In Maria Baoli’s series, linearity is constantly broken up. The stories she tells are diffracted; space and time overlap; images are shot through with cracks and scratches like broken mirrors. Although it is clear that the photographer is attached to human situations, to stories and environments charged with life and memories, these devices make us focus on the stylistic elements of the images and stimulate an open and complex interpretation of them. This is particularly true for one of her most recent projects, Chez moi loin de chez moi [At Home Far Away From Home], which explores the Maison Africaine in Brussels, a community home for students.
Maria Baoli’s images are balanced between the depth of their intention (archive, memory, time, love, dreams, etc.) and the surface. This plays a primordial role and in so doing forms a highly personal (and unique) response from the artist to the contemporary use of the snapshot.
Through an uninhibited use of flash, which flattens shadows and adds drama to the composition even in the most mundane and stripped-down environments; through her preference for the close-up or dense landscapes that block the horizon; through the frontality of her perspective; through her use of collage, which disrupts the documentary by introducing a fascinating graphic dimension, Maria Baoli relies on the figures of discontinuity that she turns into loyal servants of reality.
Text by Anne-Françoise Lesuisse
After studying aeronautics in Italy, Walter Costa realised that the pilot career was less “romantic” than he thought. In 2009, while completing a degree in Politics and International Studies at Complutense University in Madrid, he started attending photography courses at Blank Paper school, where he also got involved in publications and editing. Studying their postgraduate programme in documentary photography gave him the opportunity to start merging image-making with his interest in visually investigating social issues in relation to power imbalances. Love and curiosity made him move to São Paulo in 2013, where besides working as a news and commercial photographer he started teaching editing and bookmaking while collaborating with several Brazilian and international authors in the development and editing of their photobook projects. In 2017 Costa founded Havaiana Papers, a distribution platform aimed at improving the circulation of Brazilian photobooks. As a curator, he was invited to organize a series of performatic lectures about photobooks for SOLAR Fotofestival (Fortaleza, BR) in December 2018 and was the guest curator of the sixth edition of En CMYK-Photobook Meeting organized by the Montevideo Center of Photography (UY) in March 2019. In 2018 Costa came back to Europe to join the first cohort of the MA Photography&Society at KABK/Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. With the aim of researching, discussing and finding new ways to use photography as a tool for public debate, he completed the program with a wider and more multi-disciplinary practice. In 2020-2021, the artist took part in FOTODOK’s talent support programme Lighthouse. Still based in The Netherlands, Costa keeps editing photobook projects while teaching at KABK and developing his personal projects.
Uzochukwu has previously exhibited at Bozar (BE), Lagos Photo Festival (NG), Off Biennale Dakar (SN), Photo Vogue Festival (IT), and Unseen Amsterdam (NL). He currently studies philosophy in Berlin.
Zsuzsi Simon (b. 1988) is a photographer and videographer living and working in Budapest. In 2015, she graduated from the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Her research interests cover questions of feminism, body image and activism. The ways in which women think about the world is also central; she is particularly interested in the image of the female body and the expectations that come with it. Through close collaboration with groups of women – and a trademark blend of humour, provocation, irony and honesty – Simon aspires to break down various taboos. More recently her work has explored masculinity, and the role of the male muse from a female perspective. Simon is a member of Secondary Archive, which brings together women artists from Central and Eastern Europe for greater visibility.
Website: linktr.ee/zsuzsannasimon
Instagram: zsuzsi___simon
A combination of experimental analogue and digital photography, research-based, documentary elements and scientific imagery searches for the supposed truth content of photography and deals with the ecological effects of human action. Photography is used as an aesthetic object, medium and object of investigation.
After his apprenticeship at the Lette Verein Berlin until 2010 he studied from 2015 at Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in the class of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and from 2017 in the master class of Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in July 2017 and continues with the MFA at HfbK.
The newest work 'blast from the past' clashes two time scales: Amber is being examined as a time capsule and its possibilities to function as a photographic negative which shows snapshots of insects, frozen in its movement 20 million years ago. But the seabed of the Baltic Sea also keeps bombs and ammunition which were dumped after WWII in order to get rid of it, irrespective of the ecological disaster.
