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.
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
Born in Miskolc in 1989, Zsuzsa Darab graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME), in photography BA. In 2012, she obtained a scholarship to study painting and fine art in Denmark. In 2014, she studied at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Finland under the ERASMUS programme. In 2015, she graduated from MOME's photography MA department, then in 2016 from the design and visual arts teaching MA department. Same year, she did her photography internship in Reykjavik, Iceland. From 2017 till 2018, she was working as Jón Páll's photo assistant at SuperStudio. From 2018, she lives in Hungary and works as a destination freelance photographer. She has been a member of the Hungarian Assocation Of Young Art Photographers since 2011, and the Women Photograph database, since 2017. Her works are usually personal, conceptual, staged and also experimental. She has already exhibited several times in Budapest and abroad as well, e.g. New York, Rome, Nizhny Tagil, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Istanbul, Warsaw, etc. In 2013, she participated in the Present Continuous art project at the Mai Manó House. In 2016, she was chosen by Photo Botie as one of the 30 under 30 women photographers. She won the NKA Scholarship in 2018, 2022, 2023 and the Pécsi József Scholarship in 2021.
His practice explores themes of isolation and identity, the juxtaposition of collective and individual, communication versus segregation. By using small narratives he wants to shed light on ways we affect and are affected by artificial social and physical environments.
He has exhibited in The Netherlands and abroad and his work was included in The New Dutch Talent catalogue of 2017 from GUP magazine, and in the Encontros da Imagem 2017 festival program, while his project Point of View was shortlisted for FotoFilmic18.
More: http://www.vassilistriantis.com
Since starting to work in photography in 2009 Shlyk has had solo exhibitions in Belarus (Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk), Russia (Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Art, Moscow and Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint-Petersburg), Belgium (Extra City, Antwerp), China (Duloun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai) and participated in several international photo festivals (Breda Photo 2016 in Netherlands, Format 2017 in Derby, Belfast Photo Festival the UK, Photo Phnom Penh 2018). Since 2016 he is collaborating on multiple projects with Ben Van den Berghe. In 2017 his work was shortlisted for Prix Levallois, Shlyk became a laureate of Carte Blanche at Paris Photo and won ArtContest (Belgium). In 2018 he won Prijs Roger De Conynck and became the Public Prize Winner of ING Unseen Talent Award.
Hajdu Tamás (b. 1976) was born in Transylvania. Today, he works as both a veterinarian and a photographer in Baia Mare, Romania. His work has been recognised by a series of prizes, including the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards, and the 2015 LensCulture Exposure Awards. Tamás’ photographs have been exhibited in multiple exhibitions including the Spotlight Romania Show at GEMAK in The Hague, the Netherlands. His work has featured in a number of international publications, including Punctum, Practical Photography, Vice, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, The Independent, La Repubblica, National Geographic and The Guardian.
In 2015 she graduated in Cultural Studies from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and in 2019 she completed the course Experiences of Contemporary Photography at Docdocdoc School of Contemporary Photography (St. Petersburg). Exhibitions include: In the N apartment, all tricks are taken seriously, ZGA Gallery, St. Petersburg (2019); MoS Photo Prize, Art of Omsk City Museum (2019); Young Artists That Oksana Budulak and Sanya Zakirov Liked This Winter, Ploshchad Mira Museum Center, Krasnoyarsk (2020); and Young Photographers of Russia 2020, Innovative Cultural Center, Kaluga; Exhibition Hall, Tula (2020), Assuming the Distance: Speculations, Fakes and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow). She is a winner of The Calvert Journal Makers of Siberia Special Jury Prize (2019), the New East Photo Prize (2020), and the competition Krakow Show OFF at Photography Month in Krakow (2021). She lives and works in Moscow.
Her personal work is often photographic, but this is not an exclusive relationship. On the basis of her projects, there is very often a question: How do the campers manage the nearness with their peers (Hidden Living)? Why do some Chinese prefer to live in a false Parisian avenue rather than in a traditional hutong (Abroad is too far)? What is the counterpart that urges a person to gulp down mass amounts of food enough to hurt their body (Rotten Potato)? Where is our relationship with food and our body rooted (To tell my real intentions, I want to eat only haze like a hermit)? Behind these questions lies a desire to understand a social phenomenon. And humor is not excluded.
She also pays very special attention to actively involve people she works with in the construction of the projects.
Her work has been awarded with various prizes, publications and exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. She also took part in artistic residencies (China, France, Japan).
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/
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.
Helcel received an honorable mention in the European art thesis competition START POINT Prize 2020. He is a co-founder and active member of the theatre group Akolektiv Helmut.
The work of Eline Benjaminsen (NO, 1992) studies the lacking visuality of socioeconomic processes and how this effects our ability to engage with them. She deals with the challenge of perceiving market processes through photographic follow-the-money narratives that combine prints, video and text in mixed media installations.
