Her aim is to make the spectator observe and to be observed at the same time. While we watch others, we are being watched too. The desire of observing one another, of having insight into the lives of others posits a system of norms based on which we define ourselves compared to others. We want to confirm that we have similar problems as others, that we are better than or just as good as they are. In other words, that we only deviate from the average on an average scale.
Her works explore how we can describe our body in the most objective manner possible, to represent it without any intimacy whatsoever. Looking at these so-called anti-intimate states, the works examine all the subtle and complex relationships our physical extension forms with our environment, and how social expectations shape our appearance. Personal stories and critical observations regarding the body are represented along with abstract objects and intertwined sculptural bodies. Her fundamental medium is photography that she often combines with other disciplines, such as objects, photobooks or video.
Angelina Vernetti (* 1993 in Lüneburg, DE) lives and works as a freelance photographer in Berlin. Her focus is on portraiture, fashion and art. She works e.g. in editorial for magazines like Der SPIEGEL and GEO Magazine, photographs commissioned art for architectural firms or teaches fashion photography at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. For documentary long term projects Angelina researches and photographs socially relevant but underrepresented topics.
For example, her works tell of the socio-cultural effects of the birth control pill (SMILE EFFEKT, 2020) and of beauty ideals and their consequences (EVERY BODY, 2022). In 2020 she graduated with a bachelor's degree in documentary photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover.
He is the author of the photobooks Smog, Near, Infra, Toskana, European Eyes on Japan Vol. 18, and The Most Important Things I Do Not Tell You At All, designed by Thomas Schostock. His works have been published in SZUM, BIURO, LaVie, Machina, POST, and Bad to the Bone. He is a winner of the Show OFF Section of the Krakow Photomonth Festival 2012 and the WARTO 2015 Award.
In 2016 he was selected to take part in European Eyes on Japan—a unique project inviting photographers from European Capitals of Culture to capture everyday life in Japan. He is the winner of Griffin Art Space Prize—Lubicz 2017 for the best portfolio at Krakow Photomonth 2017. Rusznica currently runs a photography gallery, Miejsce przy Miejscu, dedicated to promoting emerging photographers from Poland and abroad.
Veronika Čechmánková is a Czech photographer and mixed-media artist based in Prague. She focuses primarily on the transformation of symbols and traditions over time, and their possible meanings in the present. Taking pieces of visual and cultural history, she examines their validity and possibilities in a contemporary context. Čechmánková studied at the Studio of Photography and New Media at FAMU – Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czechia. Her work has been exhibited in a range of institutions, including the Center for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague; Karlín Studios, Prague; Studio Vortex, Arles; and the BF Artist Film Festival, London.
In her most recent work, Rie Yamada stages self-portraits through other people, finding her source matter in family photo albums acquired from Japan, her homeland, and Germany, where she now lives, recreating scenes in her own likeness. Highlighting gender stereotypes and social archetypes, her often humorous work questions not just the family, but the changing role of photography itself in expressing how we want to be perceived. The images are, in a sense, a search for her own image, in the same way a family photo is intended to define and project their identity.
Peters Jurgis (b. 1991) is a new media artist currently based in Riga, Latvia. He holds both a BSc in Digital Media Technology and an MSc in Cyber Security from the University of Birmingham, and an MA in Audiovisual Arts from the Art Academy of Latvia. His work comprises visual explorations into the impact of various phenomena caused by advances in technology. As such, a main focus of his work is Artificial Intelligence (AI) – both as a medium and on a conceptual basis. New developments in AI have sparked a series of heated debates, ranging from whether we can entrust critical tasks to AI, to conversations on the role of the human creator in an age of AI-generated content. With a background in machine learning algorithms, Jurgis believes that the future will bring AI and human co-creation – where algorithms are used to enhance a human artist’s capabilities. In his own practice, Jurgis applies new technologies as tools for visual storytelling, and as a means to speculate on future scenarios.
Anna Ádám (b. in 1983) is a Hungarian interdisciplinary visual artist and performance maker whose work blurs the boundaries between image, object, and choreography. She graduated at ENSAPC Art School in France in 2016, and also studied styling (2010) and makeup (2018). In 2013 she was selected to the 59th Salon de Montrouge, which led her to several solo exhibitions (Budapest, Paris) and residencies (Yerevan and Berlin). In 2014, she co-founded the company Gray Box (grayboxprojects.com) at the intersection of contemporary dance, visual arts, and fashion.