Felipe Romero Beltrán (B.1992. Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian photographer based in Madrid, Spain. In 2010, He earned a scholarship in Argentina and moved to Buenos Aires to study Photography. By that time, he had developed an interest in documentary photography and traveled many times abroad for his projects. Years later, in 2016, he moved to Madrid, Spain. He got a MFA degree in photography.
Felipe focuses on social issues, dealing with the tension that new narratives introduce in the field of documentary photography. At the same time, He is currently preparing a Phd dissertation on documentary photography at Complutense University of Madrid. His practice, characterized by its interest on social matters, is the result of long-term projects accompanied by extensive research on the subject.
She also obtained a Master in “Creative Photography” in 2009 at EFTI school in Madrid and participated to many workshops with international artist as Peter Funch, Mauricio Alejo, Danis Darzacq, Jill Greenberg, Matt Siber, James Casebere, Mary Hellen Mark.
She uses photography since 2009 and her project investigates often the relationship between objects, human habits and society, by using and mix up different photographic languages and category (as setup pictures, landscape, reportage, portrait and still life, etc.)
She participated in solo and group exhibitions in Spain, Italy and Brazil.
Her work has been displayed in Mia Photo Fair Milano, Urban Layers Triennale di Milano; Set up Bologna, Galleria Bluorg Bari; Bitume Photofest Malaga, Salonicco and Lecce: Milano, Biennale of Young Mediterranean artists; Galleria ARTcore Gallery Bari: Museum of history of Lecce; “Si fest off” Savignano: Galeria Mascate, Brasil; Galeria Cero Madrid; “Shangai Photofestival”, Shangai.
She was selected for the international art residency Default – Masterclass in residence in 2011, for a residency at the MO.ta in Ljubljana in 2013, for the Biennale of Young Artists of the Mediterranean in 2015 and for “Bitume Photofest” in 2016 (Malaga, Thessaloniki, Lecce).
Her project Fata Morgana has been selected in the finalist group for LensCulture Exposure Award 2018 and exhibited during Photo London 2018.
Paolo Ciregia (b. 1987) is an Italian artist. After experience as a reporter at the forefront of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, in the last five years his artistic research has been focused on Ukraine context, manipulating and reworking his personal archive in a new way. Investigating and deconstructing both archives symbols and language, Ciregia aims to reveal the atrocities behind the war, destroying the propaganda patina through installations and sculptures. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Among the major prizes are Winner of Talent FOAM Amsterdam 2016, Winner of “LOOP, Giovane Fotografia Italiana”, Festival Fotografia Europea 2017, “Honorable jury Mention” at Premio Francesco Fabbri 2016, TU35 at the Museo Pecci in Prato 2017, Winner of Leica Talent 2012.
http://www.paolociregia.eu/
Lukas Heibges (b. 1985) studied in Holland and Berlin and is currently doing a degree in photography and media in Bielefeld. He lives and works as an artist, shuttling between Berlin and Amsterdam. As a co-founder of a photography and a film collective he understands both photography and film as central tools to visualize social topics from an artistic point of view. He considers these media as the starting point of a wider expression, which combines theoretical considerations with societal debates. The result is a transfer of his artistic expression back to the intersection of theory and practice to question not only the subjects he is working on, but also the medium itself.
Giulia Vanelli (b.1996) is an Italian photographer based in Tuscany whose work explore concepts such us memory and identity, always driven by an evocative approach. She uses symbols as a causal link between visible and invisible, capturing the most enigmatic and hidden aspect of reality. She graduated from the BA Photography at Libera Accademia di Belle Arti of Florence in 2019 after spending a schooling period at Stephen F. Austin University, Texas. In 2020 she was selected for the artistic residency at Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center. In 2023 she was selected by the British Journal of Photography as one of the fifteen most promising emerging photographers from all over the world. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibition in international festivals and galleries, including Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2021), Galerie Joseph Le Palais (Paris, 2022) and 1014 Gallery (London, 2022). In 2024 her first book The Season has been published by Witty Books.
