Prins de Vos (1991, Raamsdonk) is a Dutch photographer living in Amsterdam. In 2013, Prins graduated with a Bachelor Design from the Academy of Popculture (Leeuwarden). Their work touches on themes such as intimacy, sexuality and gender. Prins' first photo book Enclose (2013) was launched in photography museum Foam, and included a poetic introduction, written by Dutch author Arthur Japin. In 2022, Prins published their second photo book BOYS DO CRY, about Levi, who is an artist, poet and trans man.
It’s been seven years since I left Poland, my native country. The departure created the need to question my homeland. It swings constantly back in my mind and in my works. What I try to understand is why Poland resonates in me. Why do I constantly look for it abroad whereas all I wanted was to escape from it? Finally, how can I free myself from it? Answers never come; only more questions appear. Somewhere between past and present stories, speculations; an opportunity for me to wander through different identities.
My practice mixes photography, physical presence, text, installation and sound. Our My work in progress, Dom* [EN house, home], lies between performance and theatre play, not suiting plainly to either of them. It engages two performers and me, a setting that is being constructed during the show and numerous stories that come along with it. What I explore is the visual mean in which a story, a memory, or an image is transmitted throughout a performative act.
* Dom is written by Wiktoria Synak, directed by Wiktoria Synak and Erwan Augoyard and performed by Wiktoria Synak, Anouk Boyer-Mazal and Olga Wyszkowska.
Zellei studied Photography at the University of Kaposvár and received her MA in Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest in 2017. In 2016 she studied as a visiting student at Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Besides Hungary, she was represented in exhibitions in Berlin, London, Vienna, Kanazawa, Breda, and Monopoli. Her works were published in several magazines, for example on the cover of HANT Magazine für Fotografie, in The Guardian, Spiegel Online, IMA Magazine (JP) and C41 Magazine (IT).
In 2020 she earned the 3-year scholarship of Hungarian Academy of Fine Art. In 2018 the artist was a New East Photo Prize finalist, a Prix Pictet nominee, and earned the Pécsi József Photography Grant. She won the third prize of Different Worlds competition in 2017.
Aline Bovard Rudaz is a Swiss photographer based in Geneva. She studied photography at the CEPV (Centre d’enseignement professionnel de Vevey). Through her artistic practice, she sees images as witnesses capable of conveying the concerns of her generation. For her, photography is a sensitive means of tackling the social, intimate and taboo issues of our society. She is particularly interested in forgotten histories, especially those relating to women's lives.
Kvet Nguyen (Hoa Nguyen Thi) is slovak-vietnamese artist based in Bratislava. Cultural clash of two different realities is the basis for every thinking process and eventually the dominant subject in her works.
She completed her master’s degree in photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava within she attended interns in Plymouth College of Art in England and the Royal Academy of Art in Netherlands. Her works have been exhibited in slovakian and international context (Soda Gallery, Čepan Gallery, OFF Festival, Nitra Gallery, Karlín Studios in Prague, Galeria Promocyjna, Krakow and at the presentation of photo books in Poznań (2017), and at LIVRE PARIS (2019) in France.
https://kvetnguyen.com/project/you-are-allowed-to-mix-apples-and-pears-here/
For Sine Van Menxel, photography is the art of manipulating light and shadow. Since she works exclusively with black-and-white analogue photography, Van Menxel encounters the problem of light and shadow twice: first, in the moment of shooting and secondly when printing the final image in the darkroom. In both cases, she is fascinated by the possibilities and the limits of photographic technique in terms of manipulation and reproduction. While the moment of shooting mainly concerns the receiving and measuring of light, the work in the darkroom is a far more engaging moment: it is the phase where the photographer manipulates the projected light to create the final image. Although Van Menxel sometimes intervenes before taking a shot – for example, by staging the scene – the real challenges only arise in the second phase of the photographic process. For her, the darkroom is first and foremost an experimental environment where fortuitous discoveries occur and playful ideas are tried out. The tools that surround her (such as the magnets used for keeping the photographic paper flat against the wall) can transform from mere accessories to active agents in the creation of new and surprising images. Van Menxel often chooses not to retouch the prints, instead accepting the traces (specks of dust, stains, etc.) left behind on the image by the labour in the darkroom. The lucky coincidences created by a “failing” system alert the viewer to the image’s technological origin, thereby allowing Van Menxel to question the transparency of the medium. As such, her work is less about the subjects immediately visible in her images than about the visual possibilities created by exploiting and /or subverting the photographic method. Her work ensues from a sensitive alternation of action and surrender, of control and the loss of it. The result is a set of witty images made by a mischievous eye that is able to extract visual surprises from the most mundane situations.
