One often looks at the work of Arnaud De Wolf with a sense of disbelief. Is that image of a gigantic ice cube really floating in mid-air? Is that colourful picture of an ancient forest a realistic depiction or is it a digital fabrication, a fanciful re-creation? What are we meant to discern in his cyanotype prints: random blue lines surrounding white voids of various shapes and sizes or the contours of a mountainous landscape? By means of an unconventional presentation of the photographic image, simply turning it on its side or projecting it into a corner or using outdated techniques, such as the cyanotype, De Wolf presents us with works that hover between the clarity of description and the artificiality of invention. A projected bundle of light suddenly transforms into a three-dimensional object; abstract lines coagulate into a legible form; colours become deceitfully (un)real. In each of his experiments, De Wolf is testing the boundaries of the photographic system, looking for that breaking point where the photograph loses its readability and easy accessibility. His thorough investigation of colour is particularly revealing: Fading forest makes abundantly clear that colour in photography is always artificial. The colours that we see in a photograph are technologically and culturally coded; they are made in the chemist’s lab or produced by a programmer’s algorithm. Colour is here revealed as the manipulative garb in which the photographic skeleton is dressed.
Text by Steven Humblet
Suzette Bousema graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL) in 2019. She exhibited at a.o. museum Singer Laren (NL), Foam (NL), Art Rotterdam (NL), Photoville (NY), Fotobok Festival Oslo (NO), COP 25 (ES) and The Scientific Center Kuwait (KW). Her work has been published in a.o. NRC (NL), de Volkskrant (NL), Foam magazine (NL), Harper’s Bazaar (NL), Financial Times (UK), Der Spiegel (DE), Die Zeit (DE) and Liberatión (FR).
Vic Bakin (b. 1984) is a self-educated Ukrainian photographer. In Kyiv, the artist explores various local groups – queer and fashion scenes, rave and music culture, and even closed communities like student dormitories. In light of new and evolving local circumstances, Bakin’s focus has since shifted to the subject of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His diaristic personal projects use of analogue photography to probe at questions of identity; with Void, Bakin is currently working on his debut photobook.
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/
In her works she often focuses on issues connected with migration or its destiny. She is mostly interested in the problematic of constructing identity and how people define themselves and the land of their origins. Recently she is involved in collective photographic research about polish migration to South America. It happens that she gets out of the material world and enters other dimensions of perceiving the world, exploring the paranormal events and believes not connected with any religious system. Finds collective creation as the best way for making photography as permanent process of putting individual thoughts in doubts.
She was born in 1990 by the Polish seaside in Gdańsk. Graduated in Photography on Academy of Arts in Poznań. She is also part of Ostrøv publishing collective.
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.
Irene Zottola is a self-taught photographer; in 2016, she began honing her skills in the laboratory of Madrid’s Slow Photo collective. Her poetic works probe at the limits of analogue photography, which she often pairs with text. Working simultaneously as an arts educator, Zottola explores photography as a tool for social intervention amongst vulnerable groups. Her first photobook, Icarus, was published by Ediciones Anómalas in 2021. With the same project, Zottola was a finalist at PhotoEspaña, and at the Photobook Awards of Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2022. Her work has been exhibited in Spain, Italy and Morocco.
Anna Gajewszky (1997, Budapest) is a photographer based in Budapest. She has recently graduated from the photography masterclass of Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design.Her work is mainly characterized by its intimate exploration of personal issues, with a focus on the intricate quality of human relationships. She examines connections people form with each other, their families, their past, their own bodies, animals, and within a larger aspect the land.The use of self portraits underline that her work is rooted in her personal life, however the images transcend personal narrative to engage with broader themes such as womanhood, family connections, generations, and countryside, rural customs, rituals. Her images are mostly staged but they often stay on the ground of reality creating a duality of fiction and truth that is central to her projects. This approach allows her to explore and communicate complex aspects of human experience.Her work was exhibited both in Budapest and internationally, she was published in the 2021 edition of Blurring the Lines, she received the National Higher Education Excellence scholarship, her book was shown at Polycopies 2023, she was finalist at the Paris Photo Carte Blanche Students, she was an exhibitor at the 2024 Breda Photo Festival and was presented at UNSEEN Amsterdam, by Tobe Gallery in 2024 fall.