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.
Dorota Franková is a Czech photographer finishing her studies of photography at the Libuše Jarcovjáková’s studio at the Faculty of Design and Art Ladislav Sutnar in Pilsen. She is engaged in various professions such as social worker in nursing home. In 2022, she devoted a photographic series in a hospice, where she encountered the passing of people to the other side. Here she interviewed dying people and documented their last moments. She has also been working on a documentary about her ailing grandmother for several years. She enjoys fashion photography and loves collaborating with musicians on their album booklets. A core part of her work is self-reflection and understanding emotional states and their reflection in photography.
The addictive force of the internet is real, and no one knows this better than Aurélie Bayad. In a post-internet world, where IRL increasingly merges with URL, new possibilities of being are creeping into our daily lives. In her versatile art practice, Bayad uses video, photography and performance to confront us with the messy, dirty thoughts and desires of our hyperreal (what is real?), cultivated identities, as we try to live up to the new rules and standards set by the digital sphere of fake likes and dark web eroticism. Bayad uses her camera, her own and other bodies, and texts she wrote to create a fresh aesthetic language for the new desires of contemporary culture. In slimy and gooey, ugly and disgusting, cheap and glittery settings, we watch her unfold the personae of her filmed and photographed subjects. She hides her models behind the soft, nostalgic hues of the kitschy eighties and nineties; includes erratic and ecstatic sequences in her films, with heart-pounding soundtracks; and fearlessly looks back into the lens, as if asking us: ‘What is your real personality? What is real beauty? What is your true desire, your fetish? Who do you want me to see?’ With her otherworldly beauty standards, her visceral and vomitous but lively encounters with food and other quotidian objects, and her frank interrogations of intimacy, giving and receiving, love and abuse — so pertinent that they can make you tremble with self-doubt — Aurélie Bayad shares with us her search for personal grounding in this confusing, networked world.
- Text by Zeynep Kubat (.tiff)
Rebekka Deubner's work is full of narratives of metamorphosis, as close as possible to the earth and the bodies it carries. From the prefecture of Fukushima, where she made her first visit in 2014 and will return on several occasions, she has brought back indexical images, faces taken from encounters, seaweed and other living organisms she came across while wandering on the edge of the forbidden zone. Scattered into fragments by the catastrophe, they are traversed by the same palpable quivering, exuding signs of persistent vitality. The material of these bodies, the fluids that emanate from them and that they exchange, framed as closely as possible, are at the heart of the work entitled En surface, la peau, produced in the intimacy of the artist's love life. The act of photographing retains desire, counters its volatility, and ward off its loss. From this intimate exploration of the body and its profound movements, she moves on to the body as political territory, with Les saisons thermiques, an ensemble dedicated to male contraception. Here we find her way of slowly approaching the body and restoring its tender plasticity. In these bodies standing close to her, an alternative representation of masculinity is embodied. Framing and squeezing again with Strip, a work in progress made up of photograms and videos in which the artist attempts to become one with her late mother. Dressing her clothes and underwear, like counter-forms that still carry within them the latent trace of the body and epidermis that inhabited them, slipping into them and, in video performances, tying them up, patching them up and covering herself in them. Alongside these short films, Rebekka Deubner combines a collection of photograms of clothing, also fragmented, which, reassembled on the wall, sketch out the contours of a vast, warm body.Rebekka Deubner (1989), based in the Paris region, graduated in 2013 from the École de l'image Les Gobelins, Paris. She combines her personal practice with press and commercial photography, and teaches photography at ENSBA in Lyon.
Lesia Vasylchenko (b. 1990 Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway) is an artist and curator. Her work with installations, moving images and photography raises questions around temporality, history and memorialising. Vasylchenko is a co-curator of the artist-run gallery space Podium and a founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her works have been shown among others at Louvre Museum, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg; Tenthaus Gallery, Oslo; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale.