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).
She directed her first short film, documenting the 'Fair' cashmere project which supports livelihoods of nomadic herding communities in the remote Gobi desert. Kerry has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally, and has been selected as part of the 34th edition of the International Festival of Fashion, Photography, and FashionAccessories in Hyères.
He is interested in the image and imbrication of this medium with other disciplines such as sculpture and installation. As well as visual media, music and the creation of scenography and environments. Trying to convey an experience, an event or a state of mind is his main excuse when developing a project.
He investigates the relationship between the individual and his environment, about the spaces we inhabit and about contemporary forms of domestic life and the state of the objects that inhabit an era of wild mediatic reproduction. His work process is based on finding, combining and remixing poor materials, found objects and waste, signs that encourage him to experiment with new ways of interpreting what surrounds us.
More: https://christianlagata.com/
Polina Davydenko works mostly with the medium of photography overlapping with the media of video, audio and text. The key theme of her work is narrative and its various forms. She focuses on human-animal relationships and cultural stereotypes related to the issue. These become the starting point for playing out other contexts, which the author visually sensitively connects into one disturbing message.
Polina was born in Ukraine, but since childhood she lives in Czech Republic. She completed study at the Ivars Gravlejs’ Photography Studio at the FFA BUT in Brno. She has furthered her education at KASK in Gent, FAMU in Prague and at the FFA’s Studio Environment.
https://polidavydenko.tumblr.com/
Lukáš Opekar focuses on photography and moving images, which he transforms into virtual environments, hand-printed graphics, and cyanotypes. He explores the limits of photography using methods of computer vision, but also through algae growth or drawing. Using random processes he discovers extraordinary worlds that hide behind the commonly perceived reality. He cultivates images from fragments, and the result that emerges from this substrate is largely a surprise. A long-term theme of his work is the exploration of the intermingling of living and non-living beings over time. He studied at Faculty of Art and Design Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Ústí nad Labem and he lives and works in Prague.
With additional background in gender studies & activism Marta’s artistic work focuses on geopolitical and social issues, gossip & fiction, as well as personal experiences. She experiments with various media including participatory workshops and sound installations..
Marta’s work was shown e.g. at OBSCURA Festival of Photography in Malaysia, at TIFF Festival in Wroclaw, at ODESA PHOTO DAYS 2020, BLICA - First Biennale of Arts in Lebanon. Photobook presenting SHIFTERS project is shortlisted for Mack First Book Award 2020. She was selected for several residencies, most recently Landskrona Foto Residency (2020), as well as Nida Art Colony, Gasworks, and Botkyrka Konsthal. She took part in ‘Re-Tooling Residencies Project’ organised by CCA Warsaw. She created & curated ‘Fenix Cities: workshops and exhibitions in Warsaw and Beirut’.
www.martabogdanska.com
Tanja Engelberts (b. 1987) lives and works in The Hague, the Netherlands. In recent years, Engelberts has worked on several projects related to the fossil fuel industry, focusing on the ways in which energy production shapes our landscapes. In 2021, she concluded a two-year residency at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie. She has participated in further residency programmes at The Banff Center for Arts and Creativity (CA), The Ucross Foundation (USA), IK Foundation (NL) and Örö Residence (FI). Exhibited and published internationally, Engelberts’ works are also included in the collections of De Nederlandsche Bank (NL), De Brauw (NL) and Clifford Chance (UK). She is represented by Caroline O’Breen Gallery, Amsterdam.
Lucija Bogunović has been studying New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Zagreb since 2019. As a photographer she collaborated with Mostar Street Art Festival, Zagreb Film Festival and Gallery Karas. In her artistic practice she explores the conceptual relation between photographic medium and time in depicting fragments of life and repetitive events.
@adeyata
Balázs Turós (b. 1990) studied at the Department of Photography at Budapest’s Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. After finishing his BA, Turós moved to England, where he was introduced to FotoNow – a media-based social enterprise in Plymouth, with whom he worked for two years. Having returned to Budapest, he pursued a Master of Photography course at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Turós was awarded the József Pécsi Fellowship in 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2021, he participated in the Fellowship of the Robert Capa Photography Grand Prize. The following year, his works featured in the Open Program of Fotofestiwal Lodz, Poland.
Wbsite: balazsturos.com
Instagram: balazs_turos
Tamara Janes is an artist based in Bern. After studying photography at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and at the School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA), she completed a master's degree at the Institute of Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel University of Art and Design. She then returned to New York on a Studio Scholarship from the City of Bern to continue her research at the Public Library. Among others, her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Glarus, HeK Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Kunsthaus Baselland, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Stadtgalerie Bern, on the occasion of Plat(t)form15 at Fotomuseum Winterthur and at the Bieler Fototage. Her projects have been supported and awarded several times. Tamara Janes received the Swiss Design Award 2023 in the category photography with her work “Copyright Swap”. Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at the photography class, F+F School of Art and Design, Zurich.
Artist Statement
In my work I deal with the conditions of digital images. I take a critical view of current photographic behaviour because our perception and our handling of images is increasingly determined by technology and algorithms. Mostly we unreflectively consume images every second and strive for more and more unrealistic sharpness and brilliance. This development is at the same time thought content and friction surface for my work. By shifting through and contextualizing my own and other people's visual material, I want to create new perspectives and visual commentaries.
