born in 1989. She is a photographer and an architect currently living and working in Athens, Greece. She has lived in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Madrid, Rotterdam, L’Aquila and Chania. In January 2019 she founded the architectural atelier CHORA. In her work, a personal experience or event, real or imaginary, is the starting point for fragments’ stitching and the composition of tales, where the irrational, the reasonable, the uncanny and the secret may coexist harmoniously. Her photographic work has been featured in magazines, galleries and festivals in Greece and abroad. In February 2019 she published the book ‘Pendulum’, a visual recounting of a return journey to the city of L’Aquila in central Italy. In 2020 she received the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. In 2021 she published the book ‘Cold Turkey’ and she created the art installation ‘Daidala’ at Yali Tzamisi at Chania, Crete.
Since starting to work in photography in 2009 Shlyk has had solo exhibitions in Belarus (Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk), Russia (Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Art, Moscow and Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint-Petersburg), Belgium (Extra City, Antwerp), China (Duloun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai) and participated in several international photo festivals (Breda Photo 2016 in Netherlands, Format 2017 in Derby, Belfast Photo Festival the UK, Photo Phnom Penh 2018). Since 2016 he is collaborating on multiple projects with Ben Van den Berghe. In 2017 his work was shortlisted for Prix Levallois, Shlyk became a laureate of Carte Blanche at Paris Photo and won ArtContest (Belgium). In 2018 he won Prijs Roger De Conynck and became the Public Prize Winner of ING Unseen Talent Award.
He often follows the subjects of his photo essays for many years. His series are mostly people-focused, trying to explore the problems of individuals or social groups with the tool of photography. His work has been rewarded with honored awards: shortlisted in the See.Me The Exposure Award competition in landscape category, and his image was exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. He has won several awards at the Hungarian Press Photo Competition, including the André Kertész Grand Prize, the Károly Escher Prize and the Zoltán Szalay Prize for three consecutive years for the best-performing photojournalist under 30. He has been participant in international masterclasses such as the Nikon-NOOR Academy Masterclass and is now a third-time scholarship holder to VII Academy seminars.
His latest photo essay on air pollution in Northeast Hungary was chosen by the Reuters news agency as one of the most important Wider Image story.
In 2016 her book "The Modern Spirit Is Vivisective” won the ViennaPhotoBookAward. Her work has been presented and exhibited internationally, including Plat(t)form 2017, Fotomuseum Winterthur; Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia; Benaki Museum, Athens; Noorderlicht Photofestival, Groningen; Emerging Talents, MACRO Factory, Rome; Festival Circulations, CENTQUATRE-PARIS, Paris; and Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome.
Her latest work Petrus, published by Kehrer Verlag, reflects on a certain rhetoric of masculinity in Western culture. Through a cynical, tender and arbitrary analysis of what probably cannot be sliced and diced Francesca Catastini plays with archetypes and images considering the way they sculpt ourselves and shape our views. Looking for subtle discrepancies her images go beyond their figurative meaning in order to activate new analogies and connotations.
http://francescacatastini.it/
Sensitive to the cracks that our society is going through, her work focus on social issues and human bodies as territories. Celine uses film codes to transgress the world she’s looking at.
Her various works as a photographer and video artist were presented at the Billboard Festival in Casablanca (2015), the Marrakech Biennale in 2016, the Paraguay Biennale (El ojo Salvaje - 2018), the Tangier Photography Foundation (2019), the Dummy Award Photobook of Kassel and the Fuam Dummy Book Award from Istanbul in 2018.
In 2019, she is the winner of the In Cadaqués Festival with « SQEVNV », and the Revelation Price between Festival Map and Face à la mer.
In 2020, she is selected among 100 emerging European photographers by Gup magazine and Fresh Eyes Photo Talent 2020 (book published in July 2020) and she’s the winner of the Prix Mentor 2020 with « Mala Madre ».
In 2021, she’s one of the finalist of the HSBC prize 2021 with « SQEVNV » and will exhibited it in April at the Festival Instantes in Portugal.