Since 2015, in the frame of her personal practice (www.annaadam.net), Anna Ádám creates hybrid spaces where spectacle and exhibition merge: she "curates theater" and "choreographs exhibitions". She conceptualizes and uses the exhibition space as a theatre and the theater as an exhibition space: the plinth as stage, the installation as setting, the visitor as spectator, and vice versa. Her multidisciplinary and always site-specific projects - including photography, drawing, installation, clothing, performances, and choreographed works - echo the broader socio-political context from a feminist and queer perspective, and challenge the body as both a historically disciplined, shaped archive and a living public/private site, where power is constantly contested and negotiated.
As a photographer, by combining both personal and anonymous photos with different technics (collage, drawing, painting, sewing, embroidery…), she examines the ways vernacular photography influences memory, individual and collective identities, personal and historical narratives, privacy and public life. Her embroidered photographs, photo-objects, and photo-based clothings explore the performative, choreographic, and sculptural potential of photography.
Between 2013 and 2015, Anna Ádám worked as a performance artist in commissioned works (Palais de Tokyo, Musée Georges Pompidou...). Since 2014 she regularly presents her projects in both exhibition spaces and theaters (Museum of Modern Art Yerevan, National Museum of Immigration History Paris, Theater MU Budapest, Théâtre de la Maison d’Europe et d’Orient, Salon de Montrouge, Galérie YGREC, Dorothy’s Gallery…), and holds workshops in universities across Europe (Austria, Hungary, Serbia, France...).
Jan Kazimierz Barnaś – born in Sandomierz on September 12, 1991; currently permanently connected with Lodz. Student at the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in lodz in the specialty of Photography and Multimedia. In his works, he often takes up the subject of the destruction of the image, his main interest is film and video art. As the FILMMAKER on his account, he has several etudes, video-arts, animations, music videos and feature films.
Wojciech Kamerys – born in 1994, student of the faculty of Photography and Multimedia Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in lodz. Practice based on photography, combined with other media. Participant of several exhibition in Lodz, Gdynia and Bydgoszcz. Cooperation with Academy of Music in Lodz, and The National Film, Television and Theatre School of Lodz and MS1 in Lodz. Theme of works based in relation between human and architecture, funcion of light and shadow in a classic silver photography.
Agnieszka Sejud is an interdisciplinary visual artist operating between Hamburg and Wrocław. She holds a Master’s degree in Law from the University of Wrocław and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Silesian University in Opava (Czech Republic). In her artistic practice, Sejud engages with various media as tools for critical reflection on identity, the notion of individual freedom, and the oppressive structures that constrain human autonomy. Her work aims to deconstruct and dismantle these mechanisms through an experiment-driven artistic approach. She works with photography, both digital and analog collage, artist publications, installations, and video art. A distinctive feature of her aesthetic is the deliberate deformation of the image, which serves as an expressive vehicle for conveying complex ideas and emotions. Sejud’s works have been exhibited in numerous international contexts, affirming their universal resonance and significance within the discourse of contemporary visual art.
The focus of my work in the past years has been human violence and poverty: how its constant reception can restructure the society and the self. I live and work in Mexico with the aim of completing my visual research on this topic, where I look for cultural movements, group activities, individual destinies which exist as consequence of the persistent violence and repress. My goal is to be engaged from an intimate closeness in order to witness, capture the essence of these realities, emotionally, mentally strongly involve the viewer into the topics I'm working with, to give the audience another perspective on the reasons why their lifestyle may often appear to be controversial and condemned, where I believe the key always lies in a brutal social and political system. I aim to give voice and visibility for people who are social outcasts, victims of injustice, showing contemporary social conflicts in a different context and narrative other than the newspapers. The photograph's focal point is a physical remnant of violence – a scar, a bruise, or a symbolic conduit, landscape – while the non-physical remnants of aggression are left to the viewer to interpret through a gaze, expression or pose and in physical space accompanied with text, interviews, even sound, so the story can become a whole, questioning faith, the nature of human and it's behavior.
More: http://koladel.org/
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.
Anaïs Boileau was born in 1992 in Nîmes. She is a photographic artist who works exploring Mediterranean cultures as a constant source of inspiration in her projects. She graduated from the art school of Lausanne, ECAL. She lives in the south of France where she alternates between photographic commissions and her artistic projects.Her work is presented in various group exhibitions and selected in several international festivals. In September 2017, she joins a year of master at Central Saint Martins school in London in photography. Since her first collaboration for M le magazine du Monde in 2015, she has worked regularly for the French and international press. Her work can be found in magazines and newspapers such as Le Monde, M le magazine du Monde, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Time or Vanity Fair.
Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant are two Belgian artist-photographers based in Brussels. They have a history of collaborating but launched a new project together in 2020. Studying at ESA le 75 from 2015 to 2018, Elise Dervichian deepened herself into the reportage style. Towards the end of her studies, she worked as an assistant curator at La cité des Arts in Saint Denis, Réunion Island. Her work is focused on documentary photography, working on societal subjects such as rape culture or the Armenian diaspora in Belgium. Lina Wielant graduated from Sint Lukas Hogeschool Brussel, where she primarily focused on analogue darkroom techniques, with a predilection for editing photo-books. In August 2022 she participated in a residency at DecorAtelier, (Brussels) with the organisation Dis Mon Nom, which aims to shed light on invisibilised people. Together, Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant combine analogue and digital photography, mainly through staged self-portraits and photo-montages.
In her work she explores the boundary between truth and fiction. Using reality as a starting point, her image-making anchors the subject matter in her own personal perspective. Depicted themes include technology, internet culture, sexuality and identity. Alongside her practice she has initiated and developed short-films, exhibitions and a film festival. She is the co-founder of the independent film festival Cinema Underexposed - a The Hague based platform aimed for new voices and perspectives.
After graduating from The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, she is now attending the master program at the Norwegian Film Academy in Oslo. In 2020 she attended the Canon Student Development Programme at Visa Pour l’Image. Her work has been shown at Eye filmmuseum and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. San Mei Gallery in London, Grimstad short film festival in Norway, gallery CK13 in Serbia and cultural platform Page Not found in The Hague, among others. She has been published in Morgenbladet, Aftenposten and Zweikommasieben magazine.
The perfect skin and the smooth image which accompanies it, Eva O’Leary knows all too well the different ingredients and recipes of commercial photography. She too, as a teen, ate this cake which now, as an artist, she presents to us on a plateau. In a refrigerator rests a sponge cake, accompanied with printed icing: a saccharine young woman with perfect blow-dried hair watches us. Since it is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, this is the fate which the photographer reserves for the young blonde haired woman with the Colgate smile and her diktat. She grew up in the United States of America in a campus town whose name is almost an order – Happy Valley – and remembers her years spent masking her Irish head in the hood of a must have Abercrombie sweatshirt. The series, Happy Valley, is rooted in her town and her adolescent memories, describing an environment which is intrusive and worrying, modelling individuals whose self identity has been traded for a generic body. With the more recent Spitting Image, it is the years before, the adolescent vulnerability which are exposed. Young girls, around fifteen years old, present themselves to us, tightly framed on a vibrant blue backdrop which permits neither an escape for the gaze, nor breathing room for the model. Eva O’Leary accompanies these photographs with videos: perched upon a stool, we watch them searching for the person they hoped to find in the mirror. In this interval the photographer reopens the field of representations and with it, the freedom to be complex, different, uncertain, unique, human.
The current project Systems of Order examines the hidden relationship between fear and joy - something that is deeply embedded within the Russian condition. The first part of the project focuses on the drag community in Novosibirsk, Russia. In joy, there is a darker reality and often the truth must be hidden in this world and “joy” can only be expressed through beauty - one has to place him/herself within the system.This, in a lot of cases, is based on oppression and boundaries. The theme of oppression vs. exhibition is constantly present in those systems of order. Joy becomes a form of repression in itself, there are moments of freedom in the constructed safe space, but they can only be obtained and permitted behind the masks of beauty and entertainment.
Beauty within a Russian context allows for certain freedoms from the norm. You must fit in the central mass of these systems unless you have power, money or beauty. In this way, beauty can become your safety net. In the country, unsure of its own reality and fearful to discover the boundaries, many struggle to be themselves in the current dystopian hybrid.
My research that for formality can be described as photographic due to the medium used, even if the dimension that belongs to me is more related to the image, to what it communicates to us and how it is perceived. Like the graphic design my photographs tend to a clear reading, which privileges functionality to pure aesthetic beauty, to finalize the reading to a deeper stage of cognitive perception. I have two different aspects: the construction of the image by the sculpture, and the archiving of the photos that I collect in certain carefully chosen environments. It’s very important to me to return many times to the settings that I selected. Both approaches are always formalized and captured through photography.
In 2019 I was finalist of the FFF Fondazione Francesco Fabbri award. My work has been featured in many national and international exhibitions: Audi Studio by Nevven Gallery, Stockholm; Villa Vertua Masolo, Milano; Spaziosiena, Siena; LOFT, Lecce; Las Palmas, Lisbon; Galleria Giuseppe Pero, Milano; BASIS, Frankfurt; Spaziobuonasera, Torino.