The
Artist
Ignacio Navas
Lives and Works in
Madrid
Ignacio Navas (b. 1989 Tudela, lives and works in Madrid) creates computational, generative and interactive projects based on photographic image to research how dominant structures—political, economic, or social—are made present and shape our everyday affairs. With this approach, Ignacio explores the possibilities that emerging technologies, computing, and new media offer to the photographic medium.
His recent work has received support from several grants and institutions, including the Visual Arts Creation Fellowship (Community of Madrid, 2024) and the Plastic and Visual Arts Fellowship (Government of Navarra, 2024). His images and interactive installations have also been part of initiatives such as Plat(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2024), the Photoworks Digital Programme (UK, 2023), the Return2Ithaca Residency (Greece, 2023), and the FUTURES European Photography Platform (Netherlands, 2022).
Ignacio believes that contemporary creation cannot be understood without actively engaging in its own management. This conviction drives him to lead collective initiatives such as La Embajada (2024–), a platform to showcase projects created within the Spanish territorial context in the unofficial circuit of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, or El Local (2023–), an independent space for contemporary photography in Madrid.
Projects
2025
KICKFLIP
KICKFLIP is an audiovisual installation featuring an interactive project—similar to a visual novel or walking simulator videogame—created using photographs, found documents, and audio recordings.
This project gathers the testimonies of a group of people whose teenage years revolved around a skatepark in Tudela, a small city in the north of Spain. Their personal stories, set in the 2000s and told from the present looking back, aim to offer new perspectives on themes related to adolescence, such as academic failure and school dropout, substance abuse, the discovery of sexuality, and the search for personal identity through musical subcultures.
Ignacio Navas
was nominated by
PHotoESPAÑA
in
2022
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.
Ignacio Navas draws from everyday life to explore the political, social and personal structures that comprise us. His project is a critique on the capitalist system, and the
instances of micro-violence that define it.
With her Paul project, Cristina Galán suggests the subversion of identity and something sinister under the visually-polished surfaces of reality. Figures suspended in
time appear in an idealised but impersonal world, representing the clichéd spaces of consumer society.
A disturbing feeling also permeates Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect project, which saw the artist recreate the everyday lives of a group of Moroccan youngsters, as they await a future beyond an immigrant centre in Seville.
In Como la casa mía Laura C. Vela accompanies Xirou, a Chinese immigrant woman, in her search for a way of being in the world. The work is both an exploration of the main character’s inner world and a significant photographic encounter between two women.
Finally, Lorena Morin reflects on family life through intimate images of her partner, herself and their children. Captured in shared domestic spaces, her photographic diary reflects 15 years of familial love and unbreakable bonds.
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Sarah Stone (U.K., 1994) is a photographer and artist based in Antwerp, Belgium.
She received her master’s degree in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2022, winning the Photography Department prize. Her photographs have been published in .Tiff Magazine, Der Greif and Subbacultcha/Different Class and self-published books such as: 'La Vie De Camille' (2023), ‘ANNA’ (2022) and ‘The End of The Pipeline’ (2021). Her project '76 collages' was published by SO-RI in 2021 and a following series ‘98 collages’ is set to be published in 2025. In 2023 her image 'Whistle' from the project 'ANNA' was selected for ONBOARDSBiennale, an exhibition of art displayed on billboards throughout Antwerp. Her collage 'West Virginia Interior' was published in Karoo magazine in 2024. In 2024 Stone exhibited her work as part of the outside art trail "Out ofOffice" with BREEDBEELD in Gooik, Belgium and in 2023 with the FOMU(Photography Museum Antwerp) as part of .Tiff. Her collages were exhibited withStieglitz19 Gallery in the group show ‘Collage! Collage! Collage!’ with Vincent Delbrouck and Miriam Tolke (2021) as well as a pop-up in (2020). In 2025 she began her own TOT ZINES project, publishing local artists in the zine format.
Stone’s work is created around a strong signature of aesthetic, poetic and colourful images, conveying a powerful message. This is substantiated by her usage of analog photography, creating imagery that presents an open and honest reflection of her surroundings, details, friends or objects that she is drawn to. Shot on 35mm film, they reveal her inner life at a certain time, almost like a distant diary. Stone's series are often founded on human traces, whether that be in personal relationships, or relationships to objects and materiality. Each with its own angle of approach, but based on the beauty of life and it's details.
Her photographs illustrate and inspire people to embrace colour, texture, shape, and to see the world as a theatrical stage, full of props and characters. To capture the atmospheric variety of photographs, Stone uses various analogue cameras and experiments with making collages, using paint in her collages and works on paper.
Adi Tudose (b. 1987, Bucharest) is an artist-photographer based in Budapest. After completing his studies at The National University of Theatre and Film, he further expanded his artistic vision through experiences in Milano. He is pursuing an MA in Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, where his practice continues evolving. For him, the camera is far more than a tool—it is a medium through which he connects with the world around him. The streets become dynamic, ever-changing spaces where unpredictable encounters unfold. Immersing himself fully in these environments, Tudose approaches his subjects with empathy and sensitivity, capturing their lives with care and revealing emotional depth and vulnerability.