Her work 'Nothing Hapenned' will be exposed in April 2021 at the Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale de Niort (Villa Perochon). She’s also have been selected by Claudio Composti for the Leica Oscar Barnack, and she’s one of the laureate of the Tremplin Jeunes Talents of the Festival Planches Contact in Deauville 2021.
Rita Puig-Serra Costa is a Barcelona-based photographer. With a background in Humanities and an MA in Comparative Literature, she later studied Graphic Design and Photography. Today, Costa works on personal projects alongside various commercial assignments. Her first project, Where Mimosa Bloom, was published by Editions du Lic in 2014. Her ongoing Anatomy of an Oyster project will launch in 2023. Closely related to literature, Costa’s work revolves around the concept of identity. Her investigations also explore the essence of human relationships, and the influence that love, death, luck or memories have on the construction of ourselves.
Andrey Anro (born 1987 Smarhon, Belarus) Lives and works in Berlin, Germany / Minsk, Belarus. His basic tools are painting, photography, digital collage, and installation. Anro explores topics such as collective memory, historical heritage, politics, dictatorship, religion, disappearance and death. He is author of the photobook "Happy Death Society", 2019.
The artist's works are in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow(MOCAK), Poland, in the ART4 Museum in Moscow, in private collections in Lithuania, Sweden, Canada, Russia, and the USA. In 2007 he graduated from MMT L.B. Krasina (Moscow, Russia), speciality "Advertising".
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.
He holds a first-class honours degree in Documentary Photography from Newport, University of South Wales. Venezia has exhibited his work in solo shows at VOID (Greece) and JEST (Italy), while his work was displayed in group exhibitions at Fondazione Fabbri (Italy), Capa Photography Center (Hungary), ISSP Gallery (Latvia) and Gallery Image (Denmark). His project Nekyia is a book published by the Italian independent editor Witty Books in May 2017, the monograph is part of the collection at the National Art Library of Victoria & Albert Museum in London and Colección FOLIO at Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City.
His latest work - Is Life Under The Sun Not Just a Dream - started in 2018 and developed under the European Program Parallel Platform, by which Venezia has been selected as second cycle emerging artists.
Next to his personal projects, Rocco is working as a curator for PHmuseum and he is the co-founder of PHmuseum Lab, a photographic hub based in Bologna.
Something flows, slowly, perhaps a syrup, yet nothing saccharin arises out of Sanna Lehto’s image, but rather a bittersweet background which rests tranquilly. At the heart of this muffled world, beneath a dome, a small flower has traded its innocence in order to come and pass away on the surface of faces, the fluid has abandoned its lightness and its movement in order to gain in weight. Air is rare in Sanna Lehto’s photographic world. The image sometimes blushes, at other times it pales: the chromatic palette varies from crimson red to pink, as if these faces encapsulated between the glass lens and the sensor were breathing gently. A sort of photographic herbarium, that is what she seems to evoke through these portraits and still lifes. The creative process is not that dissimilar: during her summertime walks she gathers and picks, flowers gleaned from the Finnish countryside; sometimes she buys them, guided by a vision of a coloured harmony rather than through any symbolism. Often, she dries them and awaits for a suitable visual frame in order to place them in the photographic field. We may imagine her, back in her studio, patiently pinning these specimens one by one, according to the fortunes of encounters and visual stimuli.
Szilvia studies at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and at the Athens School of Fine Art, in Greece.
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.
His work often revolves around territory. In Ramo it was his ancestor’s Calabria, in Jardin the mythical space of the garden, found in the streets and parks of Madrid. In his new project, Massao is working on around the Mediterranean coasts, cradle of many civilisations, using the journey of Ulysses as a loose guideline. The scope of his work is profoundly political, as it is rooted in the need to explore how humans relate to the spaces (both cultural and geographical) they inhabit.
The work Jardin was awarded the BOZAR Nikon Monography Series Award 2016. In 2017, he was nominated and be part of the .TIFF by FOMU Antwerp.
In July 2019 his first book Jardin has been published by Witty Kiwi and L'éditeur du dimanche.
