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.
Daria is a lens-based artist currently living and working between Kyiv and Paris. Originally from Odesa, Ukraine, Daria came to France to pursue an M.A. in Photography & Video at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Paris, graduating in 2023.In her artistic practice, Daria explores the connections between past and present, focusing primarily on the youth and cultural, social and political contexts in which young people live.Her work was exhibited across Europe and the U.S., including La Villette (Paris), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Hangar (Brussels), Mystetskiy Arsenal (Kyiv), The Gallery atDobbin Mews (New York). Daria is a finalist of the 39th Hyères festival (2024), Palm* Phot Prize (2022) and a recipient of Beyond the silence grant by Magnum Photos & Odesa Photo Days (2024), as well as a grant for contemporary documentary photography from CNAP.
Currently she is participating in the Masterclass at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. Her work revolves around the relationship between humans and animals in context with animal agriculture.
Browsing through Allyssa Heuze’s photographs is, one rapidly remarks, like taking one path and unexpectedly finding oneself on another. A slide leads us to a pair of buttocks encircled by a hoop, a baseball player hits a home run which leads us to two small breasts drawn by the shadowed outline of two plump apples, and even to those gazed upon by another young man, his head submerged beneath a t-shirt. References to play punctuate Allyssa Heuze’s labyrinthine journey between her images: ball games, gymnastics, role play. This photographer’s preferred terrain is the studio, where she seems to take pleasure in constructing her dramas and her absurd scenarios. Herein this white cube willingly yields, where one may make believe that the real, the duration of the photographic shot, has no hold. She invites her friends within, a banana and doughnuts, an erupting volcano, and an aeroplane vulva in an inventory that is all the more burlesque as it is presented through a precise, almost clinical, photographic vocabulary. A balanced light, controlled reflections, a careful composition: together they hold all of the attributes of a style with a perfect appearance that this photographer – who certainly knows all of its rules – takes pleasure in making slip.
In 2016 she published her first photo book, eden, thanks to the Fiebre Dummy Award. Since 2010 she lives in Madrid, alternating her work as a photographer with her personal projects.
In 2023, she debuted her solo exhibition with the project "Soft Spot" at the Biennale of Photography - NEXT 2023 in Riga. Laureate of the 12th edition of Circulation(s) festival in Paris (2022). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at venues such as: Bialystok Interphoto Festival (2021), the Fringe section of the Photomonth in Krakow (2022), Frames of Sopot Festival (2022) and Titanikas Exhibition Halls in Vilnius (2022). Her project “Soft Spot” has been published in OVER Journal issue #3 (2022) and awarded first prize in the Bartur PhotoAward in the Ann Lesley Bar-Tur Student category (2022).
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.
His main interest is the correspondence of the photographic medium and perception. He uses the camera as an extension of the human sight and tries to examine the concept of reality and knowledge. He mostly works in the studio environment and seeks to unfold his ideas in a progressive form.
His works were shown at exhibitions at home and abroad. He won the ON_AWARD grand prize of the OFF_Festival Bratislava Contemporary Photography Festival as a member of a group exhibition in 2014. He won the National Scholarship of Hungary in 2015–2016 and the Association of Hungarian Photographers: Photography Scholarship for 2017. He is a member of the Hungarian Photographers’ Association and Studio of Young Photographers. Biró is represented by Trapéz Gallery, Budapest.
http://www.birodavid.com
Her work has been exhibited internationally at Red Hook Labs (NYC), Unseen Photo Fair (Amsterdam), Addis Foto Fest (Addis Ababa), the International Centre of Photography NYC) and at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair( London). Mann’s personal and commissioned work has been published internationally including The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Artsy, British Vogue, The British Journal of Photography, and National Geographic.
Her award winning series ‘Drummies’ exploring female drum majorette teams in South Africa, has been selected as a winner of the Lensculture emerging photographer prize (2018), the PHMuseum Women’s ‘New Generation’ prize for an emerging photographer (2018). Four images from the series were awarded first place at the prestigious Taylor Wessing portraiture prize (2018). Mann was also the recipient of the Grand Prix at the 34th edition of the Hyeres International Festival of Fashion and Photography (2019).
