The
Artist
Hana Selena Sokolović
Lives and Works in
The Hague
Hana Selena Sokolović was born in Vienna in 1999 and grew up in Belgrade. She is a visual artist and researcher working between the Balkans and the Netherlands. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, some of which are As Water Softens Stones (Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, 2025), Push, Pull, Shift (Živi Atelje DK, Zagreb, 2025), 00:05:59 (Paradise, The Hague, 2024), and Fragments in Transit (Beetroot Studio, Thessaloniki, 2024). Alongside her artistic practice, she has worked with children in educational and socially engaged settings, an experience that continues to shape her people-centered and collaborative approach to art. Hana holds a BA in Photography and New Media from FAMU in Prague (2021) and an MA in Photography and Society from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2025). She currently lives and works between Belgrade and The Hague.
Projects
2025
Dear Orchid
There are no photographs from the year my sisters, eight and ten at the time, fled Sarajevo at the beginning of the Bosnian War. What remains is a diary, written by my oldest sister. She wrote through displacement, and that writing became the only testimony in our family archive that speaks to a time I did not witness but have come to know through her words and the stories passed down within our family—a time that has deeply impacted the course of our lives and continues to shape my sense of family, identity, and belonging.
The diary covers a period from spring 1992 to winter 1993, during which they moved through several temporary homes across Croatia before eventually settling in Zagreb. In Dear Orchid, I return to these places with my other sister and our father. Using the diary as a guide, we traced a path from Sarajevo to Hvar, Jelsa, and finally Zagreb, revisiting landscapes carrying the memory of their displacement. This journey became the foundation for Dear Orchid, a body of work comprising an 18-minute film, a series of photographs and a publication.
This act of return, personal, political, and embodied—asks how the postwar generation might carry its inheritances with care and responsibility. To engage with the archive is to engage with history not as past, but as structure, active, transmitted, and embedded in the present, carried through generations of sisterhood. The archive, like grief, demands to be held, as something unfinished, unresolved, and still urgently alive.
Hana Selena Sokolović
was nominated by
Organ Vida
in
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Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.
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He approached photography as a self-taught artist after earning a diploma in Graphic Design and Art Direction from NABA Milan in 2014.
In 2015, after spending one year in Tbilisi (Georgia) working on a documentary about Abkhazian refugees, he returned to Italy and joined the photography collective CESURA, where he remained for two years. During this time, he worked as an assistant to photographer Gabriele Micalizzi and collaborated with Alex Majoli (MAGNUM) on the production of several major exhibitions. While at CESURA, he shifted away from a photojournalistic approach, developing a long-term, research-driven photographic practice with a strong focus on photobooks.
After leaving the collective in 2017, he began working as a freelance photographer. His journey took him first to Siberia, where he worked on the project I Don’t Try to Feel Awake Anymore. In 2019, in Oklahoma, where a chance encounter with Kristal and her son Skyler led to Love Mom, an ongoing project that explores the sometimes toxic relationship between a mother and her son while also reflecting on emptiness and the profound solitude embedded in the vastness of the American suburbs.
In 2020, driven by the need to find a place to call home, he moved from Milan to a small village of 50 inhabitants in the Val di Noto. There, he began working on All These Goodbyes, a body of work that serves as both self-reflection and the story of an escape.
In the spring of 2021, he spent three months in Denmark collaborating with photographer Jacob Aue Sobol (MAGNUM) on the production of his book James House (2022).
In 2022, he was selected as one of the 25 winners of Italian Panorama, an open call organized by Vogue Italia and PhotoVogue.
In January 2023, the Penumbra Foundation (New York, USA) awarded him a full scholarship for its Long-Term Photobook Program.
Igor Shiller (1996) is a Serbia-born, Amsterdam-based visual artist who graduated with a degree in photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2021. The following year, he was nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award. His work has been showcased at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Unfair Amsterdam and the EYE Film Museum, among others. In 2024, he received the Mangelos Award, honoring him as Serbia’s best young visual artist.Schiller’s artistic practice explores the lasting imprint of childhood, drawing inspiration from memories and his Balkan roots. Through photography, film, and set design, he transforms family archive into uncanny dreamscapes saturated with tenderness and warmth. Embracing play as both method and subject, he turns toys, lullabies, and games into historical artifacts that reveal how tradition and upbringing shape and perpetuate rigid systems. As colors grow richer and characters take form, the line between remembering and reinventing begins to blur. What started as a search for fragments of memory became an unfolding tale of identity and belonging.
