Kaarina-Sirkku

Umberto Diecinove (b. 1978) is an artist and author with with a background in literature, philosophy and poetry and a master degree in photography. His projects have been presented in various international galleries, festivals, and cultural institutions, including the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center (Budapest, Hungary), the Muséum d’Orléans pour la Biodiversité et l’Environnement (France), and the Glass Box Gallery (Santa Barbara, California, USA), among others. In 2025, with the project I N S C Ṭ S, he was nominated for both the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.

eden levi am (b. 1992) is an artist, photographer, and queer activist based in Geneva. For several years they have developed a documentary approach that centres on activism and intimacy. Working primarily with analogue photography and video—and, more recently, performance—their practice offers a personal and affective view of the world that resonates with current social and political issues. From an intersectional feminist and decolonial perspective, their work addresses questions related to the body, gender, identities, and their representations. They graduated from the Vevey School of Photography (CEPV) in 2018. Their work has been exhibited and published in Switzerland and abroad since 2017. It was recently featured at Swiss and international venues and festivals such as Verzasca Foto Festival (2024), Fesses-tival (Geneva 2023), Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival (London 2023), Musée d’art de Pully (CH, 2017 & 2023), Urgent Paradise (Lausanne 2022), Forde (Geneva, 2022), Romantso Gallery Space (Athens 2020), Space Grotesk (Basel 2019), CPG (Geneva, 2019), La Nef (Jura, 2019), and others. Publications include Libération (2021) and Journal des Bains (2016–2025) as well as several exhibition catalogues. In 2021 they were awarded the City of Geneva’s Documentary Photography Grant. The resulting project, Rivers, was published in 2023 as a monograph by Miami Books and presented in a solo exhibition at Halle Nord in Geneva, accompanied by two performances during the Fesses‑tival, a festival that promotes positive and inclusive visions of bodies, identities, and sexualities. Most recently, they presented their latest project, ZONE ROUGE RACINES, within the framework of the JOUPH (2025) programme at Espace Libre in Biel/Bienne.

Máté Dobokay (b. 1988) is interested in conceptual art and experimental photography, particularly through manipulating the medium and neglecting the apparatus. He is graduated at University of Kaposvár on Photography BA department. He is a member of Studio of Young Artists’ Association. He received a Republican Scholarship for 2015‐2016, was shortlisted for the Leopold Bloom Award in 2015 and for the Esterházy Award also in 2017. During 2014 he was a member of the winning team at OFF_Festival, Bratislava and was nominated for the Lucien et Rodolf Hervé Prix. He was the youngest artist in “IMPACT: Abstraction & Experiment in Hungarian Photography” exhibition in New York. He has had some solo exhibitions and featured in several group shows. He is represented by acb Gallery, Budapest.

Weronika Bela (born 1988, Baerum) and Ivar Hagren (born 1986, Stockholm) are an artist duo based in Stockholm. In their project based practice, they work with the historical conditions of analog photography, its materiality and phenomena. They work with subtle visual worlds and develop associative stories in still images and video essays. They both have a master's degree in fine arts from Konstfack. Hagren/Bela were Iaspis studio fellows in 2022 and received the Hasselblad Foundation's nature photography scholarship in 2024.

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.

Vitalii Halanzha (b. 1991) is a Ukrainian artist photographer living and working in Kyiv. His artistic practice involves engagement with the landscape, employing it as a dynamic medium to explore the complex relationships between natural processes and society. In his recent work, Halanzha investigates the intersection of the enduring presence of warfare, environment, and perception. Using a restrained visual language, he documents the quiet aftermath of war. Avoiding the scenes of destruction, he invites viewers to observe what lingers - the latent threat, the buried remnants, the psychological and environmental imprints. Vitalii has been selected as an artist for the third cycle of the Parallel Photo Platform in 2019-20. His works have been exhibited in numerous galleries and festivals, such as Landskrona Foto, Les Rencontres d'Arles, Odesa Photo Days, Lodz Fotofestiwal, Photo London, etc. In 2025, he is one of the nominated artists for the FUTURES European Photography Platform.

Laura Van Severen is a photographer interested in landscape representation. She develops her artistic practice in the form of long-term projects that result from traversing, connecting, observing or interacting with a specific place. In doing so, she touches upon a variety of subjects, from global logistics and waste management to local rural realities or sound (hi)stories. Laura studied Fine Arts and Photography at KASK School of Arts in Ghent, (Belgium) where she obtained her MA in 2015. that same year she was selected as one of ten talents by the FOMU Photography Museum in Antwerp. In 2016, she published the photobook Land (The Eriskay Connection), which was awarded Best Dutch Book Design. In 2021, she became part of Futures Photography after being nominated by the Triennial of Photographie Hamburg. In 2023, she received the Creación Injuve grant from the Spanish government and participated in an exchange residency between Hangar Barcelona and Kunstiftung Baden–Württemberg in Germany. Under the title Listening–Gathering, she is currently creating a collection of stories in which sound impacts and materialises into concrete realities. Laura lives in Barcelona (Spain) where she also works as a freelance photographer, teacher and studio manager.

Maria Høy Hansen, b. 1995, is a Danish photojournalist with a BA from the Danish School of Media & Journalism. Through in-depth photography, her self-chosen work mainly focuses on systemic stories about human rights issues and ideology.