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.
Her aim is to make the spectator observe and to be observed at the same time. While we watch others, we are being watched too. The desire of observing one another, of having insight into the lives of others posits a system of norms based on which we define ourselves compared to others. We want to confirm that we have similar problems as others, that we are better than or just as good as they are. In other words, that we only deviate from the average on an average scale.
Her works explore how we can describe our body in the most objective manner possible, to represent it without any intimacy whatsoever. Looking at these so-called anti-intimate states, the works examine all the subtle and complex relationships our physical extension forms with our environment, and how social expectations shape our appearance. Personal stories and critical observations regarding the body are represented along with abstract objects and intertwined sculptural bodies. Her fundamental medium is photography that she often combines with other disciplines, such as objects, photobooks or video.
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)
Maxim is a co-founder of SHKLO – online platform about Belarusian photography and visual arts. From 2020 he is a member of Inland - international cooperative of 13 photographers.
Maxim’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions including shows at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2020, Riga), Kasarna Karlin (2018, Prague) and CECH (2017, Minsk). He was published in Wall Street Journal, Stern Crime, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Courrier International, Meduza, The Telegraph, Le Monde Diplomatique among others.
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Lara Varat has been studying Cinematography at the Academy of Dramatic Arts at the University of Zagreb since 2019. She participated in several art workshops and other educational programs focused on queer topics. She has experience working on film sets, in smaller (e.g. Eclectica) and larger (e.g. Netflix) productions. Her photographic works have been featured in the series of exhibitions titled "In the process" (2019-2020, 2021) at the F8 Gallery in Zagreb. She participated in building a collaborative light and sound installation in the exhibition Coexistence II: Spaces of Light (Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2021).
lara.varat@gmail.com
Renée Lorie lives and works in Brussel. She graduated in art history, filmstudies and photography.
Renée captures the light, she show her experience of the world around her. It’s a world full of contrasts. Her images show disharmony, memories in nowadays. Vulnerability, white against deep black backgrounds, day and night, emptiness and fullness. Coolness and heat, burning ice. The present and the absent. She’s looking for attachment, but displacement too. Themes are the mystery, the uncanny, abjection and the enigmatic. Creaking discomfort in down, a sensory touch in a flat image. She shows a glimpse, an error, disturbance, the lyrical. She’s showing distance, yet close framing. She uses the dark room, groping for light. Light traversing trees and water, that lives on the tide during spring tide. Everything is strange, yet daily and known. Trees, water, horse and dew, rustle, a man in a suit, sand mountains and a statue. She’s look around, capturing an image and imagining immediately another image, a walking écriture automatique, a photo novel, a same story. She likes to see the past in the present.
She very often travels to remote places, far away from the big cities, where she is able to find more simpler ways of existence.The subjects she photographs are often isolated with little context around them. While this visual isolation is the way Juliette presents herself to the world, she also craves human connection. A direct confrontation with the camera is a way for her to connect with the subjects she photographs and through them with the rest of the world.
In a few words, her practice in documentary photography is a search of self-knowledge and an attempt to reencounter the essence of a life without noise.
In the last five years he has been working extensively in the valley of Kashmir, India, at first documenting the political conflict between the population and the Indian administration, and later trying to explore a more personal and oneiric approach to the issue. In 2020 Camillo was one of the selected artist for the FOAM Talent.Among the prizes received are Shortlist at PH Museum Grant, Best Rising Talent at Gomma Grant, Alexia Foundation Student Grant, LensCulture B&W, Shortlist Unseen Dummy Award, Fotoleggendo Award.
Camillo’s photographs has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Europe, USA, Asia, Oceania and published in Time, Der Spiegel, Polka, National Geographic, Internazionale, BuzzFeed, Mashable, Vanity Fair and many other international publications.
Time at work, this time which rushes, always too short, it is this which Csilla Klenyànszki addresses in her performative and photographic games. Of course, this artistic approach is accepted, being defined by a sum of constraints which might be resumed here as follows: the daily siesta of a child, the domestic setting imposed by this siesta, or thirty minutes for creation. Pillars of Home is a series of variations upon a single theme that is as dizzying as it is absurd. In thirty minutes flat, within this confined frame and with no more than plants, plastic beakers, a vacuum cleaner, table, chair, teapot and other utensils (with the inclusion of her own body, an object which she does not hesitate to contribute and contort), this artist provides ninety-six answers held in a fragile balance between the floor and the ceiling of her apartment. We are amused by one, stunned by another. Yet none of them impose a superiority as, more than just the form, it is the process and the accumulation of experiences which the photographer wishes to highlight: not the beauty of the sculpture nor the skill of its assembly, but the action of an artist who wishes to oppose time with a mischievous and vital fantasy. Ephemeral, yes, but certainly not trivial.
Oxiea Villamonte (b. 1995) was born in the USA and raised in the Netherlands. She holds both a BA and MFA in Photography from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Shortly after graduating, her book – Next of Kin – was published by Stockmans Art Books. Through self-portraits and archival material, the project presents the artist’s search for identity in Chicago, where her mother spent her formative years. More recently, Villamonte embarked on a 10-month journey through America by Amtrak, guided by photographs from her parents’ archive. Her work is highly personal, guided by a fascination with identity, and with the legacy of her upbringing in the choices she makes.