Graduated in Political Science and Urban Sociology, his work unfolds in territories left, maintained or deliberately built on the fringes of our cities. He takes them on over a long period of time and draws up a personal cartography, walking a fine line between documentary and fine art photography. He attaches particular importance to form, colour and material, which serve as points of encounter with his mental universe. In this way, he constructs a visual language that is both frontal and polysemous, offering a singular vision in which human frailties are transfigured by new lines of force. His work is regularly exhibited at festivals in France and abroad, like Athens Photo Festival, Tbilisi Photo Festival, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles or Circulation(s). He was awarded the Maison Blanche Prize in 2021.
Glorija Lizde (b. 1991, Split) holds an MA in Photography (Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb) and a BA in Film and Video (Arts Academy Split). Her practice focuses on recreation and reinterpretation of the archives and memory interweaving documentary and staged photography, text and objects. She has had several solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows in Croatia and internationally, including the O21 OSTRALE Biennale, She Who Starts the Song (17th Gjon Mili International Exhibition of Photography and Moving Image), Familiar Fantoms (Residency Unlimited, New York), Of This World – Envisioning Alternative Cartographies (Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center), Being/Seeing (QUAD Gallery), Athens Photo Festival (Benaki Museum), In-between (The Bridge and Tunnel Gallery, New York), Floodlit Room – Women’s Photographic Practices in Croatia, among others. Her works are included in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan. Lizde was selected for the international emerging artists program Parallel – European Photo Based Platform in 2018 and 2021. She received the Dr. Éva Kahán Foundation Scholarship and Residency in 2022 and was awarded the Radoslav Putar Award the same year, recognizing her as the best young visual artist in Croatia.
Rūta Kalmuka is a Latvian photographer whose passion for analogue photography took root during her secondary school years under the mentorship of Andrejs Grants. For roughly seven years, she immersed herself in the art of film developing, darkroom printing, and the finer details of traditional photography. This hands-on experience laid the foundation for her enduring commitment to analogue processes. Despite the demands of a busy editorial career, Kalmuka consistently nurtured her personal art practice. She created bodies of work focused on her immediate family, capturing intimate narratives through the tactile, deliberate medium of film. Over the years, she participated in numerous group exhibitions, both in Latvia and abroad, showcasing her evolving perspective on family life and everyday rituals. In 2022, she transitioned from the news agency to a new role as a photographer in a museum setting, affording her more time and creative freedom to develop her ideas. This shift allowed Kalmuka to delve deeper into the conceptual aspects of her projects, further refining her analogue techniques. Two years later, in 2024, she exhibited a long-term family-centered project at the ISSP Gallery—an exhibition that encapsulated her ongoing exploration of memory, identity, and personal history. Through her distinct blend of traditional processes and reflective storytelling, Kalmuka continues to expand the expressive potential of analogue photography.
Julius Thissen (1993, the Netherlands) lives and works in Arnhem, NL. Their work investigates themes of community and representation, masculinity, sports, and competition. Originating from their background as a performance artist, Thissen's photographic practice aims to create narratives that explore the fine line between performing and failing. These themes are closely tied to contemporary performance-driven culture and the influence of societal expectations on behavior. Their work is deeply rooted in personal experiences as a genderqueer and transmasculine individual. Thissen strongly opposes the restrictive and often binary narratives imposed on transgender and queer individuals.
Thissen has been nominated for the Hendrik Valk Prize, Arnhemse Nieuwe, and the Warsteiner Blooom Awards. In 2023, they received the Artist Basis Fund and, more recently, a Mondriaan Fund Artist Project Grant for their new project Bones of Graphene, Skin of Kevlar.
