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)
Although none of Stockburger’s works were actually shot in the United States, the country and its myths are central to his photographic work. By photographing the global outcome of the power projection of the United States Stockburger is mapping the country from the outside.
In his work „Why Quit Our Own To Stand Upon Foreign Ground?“ he is documenting the closure of the U.S. Army Garrison in his German hometown Schweinfurt. Stockburger’s follow-up work アメリカ(Amerika) examines the U.S. influence on post-war Japan.
Currently he is working on a photographic juxtaposition of the development and use of the atomic bomb.
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/
The project 'The lost paracosmist' is an animated short film by multimedia artist Josephina van de Water. Using digital photography, printed celluloid film, paint, digital scans, video montage, cardboard and extreme patience, she brings a fictitious world to life in fascinating detail. The film was made in the traditional, time-consuming way that requires particular dedication, with each frame individually handcoloured as was done in the first colour movies.
The imaginary island of Paperland is inhabited by a colourful collection of talking animals. Josephina van de Water wrote and narrated the dialogue, giving each animal its own voice, tone and place in her universe. The chronicle guides us through a logical, yet fictitious, tale, in which we learn about Paperland’s geography, history, language, culture and religion.
As in every good fable, imagination is closely accompanied by reflection. While The lost paracosmist focuses on the irresistible charms of storytelling, it also warns the audience to beware of stories. They have the power to contort our perception of the world and disturb our relationship with reality.
The endearing cardboard animals in their warm, glowing colours, and the gentle, motherly voice of the narrator, are reminiscent of children’s programmes. However, the topics covered in this allegory are anything but childish: territorial disputes, political and religious authority and mechanisms of exclusion and esteem all make an appearance, allowing inequality and frustration to creep into this seemingly safe cosmos.
- Text by Geert Goiris (.tiff)
Laura San Segundo (b. 1990) studied Fine Arts at Madrid’s Complutense University, followed by an MA at Efti International School of Photography and Cinema. Her personal projects have since run alongside commissioned work and a series of teaching roles. A recipient of various scholarships and residencies, Segundo’s projects have been exhibited internationally. With a playful but thoughtful methodology, her work makes conceptual connections between different image types, exploring their many layers of meaning – and how their meaning can be altered by visual strategies like cropping, fragmenting and decontextualising.
He often follows the subjects of his photo essays for many years. His series are mostly people-focused, trying to explore the problems of individuals or social groups with the tool of photography. His work has been rewarded with honored awards: shortlisted in the See.Me The Exposure Award competition in landscape category, and his image was exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. He has won several awards at the Hungarian Press Photo Competition, including the André Kertész Grand Prize, the Károly Escher Prize and the Zoltán Szalay Prize for three consecutive years for the best-performing photojournalist under 30. He has been participant in international masterclasses such as the Nikon-NOOR Academy Masterclass and is now a third-time scholarship holder to VII Academy seminars.
His latest photo essay on air pollution in Northeast Hungary was chosen by the Reuters news agency as one of the most important Wider Image story.
Pauline Hisbacq was born in 1980.
After a master's degree in philosophy, she joined the ENSP in Arles, from which she graduated in 2011. She continued the same year with a post-graduate degree at the ICP in New York.
Since then, her work has been presented at the Rencontres de la Jeune photographie Internationale de Niort (2014), at the Ecureuil Foundation for Contemporary Art in Toulouse (2019), at the Image Satellite in Nice (2018), at the friche belle de Mai in Marseille (2017), and in Paris at Jeune Création (2013), at the Photo Paris Saint Germain festival (2017), at the Bal (2019), at the Rouen Normandie Photographic Center (2021).
She published Natalya at 7 Editions (2016), Le feu at September books (2017), Amour adolescente (chants d'amour) at Rayon Vert . édition (2019), Cadavre Exquis, fanzine co-published by Le Bal Books and September Books (2021), Songs for women and birds at September books (2021).
In 2017, she was awarded the CNAP's Soutien à la photographie documentaire contemporaine grant for the project La fête et les cendres. In 2021, she received the Aide Idividuelle à la Création from the Drac Ile de France for the project Rimorso. She is also the winner of the national commission Les Regards du Grand Paris initiated by the CNAP and the Ateliers Médicis, with the project Pastorale.
She is currently a photographer at the Rodin Museum, and editor at September Books.