Tudose can transform fleeting, transient moments into cohesive compositions, bringing order and harmony to the everyday. Through this process, he taps into the subconscious, offering viewers a sense of unity within the chaos. His seamless blending of form and content sets him apart, creating simple yet mysterious representations. His work is characterized by cohesive framing, a rich interplay of diverse elements, and tuned figure-to-ground relationships. Tudose’s work offers an invitation to reflect on what photography can reveal about the human condition. Each frame carries layers of emotional and sociological insight, capturing the essence of his subjects while creating space for the viewer to connect with them on a personal level. Each photograph becomes more than a visual representation; it transforms into a deeply felt emotional experience.
Empathy and vulnerability lie at the core of Tudose’s creative process, enabling him to form deeper connections with his subjects and uncover meaningful relationships that might otherwise remain hidden. His work seeks to evoke genuine emotions, delving into themes of social and gender representation while fostering a sense of belonging. In doing so, he transforms emotional disconnection into moments of peace and truth.
As an artist, Tudose is committed to long-term projects that tell meaningful stories, ones that challenge him to confront fear, embrace vulnerability, and transform his personal experiences into shared human truths. His photography doesn’t just document—it transcends, offering symbols of connection and hope in a chaotic world.
Viacheslav Poliakov is a visual artist, photographer, graphic designer. He was born in 1986 in Kherson, Ukraine. Obtained a master’s degree in art education from Kherson State University. Now based in Lviv, Ukraine.
His art practice exists on the intersection of documentary photography and design. He's interested in objects and spaces made by people, the historic background behind the urban landscape.
Viacheslav is a finalist of Foam Talents, Vienna Photobook Festival, Circulations, Krakow Photomonth Showoff, Fotofestival Lodz Grand Prix, Prix Levallois. His works were published in the Foam Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, GUP magazine, Lensculture, The Washington Post.
Benjamin Li is a conceptual artist based in Rotterdam. His work pushes on questions of identity, representation, displacement, everyday life, foodways and a sense of home. He currently approaches these questions centrally through an exploration of the Chinese-Indonesian restaurant.
Since 2014, Benjamin has visited over 1.200 Chinese-Indonesian restaurants across the Netherlands in an endeavour to build an archive of this restaurant. During these visits he has collected menus, pieces of tableware and written memories of his encounters. Importantly, he has also taken photographs of over 250 unique Chinese-Indonesian dishes at these restaurants. Throughout the years Benjamin also traced back and collected many sugar packs, postcards, beer glasses and other objects all linked to (defunct) Chinese-Indonesian restaurants.
Benjamin finds beauty in the Chinese-Indonesian restaurant, but for him it is also a way to come to understand his Chinese roots and family history. Many of his family members, including his parents, have worked in the restaurants as way to survive and integrate into Dutch society. With his work Benjamin tries to honour the restaurant, where others at times mock it. Today he sees the significance of his work in straddling the tension between bringing out the absurdity of certain stereotypes and fostering a reappraisal of the beauty and heritage of the Chinese-Indonesian restaurant.
Since 2014, Benjamin has visited over 1.200 Chinese-Indonesian restaurants across the Netherlands in an endeavour to build an archive of this restaurant. During these visits he has collected menus, pieces of tableware and written memories of his encounters. Importantly, he has also taken photographs of over 250 unique Chinese-Indonesian dishes at these restaurants. Throughout the years Benjamin also traced back and collected many sugar packs, postcards, beer glasses and other objects all linked to (defunct) Chinese-Indonesian restaurants.
Benjamin finds beauty in the Chinese-Indonesian restaurant, but for him it is also a way to come to understand his Chinese roots and family history. Many of his family members, including his parents, have worked in the restaurants as way to survive and integrate into Dutch society. With his work Benjamin tries to honour the restaurant, where others at times mock it. Today he sees the significance of his work in straddling the tension between bringing out the absurdity of certain stereotypes and fostering a reappraisal of the beauty and heritage of the Chinese-Indonesian restaurant.
Olga Kocsi (1987) is a multimedia artist based in Budapest and Freiburg, creating multi-sensory experiences that explore topics at the intersection of various scientific fields. Her work investigates the relationship between reality and virtual reality, as well as its potential evolution in the future, while pushing and mapping the boundaries between private and public spheres.
Kocsi is known for her complex installations that envelop the viewer, employing a wide range of media including photography, video, animation, and VR. A key aspect of her practice is providing guided experiences that encourage audiences to engage with socially complex messages through self-reflection.
Her main areas of focus include human stories, the mapping of time and reality, and simulation. As an experimental thinker, Kocsi boldly plays with spaces, surfaces, and materials, crafting unconventional situations that actively involve the viewer.
Kristīne Krauze-Slucka is a visual artist based in Riga, Latvia, whose conceptual practice interrogates the materiality of industrially produced objects, transforming them into catalysts for pseudo-social anthropological inquiries that unravel conventional perceptions.
Her approach to photographic image-making transcends the traditional lens, venturing into the realm of meta images and afterimages. By employing experimental, camera-less techniques, she treats the photographic medium not only as a tool for visual representation but as a tactile, sensory and embodied experience that underscores the physical and material processes of creation.
Balancing familiarity with abstraction, her work invites viewers to reconsider the often distorted relationships between man-made materials and the environment, ultimately engaging a sensory dialogue about our perception.
Krauze-Slucka holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Visual Communication Department of the Latvian Academy of Arts. She was awarded the Grand Prix of the Nordic and Baltic Young Artist Award in 2020 and has been twice nominated for the prestigious Purvītis Prize.
In 2022, she was selected as a FUTURES artist, an honor awarded by the Europe-based photography platform. She also serves as a lecturer at the International Summer School of Photography (ISSP).
Nuno Alexandre Serrão is a Portuguese photographer and director whose work explores the relationship between natural landscapes and human-made structures, combining cinematic formalism and raw storytelling. Led by curiosity, he often creates or documents non-linear narratives about uncomfortable and ambiguous topics that challenge comfort zones and encourage reflection, ultimately provoking questions about what is fundamental or emergent.
His work has gained international attention, and is published in established media outlets like HuffPost, Público, Expresso, L’Hémcycle, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and GQ. It has also been exhibited in cultural institutions such as Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin, ImageNation in Milan, ArtIcon in Paris, and the National Museum of Finland. His short films and commercial projects have been recognized at festivals like Aesthetica, Caminhos do Cinema Português, FUSO, and Inshadow Festival.
Critics describe Serrão’s work as ‘pursuing the beauty that emerges at the intersection of nature and humanity’ (Ana Marques Maia, Público, 2024). Claire Ducresson-Boët describes his landscapes as ‘places of passage and transition where time seems to stand still, offering a moment of quietness before life resumes.’
Parisa Aminolahi (Tehran, Iran), based in the Netherlands, is a freelance filmmaker and photographer. Her series are mostly long-term projects. And her work explores themes such as displacement, exile, homeland, family, and childhood memories, using old family photographs, self-portraits, and her own family members as subjects. Her mediums include photography, documentary filmmaking, animation, painting, and mixed media.She studied theatre stage design (BA) and animation (MA) at University of Art in Tehran and documentary filmmaking (MA) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a recipient of The Firecracker Photographic Grant, The Netherlands Film Fund, GUP New Dutch Photography Talent of the Year and One World Media Student Film Bursary. Her dummy book, Tehran Diary, was shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award, BUP Book Award, and PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant. She has held screenings and exhibitions locally and internationally and is represented by Ag Galerie.
Dev Dhunsi (b. 1996) is a multimedia artist working at the intersection of photography, textiles, and installation. Utilizing water and movement as central elements in his projects, he creates works that invite reflection on complex themes such as identity, belonging, migration, social justice, and injustice.
Through his art, Dhunsi provides space for stories that are often overlooked or suppressed, illustrating how historical, cultural, and political forces shape our lives and experiences. Addressing global issues like migration and colonialism as well as personal experiences of loss and belonging, he creates works that connect past and present, diverse geographies, and identities. His work encourages viewers to reflect on how we understand and relate to the world around us as he simultaneously look at the world through a lens of queer theories and diasporic gaze. Recent exhibitions include: Fotogalleriet (Oslo; NO), Mint abf (Stockholm; SE), MELK (Oslo; NO), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo; NO), National Sports Museum in Stockholm (SE; Stockholm).
Peter Pflügler (b. 1987) is an Austrian visual storyteller based in the Netherlands. He holds a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Pflügler’s work centres on the dynamics of secrets, intergenerational trauma and silence. With the help of photography, video and text, he aims to resurrect the unseen, the unknown and the hidden. His Now is not the right time project has been shown at numerous festivals and exhibitions throughout Europe, whilst the dummy was nominated for several international prizes, including the Kassel Dummy Award.Website: peterpflugler.com
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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.
Danaé Panchaud is a Swiss exhibition curator, museologist and lecturer specialising in photography. She has been the director of the Centre de la photographie Genève since 2022, after serving from 2018 to 2021 as director and curator of the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland. She trained in photography at the Vevey School of Photography before completing a bachelor’s degree in visual arts with a specialisation in curatorial practices at Geneva University of Art and Design. She later studied museology at Birkbeck, University of London, earning a master’s degree in 2017. She has held positions in several Swiss institutions in the fields of contemporary art, design and science, including the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, where she was a research associate from 2007 to 2012, the Gallery SAKS in Geneva in 2012-2013, the Fondation Verdan in Lausanne as scientific collaborator, and the mudac in Lausanne, where she was in charge of the public relations from 2012 to 2017. As a free-lance curator, she has curated exhibitions for several Swiss and international museums, independent spaces and galleries since 2012. She regularly writes texts for monographs of contemporary artists, exhibition catalogues, and thematic publications such as Flora Photographica, co-authored with William Ewing and published by Thames & Hudson in 2022. She was a lecturer at the Vevey School of Photography from 2014 to 2018, and regularly lectures at art and photography schools in Switzerland. In 2023, she joined the teaching faculty of the CAS in Theory and History of Photography at University of Zurich.
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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