What does reality look like when it is photographed from its own perimeter, in the uncanny zone between certainty, objectivity and dreams, where an idealised version of the world has infiltrated? Sébastien Cuvelier’s photography may well provide the answer.
In his images, what is real always seems larger than it actually is. The photographs appear to have passed through a fantasy filter, to be projected from a dimension where other rules apply. The sensation is similar to the one felt in the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, when ambiguous landscapes are crossed in what is not quite a dream.
It is not unusual to feel a little uncomfortable when looking at his photographs. To have the sense that one is intruding on someone else’s secret, imaginary territory. Perhaps it’s because the people, places and objects are made unfamiliar by certain details, yet seem a part of daily life. A superficial mundanity, one filled with residential blocks, interiors decorated with ostentatious luxury, ordinary streets and gardens. And yet, our usual references are rendered obsolete.
The colours, the blurring, the inconsistencies: everything conspires to make us doubt that these photographs portray what really exists. Sébastien Cuvelier appears to have found the way to an observation room that provides a mysterious and disturbing view of the human desire to become a utopian incarnation of itself.
- Text by Philippe Marczewski (.TIFF)
Elena Helfrecht (b. 1992) is a German visual artist based in Bavaria. She graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2019, having previously studied Art and Image History at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität, and Art History and Book Science at Erlangen’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universität. With a dark, eerie aesthetic, Helfrecht’s work navigates thresholds of fiction and reality, exploring existential questions of mortality, trauma, memory and post-memory. With Void, Helfrecht will launch her first solo monograph in the fall of 2023.
My name is Þórsteinn Svanhildarson and I am a photographer from Reykjavík, Iceland. I graduated from Photography School Of Iceland class 2018. I run a small gallery/project space down town Reykjavík called Núllið Gallery. (Instagram: @nullidgallery)
Books and zines:Juvenile Bliss. 2018 - GRAZIE PRESS (book)Container Society pt 1. 2018 - GRAZIE PRES (book)Rest in Pain. 2016 (partnership w. Kocane Wayne / Sniper. (zine)Untitled 2009 (zine)
Solo-exhibition:Núllið gallery - Juvenile Bliss book publishing celebration. 2018Gallery Port - Container Society 2018KEX Hostel- The Old Living Art Museum - 2017Lost Horse Gallery Reykjavik - 2007
Joint-exhibitions:Blurring the lines - Paris College of Art, Fotodok, Urbanautica institute, Fotofever - 2018Gallery Port - Christmas Editions 2017Gallery Port - 2016Reykjavík Culture Night Exhibition 2010 - Laugavegur 32Gallery Bosnia Hverfisgötu - 2009 (two exhibitions)Get RVK - O. Johnson & Kaaber 2009thorsteinn.svan@gmail.com
Raised in Sofia, Bulgaria and trained as a painter from an early age, his work arises from an early fascination with the Renaissance and Medieval eras. Stamenov utilizes computer graphic imagery as his primary medium, often to render the uncanny side of a simple event or a movement in a composition, exaggerating its insignificance in an extraordinary manner.
George Stamenov was born in 1988 and lives and works in London, United Kingdom. He completed undergraduate studies at Willem De Kooning Academie and postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art. His work was featured in The Bloomberg New Contemporaries for two consecutive years (2018, 2019); NOT A LIVE SHOW Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2018); Working Projects - Inhabiting the Dome at Whiteleys Shopping Center (2018); Water Tower Festival Bulgaria (2012).
Kata Geibl (1989, Budapest) is a photographer living and working in The Hague. Her work is mainly focused on global issues, capitalism, the Anthropocene, and the ambiguities of the photographic medium.
She is currently working on her new series titled There is Nothing New Under the Sun. The series deals with the rampant individualism that underpins our contemporary social, political, and economic system, and in particular, the environmental impact that it has. By juxtaposing the melting glaciers of Dachstein, animals under human control, almost Greek god-like athletes a narrative of our new age unfolds through the images.
Her previous work entitled Sisyphus received international attention, was exhibited at UNSEEN Amsterdam which was followed by her first solo show in Budapest. She received the emerging talent Paris Photo Carte Blanche Award for the series and in the same year she was nominated for Palm* Photo Prize.
In 2019, she received the József Pécsi Photography Scholarship and was a talent for Futures Platform nominated by Capa Center Budapest.
In 2020 she is a Grand Prix Finalist at Fotofestiwal Lodz, won the PHmuseum Vogue Italia Prize and is shortlisted for Palm* Photo Prize.
More: www.katageibl.com
Ignacio Navas (b. 1989, Tudela, Spain) is a photographer based in Madrid. After studying a Fine Arts Degree at Complutense University of Madrid he specialized in photography at Blank Paper School. Along with other photographers, he currently runs El Local, an independent space for photography in Madrid. In his work, Navas presents us daily life narratives that dig into the complexities and contradictions of western society. His approach researches how political, economic and social structures are made present and shape our everyday affaires. In his latest projects he explores new interactive paths for the medium by creating photography-based interactive experiences and non-fictional videogames.
