The focus of my work in the past years has been human violence and poverty: how its constant reception can restructure the society and the self. I live and work in Mexico with the aim of completing my visual research on this topic, where I look for cultural movements, group activities, individual destinies which exist as consequence of the persistent violence and repress. My goal is to be engaged from an intimate closeness in order to witness, capture the essence of these realities, emotionally, mentally strongly involve the viewer into the topics I'm working with, to give the audience another perspective on the reasons why their lifestyle may often appear to be controversial and condemned, where I believe the key always lies in a brutal social and political system. I aim to give voice and visibility for people who are social outcasts, victims of injustice, showing contemporary social conflicts in a different context and narrative other than the newspapers. The photograph's focal point is a physical remnant of violence – a scar, a bruise, or a symbolic conduit, landscape – while the non-physical remnants of aggression are left to the viewer to interpret through a gaze, expression or pose and in physical space accompanied with text, interviews, even sound, so the story can become a whole, questioning faith, the nature of human and it's behavior.
More: http://koladel.org/
Verena has a deep interest in personal histories and narrative storytelling. Intrigued by the way cultural and political factors influence one’s life, she uses her lens-based practice to shed light on inner life and everyday “reality” in intimate settings. The encounter with the subject is the core of and the fuel for her work. To a large extent, Blok’s photography and video work is driven by the complex, paradoxical, tragic, and sometimes humorous set of social and cultural relations that form everyday life in Poland. As a Dutch-Polish dual citizen raised in The Netherlands and The United States, Blok has a keen awareness of her position moving between East and West. By coming close to her subjects and embedding herself for stretches of time, she uses these locations as her studio, a backdrop to the narratives that both artist and subject become part of.
Pleun Gremmen (NL, 1992) is an artist and designer researching ways to create narratives through a variety of media reflecting mainly on internet subculture and politics while pushing the boundaries of her practice.
She graduated in 2018 from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (Master Media Design, Experimental Publishing), and in 2014 from ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (Bachelor Graphic Design). Since graduating in Arnhem she has been freelancing as an artist, designer and researcher and has been connecting and collaborating with artists and institutions in Rotterdam.
The work “Alt Reality Lexicon” (2018) explores the language neologisms of the Alt-right and Manosphere subcultures, acting as a translator between realms of reality. The performance installation “R.E.S.T”(2017) explores contemporary physical and digital expressions of escapism in a politically turbulent time.
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.
Anna Aicher (b. 1993) is a documentary and portrait photographer from Germany. After studying photography in Berlin, she became a team member at Salzburg’s Gallery Fotohof in 2018. She is currently following a Masterclass at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin. Exploring traces of old traditions and rituals in contemporary society, most of Aicher’s projects have an auto-biographical dimension. She travels constantly between the city and the countryside, turning up stories nestled in distinct communities. Besides her personal projects, Aicher regularly works on assignments for various newspapers and magazines.
Website: www.anna-aicher.com
Federico Berardi, a graduate of ECAL (University of Art & Design of Lausanne), is a Swiss-born artist and still life photographer living between Paris and Switzerland. His work explores photography’s potential for creating illusion, while interrogating the technical boundaries of commercial and fine art photography.
Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. She was recently awarded a Doctoral Scholarship for undertaking her PhD in Art after graduating from an MA Photography from the Royal College of Art. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was named Student Photographer of the Year by Sony World Photography Awards 2020. In 2019, she was awarded with the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize. Nominations include: the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation in USA, the Prix HSBC, the Prix Levallois and the Prix Voies Off in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art festivals and galleries with a recent solo show at the European Month of Photography in Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and journals including The Guardian and Deutsche Welle. Her first monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by GOST Books.
My name is Oscar Scott Carl, i’m 26 years old. I finished my bachelor programme in photojournalism in April 2021 at DMJX in Aarhus, Denmark. Photography is for me an exploration of the question why? Through photography I try to understand and comprehend. I believe that my pictures are visual footsteps in my search for understanding of the constant transitions in life. I document transitions to comprehend. I often find myself capturing quiet intimate moments in both human relations and on my own. I do not necessarily feel the need to shout, but I do believe in photography as an important part of understanding the world around us.
In 2013, she published her debut book "Fitting Rooms," which examines the role of women in her generation. Between 2009 and 2016, Karolina was based in India, where she produced her second book "When We Lie Down, Grasses Grow From Us," exploring the migratory experience (published by GOST Books in 2019). She is an editor of several Strike Newspapers published by the Archive of Public Protest.
In recent years, she has initiated and completed several participatory projects involving refugees, creating spaces for collaboration and self-expression.
Karolina is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation (K. Kieślowski Film School), which centers around the subjective narratives of historical migrations. She is a member of Sputnik Photos and the A-P-P
Hunor Tóth (b. 2000) is a visual artist from Romania, currently residing and creating back and forth between Budapest, his home village of Tăureni (RO), and Odorheiu Secuiesc (RO). In 2024, he graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest with a Master's degree in Photography.
In his artistic practice, he consistently focuses on rural life and its various aspects. Primarily, he engages in the photographic exploration and documentation of rural existence, aiming not only to dispel stereotypical images of the countryside but also to draw attention to the significance of contemporary rural culture and the various ways the concept of the village can be interpreted. He is interested in how rural communities redefine themselves, adapt, and change in response to contemporary challenges such as urbanization, modernization, and globalization.
His work combines staged and documentary photography. This combination is a defining element of his artistic practice.
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.
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.
Yana Kononova (b. 1977) has an academic background in social sciences, and holds a PhD in sociology. She was born on Pirallahi island in the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan – now an important site of oil extraction. During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, her family emigrated to Ukraine. Having later relocated to the countryside of the Trachtemiriv peninsula, Kononova turned to photography. She graduated from the Photoschool of Viktor Marushchenko before following a photography course organised by the Image Threads Collective (USA). In 2019, Kononova won the Bird in Flight Prize in emerging Photography, and in 2022 was the recipient of the Hariban Award, presented by Benrido. Her works have been exhibited in Ukraine and abroad.
The Land of Promises is an invitation to explore transnational and transracial adoption in China and Belgium, both in the present day and in the past. One can imagine that during China’s one-child policy era Belgium represented “the promised land” for baby girls whose parents had to give them up. And yet, as Youqine Lefèvre’s work unfolds, and she moves from her parents’ archives to her own images, the perspective shifts. When she visits her birth country, China becomes the land of promises — of finding her roots? Her birth family? Herself?
Such an ambitious promise is easy to break, which explains the palpable melancholy in Youqine Lefèvre’s pictures. Her work also conveys the ambiguity of her position: as an adult adoptee visiting her birth country, she is “an outsider within”, so close to her photographic subjects and yet so far away. From this perspective, art is the new land of promises for Lefèvre, who uses multiple supports (film, paper, etc.) in her photographic practice to create a world where she can live her truths. The work produced by the artist thus generates the artist. Youqine Lefèvre is not only reclaiming her own narrative, but challenging the status of archives that in her hands become both art and a political statement.
Ultimately, The Land of Promises is an invitation to decentre whiteness and the Global North in the visual narrative surrounding transnational and transracial adoption.
- Text by Amandine Gay (.TIFF)
In 2015, he began his solo career with focus in “landscape and associated behavior”. His projects evolved from painting to more conceptual processes, expanding his language to photography, video and actions in the landscape.
As center of his concerns are the humankind relationships with territory, studying aspects such as: the gradual reduction of space for wildlife, “The Naked Trace“, the overpopulation, "Genesis 1.28", the artificial character of the borders "Minimal Republics", the liquid nature of the concept of nation: "Iceberg Nations" or the dichotomy between industrial agriculture and natural agriculture: "The garden of Fukuoka".
He has presence in important collections, specially within Spain, and is beginning to exhibit abroad like the two solo shows that will take place in late 2019: one at Lianzhou Museum of Photography, China, and the other at Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal, as winner of 2018 “Emergentes” award.