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I am a Danish-American documentary photographer and visual artist dedicated to creating space for Black interiority and complexity. With a BA in photojournalism, I approach photography through storytelling with the awareness of genuine representation. Navigating from this perspective, I aim to capture the spaces where we are closest to our authentic self.
As I turn my camera towards the reality of everyday-Black-existence in its simplicity and extraordinary, I want to uplift the voices and stories of afrodiasporic individuals. As I turn the camera on myself, I explore both personal and collective history. Raised between Copenhagen and Hamburg with African American heritage, I work across local and global contexts, using my practice as a language through which I connect with and express Black existence.
Rafael Roncato (Brazil, 1989) is an interdisciplinary visual artist, editor, and educator working between Brazil and the Netherlands. His practice examines colonial memory, media myths, and the politics of representation, focusing on how images construct belief systems and shape collective perception. Grounded in documentary photography and expanded through archival research, video, and editorial strategies, Roncato develops semi-fictional, non-linear narratives that interrogate contemporary media landscapes and historical power structures.
Inspired by comics, cinema, and Brazilian (post)modernism, his work moves fluidly across formats, from artist books to exhibitions and multimedia projects. He holds a Master’s in Photography and Society from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, where he teaches artist bookmaking and visual storytelling and mentors emerging practitioners.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Netherlands Fotomuseum, Noorderlicht International Photo Festival, PhMuseum Days, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, Encontros da Imagem, and Schwules Museum Berlin. His photobook Tropical Trauma Misery Tour received the 1st Prize at the Kassel Dummy Award ’23 (GER), the Imaginária Festival Dummy Awards ’23 (BR), and a Special Mention at the Hong Kong Photobook Festival ’23.
Portrait of Rafael Roncato by Gita Cooper van Ingen
Inspired by comics, cinema, and Brazilian (post)modernism, his work moves fluidly across formats, from artist books to exhibitions and multimedia projects. He holds a Master’s in Photography and Society from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, where he teaches artist bookmaking and visual storytelling and mentors emerging practitioners.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Netherlands Fotomuseum, Noorderlicht International Photo Festival, PhMuseum Days, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, Encontros da Imagem, and Schwules Museum Berlin. His photobook Tropical Trauma Misery Tour received the 1st Prize at the Kassel Dummy Award ’23 (GER), the Imaginária Festival Dummy Awards ’23 (BR), and a Special Mention at the Hong Kong Photobook Festival ’23.
Portrait of Rafael Roncato by Gita Cooper van Ingen
Andong Zheng (1992, China) lives and works in Rotterdam, NL. With a hybrid background in engineering and fine art, Zheng was trained to focus on micro details within rigid causal frameworks, yet he often found himself questioning the macro structures they sustain. His work explores how seeing itself becomes a site of epistemological asymmetry. For him, image-making is less about mapping established knowledge systems than about dismantling and reconfiguring them, a way of engaging with the gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions that lie between these systems and the world. Through this practice, he seeks to open up new ways of knowing that traverse rationality.
Zheng was shortlisted for the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award (2024) and musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Photography Award (2025). His work has also been featured in publications such as The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice, British Journal of Photography, and Chinese Photography.
Zheng was shortlisted for the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award (2024) and musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Photography Award (2025). His work has also been featured in publications such as The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice, British Journal of Photography, and Chinese Photography.
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Emese Bíborka Szakács studied at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University. She is currently pursuing a degree in Art History at the University of Pécs.
Her interests focus on the past and present of experimental photography, as well as the cultural role of new media. As a staff member of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, she is involved in organizing international exhibitions and professional programs. She also works as a curator and writer within the frameworks of the Studio of Young Photographers (FFS) and the Studio of Young Artists’ Association (FKSE), contributing to the professional development and realization of several exhibitions in recent years.
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Salvatore Vitale (b. 1986, Palermo, Italy) is a Swiss-based artist, director, and professor whose work explores the complexity of contemporary societies. Using expanded and speculative storytelling through mixed media techniques, he focuses on the politics of systems that regulate modernity and the impact of technological transformations.
Vitale is the Artistic Director of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival and FUTURES Photography, both international platforms dedicated to contemporary photography. He also serves as a Professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where he leads the Transmedia Storytelling Programme. Previously, he was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of YET magazine, an international photography publication.
Vitale’s work has received international awards. It is featured in several public and private collections and has been widely exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.
Emese Mucsi is a Hungarian-born curator, and art critic. Emese curates exhibitions where photography is interpreted in the context of contemporary art and works with artists who have an expanded idea of photography and produce photo-based works. Her projects bring together artists and photographers with photojournalists, writers, editors, and other thinkers to experiment with new approaches to photography. She graduated from the Faculty of Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2013, and from the Faculty of Hungarian Literature and Linguistics at the University of Szeged in 2017. She is a member of the curators’ collective BÜRO imaginaire since 2012. Since 2013, she ran projects as a freelance curator. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Editor-in-Chief of Artmagazin Online. Emese is a curator of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest since 2018. She is the member of Global Photographies Network since 2020. She founded DOXA exhibition space and editorial den in 2022. She is doing her PhD in the Film, Media, and Contemporary Culture PhD program at Eötvös Loránd University. Emese is a guest lecturer at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (2023) and the University of Szeged (2024).
Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011.
His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He devises curatorial projects placing conversations in the public realm around visual culture, critical thinking. These include events (PhotoIreland Festival, Halftone Print Fair, arts residency How to Flatten a Mountain, and New Irish Works), a cultural hub (The Library Project: Ireland’s Art bookshop, host to a unique resource library of photobooks and a productive arts programme), publishing projects that distribute inexpensive access to local practices, research projects (Critical Academy: examining contemporary art practices). He works collaboratively with a growing network of organisations, noticeably through ambitious Creative Europe partnerships.
During the Summer 2020 lockdown he launched the critical publication OVER Journal, now distributed globally. He received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Bursary to deepen research on the broad historical and specific artistic context of Photography in Ireland, to curate an ambitious survey exhibition in PhotoIreland Festival 2022 and to publish a series of publications on the matter. He regularly contributes to publications such as the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies, edited by Lucy Soutter, Duncan Wooldridge.
See some of his Graphic and Web Design work in the 100 Design Archive.
Julia Gelezova is a Cultural Producer and Curator, specialising in contemporary lens-based practices. She is General and Project Manager for PhotoIreland, producing events throughout the year like the annual PhotoIreland Festival and Critical Academy, while collaborating on ambitious projects like Creative Europe Photography Platforms—Parallel and Futures. Julia is co-editor of OVER Journal: The Critical Journal of Photography and Visual Culture for the 21st Century. In 2024, she has founded vicinities.network - a peer network for Visual Arts curators and professionals based in Ireland.
She has ample experience in producing exhibitions and events, including curatorial work and project management, has vast and successful experience in personal and collective application writing for bodies like the Arts Council of Ireland and local councils. She has participated in portfolio reviews, acted as visiting lecturer, and also worked in an editorial capacity and translation for artists and other arts professionals, including work for The Routledge Guide to Photography and Visual Culture. Most recently, she curated the 2021 edition of PhotoIreland Festival and was the Centre Culturel Irlandais cultural producer resident 2022. She is a member of the AICA International Association of Art Critics.
Iveta Gabaliņa (1979) is a curator, artist and educator. She has studied photography at the studio of Andrejs Grants, at Bournemouth Art Institute, and in the MA programme at Alto University in Helsinki. Her work has been exhibited in Latvia and internationally, including at C/O (Berlin, Germany), GESTE (Paris), and Williams Tower Gallery (Houston, USA). Gabaliņa has participated in photography festivals in Singapore, Hanover, and elsewhere. Her work is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Geste Paris, and the Deutsche Börse Art Collection.
Since 2008 she has been part of ISSP team, responsible for numerous educational and curatorial projects. In 2018 she founded ISSP Gallery - an exhibition space dedicated to contemporary photography.
I’ve always loved photography, even if it sounds like a cliche. The first photos I took, I did without knowing how to do that, without paying any attention to framing, subject or composition. After a while, I began to understand what is happening in the space between me as a photographer and the subject I was photographing. And many years later, I also understood why I love to photograph. To communicate. A message, a concept, an emotion.
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