Website: http://www.ignacionavas.com
Reinis Hofmanis (b. 1985) is a Riga-based artist and photographer. He studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany, and obtained an MA from the Visual Communication Department of the Art Academy of Latvia. His works are characterised by a socio-anthropological point of view – which manifests in an interest in typifying different groups of society, their behavioural pattern, and tier effect on the surrounding environment. Hofmanis won the main prize at Archifoto in 2012 and 2013, and was awarded 2nd place in the Architecture category of the Sony World Photography Awards. His works have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Der Spiegel, Esquire, Bloomberg, Le Monde, The Globe and Mail, and The British Journal of Photography
Luciana M. Vulea is a PhD student in Visual Arts and a university assistant at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Living in a world of images, she draws inspiration from a broad range of imagery and artistic techniques – many of which she integrates into her own practice. As a doctoral student, Vulea’s research examines the insertion of virtuality into the contemporary imaginary. Her role as a university assistant involves teaching 2D and 3D animation to students. Vulea’s work also spans conservation – through the restoration of old photographs – as well as various curatorial activities.
Hiep Duong Chi (b. 1996), who holds a BA from the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, was born in Děčín, Czechia. Photography formed part of his life from the very beginning; his grandfather ran a photography studio in Vinh, Vietnam, where his mother took photographs before she moved to the Czech Republic in the 1990s. His own work began along the lines of classic documentary photography, exploring notions of family, the Vietnamese community, or following events that caught his attention. During the pandemic, the artist instead began arranging, staging and creating still-lifes and portraits. In this new work, he touches on the realities of life as a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant – That time I wished I was a white butterfly combines references to traditional customs with his own inner feelings.
His documentary approach uses photography as a link between a habitat and its inhabitants, as well as between the inhabitants themselves. In so doing, he questions notions of territorial, social, architectural and industrial identity.
In 2020, he co-founded La Nombreuse ASBL, a cultural space in Saint-Gilles, Bruxelles dedicated to emerging and contemporary photography. Since 2019, he has been driving a truck transformed into a camera obscura to meet the inhabitants of northern France.
He graduated from the BTS photo de Roubaix (fr) in 2015 and from ESA Le75 in 2018, where he has been teaching since 2023.
Images are, for Nicole Rafiki, a thinking force. She produces imaginaries in a disparity of media, photography one of them. The normativity of thought comes from a multiplicity of machines of knowledge production, including but not limited to education, exhibition spaces, and the media. A social practice means interacting and constantly challenging the presupposed universal self such an information sphere produces. In a global economy and flow of disjunctive hierarchies and modes of being, culture moves in a disruptive way through the migration of people across borders, geographies, and time. Rafiki points to such complex and conflictual past, presentness, and future. The image, the imagined, the imaginary move from a world defined mainly by concrete purposes to structure negotiations and possibilities.
Joana Dionisio (b. 1993) is a Portuguese photographer based in Porto, where she works as a freelancer on various commissioned and personal projects. Having first studied Audiovisual Communication Technologies, she completed an MA in Artistic Photography in 2021. Dionisio has exhibited her work in a range of solo and group exhibitions, whilst she was recently selected for FRESH EYES – a publication showcasing emerging European Photography Talent by GUP Magazine.
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
Ania Vouloudi (b. 1987) is a photographer, video artist and poet with a background in civil engineering. She currently lives and works in Thessaloniki, Greece. Chronicling her life in analogue images, Vouloudi’s artistic work presents docufiction stories that address the apparent banality of daily routine. Her approach is both low-fi and unpretentious. Rooted in photography, the installations she creates also feature audio, writing and objects. Zine-making is another important feature of Vouloudi’s practice; she has collaborated with Void since its inception, co-publishing two zines in 2016 and 2017.
'June', Červeňová’s most recent body of work, is an autobiographical response to the EU referendum. The month of June in 2016 signified a rupture where the meaning of home and future plans were suddenly thrown into limbo. Coinciding with the beginning of her MA at the RCA, she spent the following two years documenting daily life. Taken in various locations across Britain and Europe, each image is titled simply by the location and date in which it is made, the significance of which becomes apparent when read on mass. When viewed in retrospect, the work emerges as not only a record of daily events, but also a timeline of significant dates that will, or have already become, marker points in history.
The core of the work became an artist book, in which the work has been translated into 24 booklets (each representing one month) collated together with an opening ring – a metaphor for the easily breakable union, where the beginning and the end can be manipulated and the linearity of historical events shifted. Červeňová’s artist book 'June' was amongst 10 shortlisted titles in MACK First Book Award 2019 and was presented at Photo London 2019. June is now in the permanent collection of TATE Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum.
