Ksenia Ivanova is a documentary photographer based in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on themes of trauma, explored through long-term storytelling. She was a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award (2024) and the Picture of the Year, Online Storytelling (2021), and won the Lucie Foundation Documentary Award (2023).
Ksenia's projects have been featured in The Washington Post, Courrier International, XXI Revue, and Der Spiegel. She has also contributed to The New York Times, Zeit Online, Le Monde, Libération, and GEO France, among others.
She has been changing places from Slovenia to Greece for nearly a decade and after to Paris - for a quest of a home while on the other side she was always urged by the necessity to move.This is also the main focus she explores in her work, the question of her home, geographically as well as emotionally. Tereza’s life can be read within her photographic motives, her work stretches between diary and documentary photography, characterized by a minimalist reality that grows into surreality. Based on intuition and on her everyday life, the images spread from the north of Japan to the south of her kitchen. She is a self-thought photographer, mostly using 35mm film.
In 2020 she was the winner of Fotofever prize, the photo fair held every year in the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. Her work was exhibited at Voies Off in Arles, La Nuu Photo Festival in Catalonia, at Institut Francais in Phnom Penh, Analixforever Gallery in Geneva, Inselgalerie in Berlin, Photon Gallery in Ljubljana, etc. She selfpublished photozines that were exhibited at Athens Photo Festival.
Ivar Hagren obtained his bachelor's degree from the Gothenburg University of Photography in 2012 and his master's degree in fine art from Konstfack in 2014. Weronika Bela earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art in 2013 and 2015, respectively, also from Konstfack. Their works have been exhibited both in Sweden and internationally, including in Poland, Finland, and Greece. In 2022 they where Iaspis artist in residency grant holders in Stockholm.
They are currently developing a project on the defunct East German manufacturer ORWO, best known for affordable black-and-white photo paper, who held a monopoly over photographic darkroom material in the Eastern bloc market before ceasing operations in connection with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
IG @hagrenbela
Website www.hagrenbela.com
Pavo Marinović (b. 1995) is a photographer and visual artist who lives and works between France, Switzerland and the Balkans. In 2020, he graduated with a BA in Photography from Lausanne’s ECAL. His work has since been shown at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Paris Photo, amongst others. Traversing fields of identity, conflict, and collective memory through photography, video and installation, Marinović’s practice explores the state of a territory in transit, as well as its social effects.
Sasha participated in the 5th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art in MMoMA, previous year took a part of “Somewheres & Anywheres: Young Photography from Eastern Europe” exhibition in Berlin gallery EEP and join BERLIN PHOTO WEEK.
His short film “Swallowed by the Routine” was selected for the Fashion Film Awards 2019 by SHOWstudio X HARRODS and was shown in London last October.
The main themes explored by Sasha now are the struggle with the language, because words controls us and reduces our worldview; queer theory, that means infinite pluralism of identities, meanings without hierarchy, ever-changing flexible self-definition; and criticism/decentration of the concept of truth.
This three ideas are really close to each other like the liberation from automatisms, habits and the aspiration to independent, affective perception and action.
Inês Quente (1992, Avintes, Portugal) is a visual artist who lives and works between Vila Nova de Gaia and Porto.She has a master's degree in Documentary Filmmaking from the University for the Creative Arts (UK, 2017) and a degree in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (PT, 2015).She was a grantee of the Culture Moves Europe (2024), a program funded by the European Union and the Goethe Institut.Her practice navigates themes of ecology, memory and transformation.She showcases her work regularly since 2013, both nationally and internationally, such as her latest individual site-specific installation For Every Light Its Place, at Gallerí Úthverfa, in the city of Ísafjörður (ISK, 2024).She took part in the ArtsIceland international artistic residency (ISK, 2023 and 2024) and Grão research and artistic residency (PT, 2023).
Giaime Meloni is a visual researcher with a PhD in Architecture, currently living between two islands: Île-de-France and Sardinia. The aim of his work is to explore the role of the photography as a sensible instrument to narrate the space complexity. His researches has been published in various publications (MAM Saint Etienne, INTRU). In 2017, he was shortlisted for Premio Graziadei with his long-term project Das Unheimiliche. He teaches photography as an instrument of the making of the architectural design between France and Italy.
My practice is conceived as an act capable of questioning the nature of places.
The images provide a tangible proof of my presence in the territory, in a certain way they documented it. However I would like to take distance compared to the documentation – and strictly documentary photography – in order to provide a more universal reflection on our relationship with the space.
The photographic action that I develop aims to questioning the restitution of ordinary space in search of a visual and spatial connection with the subject. The specific interest of this practice is to investigate, by theory and practice, the photographic instantaneity and the message that it carries.