"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."
Ana Núñez Rodríguez studied Documentary Photography and Contemporary Creation at IDEP Barcelona, holds a postgraduate degree in Photography from the National University of Colombia and holds a Master degree in Photography and Society from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KABK) in The Hague. She was part of Lighthouse 2020-21, a program for upcoming talents at Fotodok, Utrecht.
Tashiya de Mel is a photographer, environmental advocate, and communications specialist from Colombo, Sri Lanka who uses visual storytelling to create narratives that drive social change.
Her practice explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making and deals with themes such as colonial histories, representation, heritage, family, landscapes, and the climate crisis.
Tashiya is driven by a curiosity to forge connections with diverse disciplines such as art, history, academia and the environment. And find ways of bridging these disciplines through different forms of image-based media.
She was the recipient of the Visura grants for freelance visual journalists in 2023 for her project ‘Great Sandy River’ and received the Stroom talent award in 2024. Tashiya is a recent graduate of the ‘Photography and Society’ masters programme at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (NL). She is based between Colombo and the Hague.
Róbert Nunkovics (1993) examines the relational systems of urban life, exploring naive artistic attempts appearing in public spaces, graffiti, and the acts of their reception through the medium of photography and video. In his own images, he presents urban space as various, freely usable surfaces for artistic creation. He sensitively combines research-based mediums - objects, memories, drawings, or collective photography - with works coming from his own observations, delicately examining the issues of our environment and social groups.
After finishing her undergraduate studies in 2018, Sophie Gladstone has continued her art practise while working in editorial positions. Her work has been exhibited in both Europe and Asia and was recently shortlisted for the Emergentes International Photography Award and nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award. Currently, Gladstone works as Assistant Photography Editor at Wallpaper*, a luxury design-focused publication. This role feeds back into her photography, informing a critical perspective as she works across the reality and fantasy of contemporary visual culture. Aesthetics of advertising, social media and e-commerce are also inspiration points. Through her practice, she performs the capitalist pressures that undermine positive traits within us, such as the desire to improve ourselves and connect with others.
Szilvia studies at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and at the Athens School of Fine Art, in Greece.
Maximilian Glas (1998) works in multimedia artistic practice, focusing on the influence of technical images on social power relations.
Current projects investigate the production of scientific representations of the natural and how moral conclusions are constructed on their basis, claiming universal validity due to their natural origin. The medium of photography and its relationship to objectivity and the circulation of knowledge through representation, serves as a thinking model for these explorations.
Website: www.maximilianglas.de
Pablo Lerma is a Spanish research-based artist, educator and publisher based in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).His work has been exhibited at Photoforum Pasquart (CH), Copeland Gallery (UK), IHLIA Heritage (NL), Deli Gallery (US), FOTODOK (NL), PhotoEspaña (ES), The Finnish Museum of Photography (FI), Flowers Gallery (US), Konstanet (EE), Centro Huarte (ES), New York University (US), Fotoweek D.C. (US), SCAN International Festival of Photography (ES), La Fábrica (ES), and Fundació Foto Colectania (ES) among others. His publications are in collections including the Guggenheim Museum (US), Museum of Modern Art – MoMA (US), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - SFMoMA (US), Aeromoto (MX), Centro de la Imagen (MX), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US), and the International Center of Photography in New York (US), among others. He has been awarded with the Cherryhurst House Fellowship MFA Houston (US), Grand Prize of Curators Award PDN (US), Fundació Guasch-Coranty (ES) and Sala d’Art Jove (ES). He has been selected for Pla(t)form FotoMuseum Winterthur (CH) and nominated for the First Book Award MACK Editions (UK), Critical Mass (US), and PDN 30’s (US). His work has been featured on Trigger FOMU (BE), Lens Culture (US), Photomonitor (UK), Unseen Platform (NL), British Journal for Photography (UK), Ain’t Bad Magazine (US), New York Foundation for the Arts (US), PDN Online (US) and PhotoInter China (CH).