Text by Steven Humblet
Cloe Jancis (b. 1992) is an artist working with photography, video, drawing and installation. In 2018, she graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a BA in photography, and is currently following an MA programme in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Jancis is fascinated by the social image and daily roles of women – and the related myths, expectations and feelings they evoke. In recent years, her work has focused on objects and rituals associated with performing femininity.
Matej Jurčević graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (KASKA), Antwerp in 2021 with a MA in Photography. In his artistic practice he explores themes of identity, collective memory and youth culture. Due to personal mental health struggles he works towards destigmatisation of mental illness. He is a recipient of the VID Grant award for 2021 hosted by the VID Foundation for Photography. The award is granted to photographers exploring relevant social issues in the Balkans. In 2022 he published his first photobook: I try to take care of myself now. The book was published by Organ Vida Publishing.
https://matejjurcevic.com/
Gulsah Ayla Bayrak (born 1997), is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgium, working on the larger themes of identity and belonging, in a complex world of interactions between her the different fragments that she embodies: Her Turkish roots and her political identity as a citizen of modern Europe, juxtaposed for the ramifications of feminist theory when thinking about the body and the self and the cultural and political consequences of queerness in an era of increasing polarization, but also of multiple polarities. Taking the migration stories in her own family as a starting point, Bayrak draws on personal biographies, to re-narrate events in such a way as to reconstruct the experience of lived time, and not merely chronologies. In her practice, moving seamlessly between Asia and Europe, both physically and emotionally, the polarity of global north versus global south emerges sharply, around the political definition of “East”—a borderland of European modernity, wholly constructed by it. The idea of the fragment resurfaces in Bayrak’s projects as a partial narrative, constitutive of our shared, social experience, and which cannot be dovetailed or manipulated, so that it remains always alive, fresh, fragile, and unfinished. In this inconclusiveness the artist finds paradox, and within paradox, the complexities of modern identities fabricated from torn off bits of different, larger structures. In dealing with objects as markers of memory, and with memories as physical objects Gulsah Ayla Bayrak creates unfinishable threads of historicity, unfolding in simultaneity, searching for a lost, but ultimately unidentifiable, temporal index.
A self-taught photographer, he has built his creative practice by travelling around Kazakhstan and shooting uncanny, unpredictable vistas.
Her work retraces her personal family history drawing on her Togolaise heritage, and the idea of origins. The theme of family is explored through self-portraits in which she plays her mother and father, narrating their experience of migration from Togo to Italy. Her images are partially informed by the West African studio portrait tradition.
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
His work was shown in galleries and museums all across the world, such as in France, USA, Haiti, Spain, United Kingdom, South Africa, Morocco, Mali, Peru, and Brazil. He also participated in international Biennales like Lima, Bamako, Thessaloniki or Casablanca.
He is represented by the Alain Gutharc Gallery in France since 2015, The Pill Gallery in Turkey since 2017 and Espai Tactel in Spain since 2018.
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.
Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. She was recently awarded a Doctoral Scholarship for undertaking her PhD in Art after graduating from an MA Photography from the Royal College of Art. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was named Student Photographer of the Year by Sony World Photography Awards 2020. In 2019, she was awarded with the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize. Nominations include: the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation in USA, the Prix HSBC, the Prix Levallois and the Prix Voies Off in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art festivals and galleries with a recent solo show at the European Month of Photography in Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and journals including The Guardian and Deutsche Welle. Her first monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by GOST Books.