The paradox of images is that they pretends to reproduce things which are only themselves. But this is only an illusion, a conviction that is a part of the magic contemplation. In fact, during the act of photographing, I realize that things denying their existence by the image.
What it remains frozen into the fragments is the (artificial) reflection of reality as an intention of my gaze.
Every photos prove that there is an implicit message exceeding the limits of the image itself. I accept that the message of the images can be corrupted / destroyed at any time by the viewer / reader.
www.giaimemeloni.com
Oliver Lantos (b.1992) is a Hungarian photographer currently living and working in Budapest.
His works are mostly long term project, whose starting point are personal experience or a visceral reaction. He is interested in the systematization of his observations and researches, and the process of building these systems.
In his projects, he usually explores the effect of contemporary politics, the LGBTQ community, and the casual relationships between the problems of global social systems and their consequences, as well as their effects on human psyche and nature.
He graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest, in 2022, before that he studied at the KREA Contemporary Art Institute. Member of the Studio of Young Photographers since 2023. In 2024 he was awarded the József Pécsi Photography Grant.
He debuted as a photographer in 2016 at Krakow Photomonth with the “Olympia’s Diary” project. From 2017 to 2019, he was part of art collective Fashion House Limanka, whose works were presented as individual exhibitions in the Museum of Art in Łódź and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He currently works at the Museum of Art in Łódź, where he is curating the “Save as a draft” program of Instagram art residencies.
Luciana M. Vulea is a PhD student in Visual Arts and a university assistant at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Living in a world of images, she draws inspiration from a broad range of imagery and artistic techniques – many of which she integrates into her own practice. As a doctoral student, Vulea’s research examines the insertion of virtuality into the contemporary imaginary. Her role as a university assistant involves teaching 2D and 3D animation to students. Vulea’s work also spans conservation – through the restoration of old photographs – as well as various curatorial activities.
For the past 6 years, Snizhko participated in several group exhibitions, festivals and international fairs in The Netherlands, Japan, Ukraine, Austria and Czech Republic. Her installation “TINI” was awarded the Best Artwork Award and Public's Prize at Smart Illumination 2016, Yokohama, Japan, Honorable Mention and Public's Prize of Steenbergen Stipendium 2016, The Netherlands.
Polina Davydenko works mostly with the medium of photography overlapping with the media of video, audio and text. The key theme of her work is narrative and its various forms. She focuses on human-animal relationships and cultural stereotypes related to the issue. These become the starting point for playing out other contexts, which the author visually sensitively connects into one disturbing message.
Polina was born in Ukraine, but since childhood she lives in Czech Republic. She completed study at the Ivars Gravlejs’ Photography Studio at the FFA BUT in Brno. She has furthered her education at KASK in Gent, FAMU in Prague and at the FFA’s Studio Environment.
https://polidavydenko.tumblr.com/
After finishing his studies as an interior architect, he was eager to learn to work the camera. In an auto-didactic way, he developed his own unique vision on fashion photography and later on managed to fuse his moroccan roots, tradition and culture with the western world he grew up with. The last years his Moroccan DNA is flowing more and more through his veins and his works. The urge to show this rich moroccan heritage through an artistic eye is present in everything he portraits and the inspiration he gets from his motherland is endless.
https://mousmous.com/
As an artist, she works across a wide range of media including photography, installations, textile sculptures, interventions into urban space, etc. since 2012.
Alessandro Zoboli (b. 1990) graduated from the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia in 2014. Between 2015 and 2019 he worked in Alex Majoli’s studio as an assistant, refining his skills as a photographer, printer and retoucher. In 2019 he joined Cesura Agency as an official member. Over the past years he has worked on a number of different long-term projects exploring the relationship between North Africa and Europe. Zoboli has also documented the Covid-19 pandemic and housing crisis in Italy; travelling the country from North to South, he photographs the conditions of inequality that characterise western societies, highlighting the forgotten discomfort experienced by millions of families. His ongoing Shine On project explores the multifaceted and elusive face of today’s Britain: a liquid form, constantly changing and contradicting itself in search of a new identity.
Pauline Beugnies was born in Charleroi in 1982. She works on long-term personal photography projects. Recently, she start writing and directing films. She also works as a photojournalist for the press. She lived in Cairo for five years and studied Arabic there.
Pauline is focusing on the Arab and the Islamic world, trying to build bridges and to go beyond stereotypes. Her first book Génération Tahrir was published by Le Bec éditions in January 2016. She was the second recipient of the Camille Lepage award in Perpignan Visa pour l’Image festival in 2016.
Her latest project, "Behind The Sun", mixing photos, videos and documents was exhibited at BPS22 in 2018. Recently, she start writing and directing films. Her first documentary film "Lessa Aichin"(Still Alive) was selected at FIFF, Dok Leipzig and nominated at Magrittes du Cinema in 2018.
www.paulinebeugnies.com