In 2017 she graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (Department of Photography) with the project Where the money is made - Surfaces of algorithmic capital about the infrastructure of algorithmic stock trading. The project was awarded the Steenbergen Stipendium (2017) and was nominated for the Zilveren Camera category Prijs voor Storytelling (2018) along multiple other nominations. She collaborates with a variety of platforms, from museums and galleries to the financial press.
The latest exhibits of her work include Stroom (NL), FOTODOK (NL), Lianzhou Foto Festival (CN), Heden (NL) and Krakow Photomonth (PL).
Since 2008 she is based in Spain where she works as a freelance photojournalist, combining her personal projects with the teaching of photography. She has published in BuzzFeed News, El Pais, XL Semanal, L'Obs, Equal Times, 5W magazine, Interviú, El Periódico de Cataluña, 7k magazine, Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka among others.
Her projects address discrimination and societal dysfunctions in western society. She also works on youth radicalization and the raise of right-wing movements in Europe. Lately she has started to investigate the construction of national identity in post-Soviet regions in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She has won different awards, such as the Third Prize in POY Latam 2015 (Mexico); she has been awarded with the Grant Programa Crisálidas Signo Editores Grant 2019 (Spain), with a Helge Humelvoll Scholarship (USA 2017) and with the “Photojournalism Grant 2015” (GrisArt International School of Photography, Barcelona), among others.
Finalist of the Grand Press Photo 2019 and 2012 in Poland and of the 19th FotoPres la Ciaxa (2013); she was also nominated in 2018 and 2017 Edition of Photography Magazine Grant (London). She has participated in festivals such as PhotOn 2019 and 2018 (Spain), Imaginaria 2019 (Spain), UCL Festival of Culture in London (2017), FOTONOVIEMBRE Tenerife (2015) and the VIII Biennal de Xavier Miserachs (2014) among others.
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.
I started off with photography on a late age, because I have a history of pro-basketball player. I decided to go back and study after I quit basketball. After a stop at RITS Drama school in Brussels I started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent where I got my bachelor in Photography.
I have an undeniable curiosity and hunger for both small and large, well-known and less well-known stories. I use my camera as a key to enter a world or to make any contact. It gives me a fly on the wall feeling, with which I can experience a tranche de vie for a while. I always try to approach my subject as objectively as possible and let my eye do the work.
Photography helps me to understand certain facets of life in a better way.
I've always been attracted to uncommon subjects and stories, which aren't mainstream and easy to approach.
Seppe Vancraywinkel (1998) grew up on the countryside in Hoegaarden, Belgium. He has always been surrounded by his close friends and they were always on the go, they still are. Since 2016 Vancraywinkel felt the need to capture these moments analog in black- and-white. Black and white is an important aspect in his work. It’s Seppes way of creating a filter that shields his dreamlike world from reality. He feels like colours are too close to reality, they can cause unnecessary distractions. Seppe Vancraywinkels work revolves around stories, shapes and scales.
vancraywinkel.seppe@gmail.com@seppevancraywinkelhttps://seppevancraywinkel.com/
Konstantin Zhukov (1990) lives and works between Riga and London. After graduating from Riga Secondary School of Design and Art, Zhukov continued his studies at Central Saint Martins and London College of Communication in the United Kingdom.
He has participated in exhibitions and book art fairs including Paris Ass Book Fair at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Strange Perfume at South London Gallery, Queer Frontiers by Artiq and Pride in London, Riga Photography Biennale: NEXT 2021 and Riga Photomonth. Most recently, Zhukov has opened a solo show Black Carnation part 2 at ISPP gallery in Riga and is preparing to take part in the fourth edition of Paris Ass Book Fair at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.
Konstantin’s work has been published internationally both online and in print in such publications as i-D, CAP74024 and Arterritory. His work "An essay on self-confidence and homoerotic Islamic poetry”, originally published in Jezga magazine Vol. 2, was translated into Russian and published on Открытые (o-zine.ru) – a pioneering LGBTQ+ publication based in Moscow.
"My work focusses on absence. Absence that we try to fill in with information. My mother found her biological family through a Dutch television show and even though she was reunited with relatives, many questions remain, including why she was given up for adoption. My mother was born in Spain in 1964, when dictator Francisco Franco was ruling. It always felt strange not being able to talk about my mother’s past simply because we don’t know exactly what happened. With my work, I’m there for exploring the process of reconstruction, and the distortion of narrative within memory.
The projects I make are dealing with the relationship between politics, media and citizens. How these three opponents feed each other, need each other, but also exist in a constant power struggle. I examine the reliability of the image in the post-truth era, it forms a grey area where fact and fiction live close to each other. This is the area from where I position myself.
My visual language is based on what I see in the media and comes from the connection I had with the tv show where we discovered my relatives. The show shaped and directed my memory so much and intrigued me a lot. I am therefore also specifically interested in that what has been manipulated.
I use artificial light in order to give a cinematic feeling to the work, which is based on emotions that tries to lure its audience into believing what is created in front of them.
In my work I take on the role of a director that investigates what truth means in modern times."