She is the author of many self-published photographic zines such as "Utopia", "Published" and "Underground". Creating zines gives her the opportunity to reinterpret existing material and create a new full-fledged work with its own meaning. She has presented her work in Belgrade, Budapest, Tel Aviv, Zagreb and Paris. In 2020, she won first place at Slovak Press Photo and the Young Talent of the Year award for her documentary series about the community called Utopia. In 2023, she placed first in the Rovinj Photo Days festival with her series of photographs about the Bratislava community. She received her bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the studio of Olja Triaška Stefanović and Jana Hojstričová. She spent a semester in Finland at the Department of Documentary Photography in Lahti. She is a recent graduate of the Master's degree at FAMU in Prague.
Mentored by the Magnum photographer Carl De Keyzer, he chose not to show the war in the east, but to focus on the aspects of life presented to him in the capital Kiev. By his active presence his work functions as an extension on the early 20th century documentary approach and tends to reveal universal questions rather then to depict actual proof of fact.
While working on two new projects, David is finishing the dummy book of Let Us Not Fall Asleep with the input of British Ukrainian researcher and cultural manager Myroslava Hartmond. Within the book the images will be interconnected with referential sources, testimonies and reflections on the impact that both media and politics have on the hybrid war that is putting strains on the Ukrainian dream and experience of freedom. This book will be published at the end of 2018, exactly 5 years after the start of the hybrid war.
After finishing her undergraduate studies in 2018, Sophie Gladstone has continued her art practise while working in editorial positions. Her work has been exhibited in both Europe and Asia and was recently shortlisted for the Emergentes International Photography Award and nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award. Currently, Gladstone works as Assistant Photography Editor at Wallpaper*, a luxury design-focused publication. This role feeds back into her photography, informing a critical perspective as she works across the reality and fantasy of contemporary visual culture. Aesthetics of advertising, social media and e-commerce are also inspiration points. Through her practice, she performs the capitalist pressures that undermine positive traits within us, such as the desire to improve ourselves and connect with others.
Kinga Wrona (b. 1983) is a Polish documentary photographer currently living in Krakow. She is a student at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. In her latest projects, Wrona explores the relationship between humans and nature in relation to climate change, natural disasters and environmental degradation. Her images have been published by FOTO Magazine, The Calvert Journal, National Geographic and New York Post, whilst her projects have been exhibited internationally. Her recent 85 project will soon be exhibited at Circulation(s) Festival in Paris, France.
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.
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.
"Porosity is probably the concept that best characterises Etienne Courtois’s approach to his photographic work. One of the threads in his creative process is his distinctly plastic treatment of the medium through integrated and often barely noticeable interventions that are both sculptural and pictorial by nature. These interventions are evident in how he prepares his support as well as in the compositions themselves.
The interventions often originate from the confrontation between various random objects gathered by Courtois during his walks and rambles through the city or in nature, leading to surprising encounters that have a contemporary surrealistic quality, which is further accentuated by the treatment or plastic and pictorial transformations he applies. Courtois adds a subsequent layer of ambiguity to the reading of this process by creating sculptural forms - often in plaster, but also in wood - that are integrated into the images or applied in relief on the prints.
Occasionally, the ambivalence of the treatment is emphasised by multiple exposure of the same photographic negative, which modifies the chromatic values as well as the shapes in the initial image, creating the effect of a shift or spectral motion.
The work of Etienne Courtois clearly surpasses the dichotomy between figurative and representational art. The ambiguity in interpreting and understanding these interventions leads to completely new and surprising formal encounters between everyday objects in a whimsical, alienating atmosphere. Courtois’s work is marked by a distinctly free, singular and often witty approach that evokes the pictorial work of Walter Swennen or the sculptures of Koenraad Dedobbeleer."
Text by Emmanuel Lambion
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).
The starting point for her work are images, both her own as well as found material. Her project 'you give it an order' questions the orientation mechanisms that apply when looking at a picture in terms of its content and form.
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.
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.
Laura Fiorio is an artist working with photography, performance and relational practices. Her projects interact with archival objects, questioning the power dynamics embedded in the editing process of creating memories, their political use and their critical and transformative potential. In her practice, she facilitates collaborative narratives by addressing the entanglement between intimate and institutional histories and fosters discussion on heritage. She holds a BA in Performing Visual Arts (Venice), an MA in Art and Social Work (Berlin) and a Postgraduate Degree in Decolonizing Architecture (Stockholm). Her work was internationally exhibited and produced independently or in collaboration with institutions, including Biennale, Sale Docks (Venice/IT), CeCuT (Tijuana/MX), Shanti Road (Bangalore/IN), Festival International de Fotografia (Valparaiso/CL), ECCHR and House of the Cultures of the World (Berlin/DE). Furthermore, she has been working on social projects in prisons, refugee shelters and with homeless people in Mexico, Italy and Germany.