In 2017 she obtained the PhotoEspaña scholarship to study the Master's Degree in photography "Theories and artistic projects". Ire Lenes attented workshops and seminars of Antoine D’ Agata, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roger Ballen, Eugenio Recuenco and Joan Fontcuberta.
Ire lenes has won several awards such as Ciudad de Alcalá, the DKV scholarship at the Photography and Journalism Seminar in Albarracín, lX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris or Julia Margaret Cameron among others. She has been selected to participate in festivals such as PhotoEspaña or Transeuropa Discovery Week. Her work Archipelagos has been exposed as a solo exhibition in several galleries in Spain and has been published in book format within the Kursala collection of Cádiz, which was recently exhibited at the ¡Hola! event in Taipei, Taiwan.
Currently her work is part of various public and private collections and she has given talks at PiC.A PhotoEspaña, Real Sociedad Fotográfica of Madrid and at the Infotografos conference in Alicante.
In 2017, her personal connection with Lithuania led her to embark on a long-term project, the analysis of ethnic minorities in the Baltic States and the understanding of the particular situation in each country, a trilogy approached from a sociological perspective and materialized through visual narrative.
Her work is centred around reworkings of historical tropes relating to the black female body, taking from contexts that include art historical paintings and sculptures as well as 19th century colonial photography. She works to subvert established notions about black female sexuality and the standard of beauty ascribed to black females. By placing historical imagery in a contemporary context, the relationship between the treatment of the black female body in the past and its treatment in the present day is explored. Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Photography, she has been a recipient of the SSA New Graduate Award and the Degree Show Purchase Prize, resulting in her work becoming part of The University of Edinburgh Art Collection.
Mafalda Rakoš was born in Vienna in 1994. In addition to her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, she earned a degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She then moved to the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she taught for a couple of years. Her work has been nominated and honored several times at international awards, exhibited in museums such as the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, Benaki Museum, Athens and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, as well as shown outside an art context at conferences on eating disorders or at the General Hospital in Vienna. Publications such as Die Zeit, Volkskrant Magazin or Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and organizations such as The Wellcome Collection have published her images. Mafalda Rakoš lives and works between Vienna and Amsterdam, her third photo book A Story to Tell was published in 2020 by Fotohof.
Nadine Isabelle Henrich is a curator and researcher in the history of art, focusing on photography, media art, and synthetic media, based in Berlin. She has been a curatorial fellow at Museum Folkwang, Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Getty Research Institute. Currently she is the Curator of The House of Photography at Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Her curatorial work examines the politics of visibility and imagination, focusing on photography, archives and visual practices online. She is a Ph.D. researcher in Art History at Freie Universität Berlin and holds a MA in History of Images and Art from Humboldt University (Berlin), a BA from Freie Universität Berlin, and studied Curatorial Studies (Städelschule Frankfurt). She is interested in expanded curatorial practices including community- and coalition-building, and commoning.
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.
In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.
“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”
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/
Bärbel Reinhard (b. 1977) is a German artist, teacher and curator based in Tuscany, Italy. After graduating in Art History, Sociology and Modern German Literature at Humboldt-University Berlin, she followed a three-year photography programme at Florence’s Fondazione Studio Marangoni. Her work has been exhibited in various shows in Italy and abroad, whilst her images have been published by the likes of Liberation, La Republica and Phroom. The main focus of Reinhard’s work lies in the characteristics and limits of photography as a time-space-tied medium. Moving between observational photography, mixed media installations, assemblages and collages with both her own and found material, she works primarily on long-term projects.
Instagram: thefoxisred
Website: www.baerbelreinhard.com
Nolwenn Brod is a French artist based in Paris. She has studied humanities and social sciences, and trained in photography in London and at the Ecole des Gobelins in Paris. She is a member of the Vu Agency and represented by the eponymous gallery in Paris since 2016.
She develops her projects most often in the context of creative residencies in France and Europe where she mixes photography and video; and responds to commissions for the press and institutions. Her works are regularly exhibited in France and Europe and are included in the collections of the Bnf (French National Library), the Cnap, the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, the Museum of Brittany, the Villa Noailles, the Agnès b. collection, the Neuflize OBC Foundation, art libraries and private collections.
Her first book was published by Poursuite Editions in 2015, the second is in preparation.
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.