Massao'work is part of the prestigious collection of the Foundation A Stichting. He is currently a fellow of the Fondation A Stichting for a project around the Mediterranean which will be exhibited there in September 2020.
From September 2019 Massao started as teacher in the Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
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.
Her personal work is often photographic, but this is not an exclusive relationship. On the basis of her projects, there is very often a question: How do the campers manage the nearness with their peers (Hidden Living)? Why do some Chinese prefer to live in a false Parisian avenue rather than in a traditional hutong (Abroad is too far)? What is the counterpart that urges a person to gulp down mass amounts of food enough to hurt their body (Rotten Potato)? Where is our relationship with food and our body rooted (To tell my real intentions, I want to eat only haze like a hermit)? Behind these questions lies a desire to understand a social phenomenon. And humor is not excluded.
She also pays very special attention to actively involve people she works with in the construction of the projects.
Her work has been awarded with various prizes, publications and exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. She also took part in artistic residencies (China, France, Japan).
Matej Jurčević graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (KASKA), Antwerp in 2021 with a MA in Photography. In his artistic practice he explores themes of identity, collective memory and youth culture. Due to personal mental health struggles he works towards destigmatisation of mental illness. He is a recipient of the VID Grant award for 2021 hosted by the VID Foundation for Photography. The award is granted to photographers exploring relevant social issues in the Balkans. In 2022 he published his first photobook: I try to take care of myself now. The book was published by Organ Vida Publishing.
https://matejjurcevic.com/
She has won the LUX Prize twice for Professional Photography in the Documentary category. She has also participated, since 2008, in various solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States and at fairs like Paris Photo, ARCO, Estampa o London Art Fair. In October 2016 she published her photobook Vera y Victoria and in 2019 Gabriel, both with the French publisher André Frère Éditions and presented in Paris Photo.
She also published the newspaper DÚO-A Sobre el viaje por carretera con desconocidos (About the road trip with strangers) (edited by Phree), together with the writer Miguel Ángel Hernández. In 2018 her works have been exhibited in Barcelona (Can Basté), Madrid (Feria Estampa y Pilar Serra’s Gallery), Baracaldo (Festival Baffest), Arles (Feria Cosmos), Vitoria (Sala Amárica), Alcobendas' Art Center and Marseille (Galería Retine Argentique), among others, and in 2019-2020, in Tigomigo Gallery (Terrassa, Barcelona), F22 Foto Space (Hong Kong), KLAP Maison pour la Danse (Marsella), the London Art Fair and Desenfocada Gallery (Málaga). As an artist, Sáez is represented by the Pilar Serra Gallery in Madrid, the Fifty Dots Gallery in Barcelona and the Institute Agency in Los Angeles.
Pauline Beugnies was born in Charleroi in 1982. She works on long-term personal photography projects. Recently, she start writing and directing films. She also works as a photojournalist for the press. She lived in Cairo for five years and studied Arabic there.
Pauline is focusing on the Arab and the Islamic world, trying to build bridges and to go beyond stereotypes. Her first book Génération Tahrir was published by Le Bec éditions in January 2016. She was the second recipient of the Camille Lepage award in Perpignan Visa pour l’Image festival in 2016.
Her latest project, "Behind The Sun", mixing photos, videos and documents was exhibited at BPS22 in 2018. Recently, she start writing and directing films. Her first documentary film "Lessa Aichin"(Still Alive) was selected at FIFF, Dok Leipzig and nominated at Magrittes du Cinema in 2018.
www.paulinebeugnies.com
Sanja Bistričić Srića is a Zagreb-based multimedia artist, photographer and cinematographer. Exploring the possibilities of image, sound and text through various media – film, video, photography, collage – her work explores personal themes in a range of diaristic forms. Srića holds a Master’s degree in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. Her works and films have been widely exhibited in Croatia and abroad, whilst her images have been published by the likes of Elle, Vice and Interview. She is a co-founder and member of the multidisciplinary collective RA’AH, which explores intersections of fashion, art and music.