In 2019, Červeňová was nominated for the prestigious FOAM Paul Huf Award. She is a 2017 Bloomberg New Contemporaries Alumni. She regularly collaborates with The FT Weekend and Telegraph Magazine.
Julia Klewaniec (1996) photographer and culture animator. A graduate of Photography in Film School in Łódź. She is a co-creator of the Picture Doc Foundation with a group of photographers (Duży Pokój Gallery) in Warsaw. Resident in the student section of the "W ramach Sopotu" festival in Poland (2022). Chosen by Fotofestiwal in Łódź for Futures Talents 2022. Talent of the Year 2022 in the Pix.House competition. Her debut project "Silent Racism" was presented among others in Warsaw, Opole, Łódź, Turin, Braga, Bochnia, Copenhagen. At the end of 2022, together with Pix.House and Krzysiek Orłowski, she published the zine "Silent Racism". She is interested in statements about contemporary society, life and relations between people, language and the environment.
http://klewaniec.pl/@klewaniec
Her work is dominated by authentic recording of everyday situations with poetic- geometric narrative overlaps. The themes touch on temporality, imagination, fiction, and the search for new image contexts (re-evalution of image). Unformal documentary images are diversfield with abstract or stylized „cut-outs“ of the everyday colors. ". The conscious disruption of the timeline opens up the possibility of individual interpretation, which the viewer can understand as he or she wishes - without time constraints. Barbora in last years is interested in the relationship between static image and the moving image. Her inspiration often comes from eastern Slovakia,personal experience, the theme of growing up and aging, home, landscape,spending leisure time and health care.
She has participated in joint exhibition projects in France, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Rupublic and others. She participated in Pla(t)form 2020 in the Swiss Fotomuseum Winterthur, where she was selected along with 42 artists. Barbora Bacova actually lives and works in Košice.
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.
If Hélène Bellenger's work could be associated with a single tool, it would not be a camera, but one of those fine, precise instruments of the forensic scientist, so diligent is the artist in dissecting the workings of an imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Preferring the act of collecting and transforming to that of shooting, she approaches images that are inert and out of use. For the Dazzled project, she collected a series of faces on the internet that had been obliterated by a flash of light - the now famous form of the selfie with the flash in the mirror - forming a kind of digital sun that contaminates the image and prevents the portrait. Another collection is that of advertisements for anxiolytics and antidepressants taken from specialist magazines, which she assembles into a frieze to display the litany of tense faces and slogans in the form of injunctions to happiness. Earlier, in Right color, she diverted a collection of magazines, posters and photograms from reels of films featuring actresses from the 1920s to the 1950s, reviving the make-up that was applied to them to reconstruct their faces and modify their plasticity for the black-and-white screen of the time. With her recent Bianco ordinario, her torsos of Apollo and busts of Venus, she continues her archaeology of the canons of beauty. Through a play of superimposed forms and supports, she links the geological time of the Carrara marble quarries, its extraction in Antiquity for sculpture, and today's massive extraction of marble powder to whiten the packaging of our cosmetics and cleaning products. The ensemble consists of a collection of unfolded packaging cartons on which the artist prints images of antique busts and quarry landscapes. In turn, the images themselves will be extracted from their support by the acidity of the marble powder contained in the cardboard, washing them ‘whiter than white’. The history and fortunes of the Western concept of whiteness are at the heart of the work the artist is currently developing in the Mediterranean basin.Hélène Bellenger (1989) lives and works between Marseille and Paris. After studying law and art history, she specialised in photography and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles in 2016. Bianco Ordinario was supported by Aide à la Création 2021 from the Drac PACA and produced at the Centre Photographique Ile-de-France as part of the 2022-2023 research and post-production residency.The artist would like to thank Isabelle Carta, Roland Carta, Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France, Nathalie Giraudeau, galerie Marguerite Milin and Francesco Bi
Peggy van Mosselaar is a documentary and visual storyteller motivated by curiosity and human interest. Van Mosselaar creates photographic and video works based upon the stories and memories of the people she meets. The artist graduated from PhotoAcademy, Amsterdam and Foto Vakschool, Rotterdam. Peggy has exhibited at Loods 6, Amsterdam; Museum Hilversum, Hilversum; and SKVR, Rotterdam. In August-November 2022, she will present her work in FOTODOK’s group exhibition Part of Me… Shaping Mental Spaces.
For the past 6 years, Snizhko participated in several group exhibitions, festivals and international fairs in The Netherlands, Japan, Ukraine, Austria and Czech Republic. Her installation “TINI” was awarded the Best Artwork Award and Public's Prize at Smart Illumination 2016, Yokohama, Japan, Honorable Mention and Public's Prize of Steenbergen Stipendium 2016, The Netherlands.