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Salvatore Vitale
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.
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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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Laura Paloma (*1995) is an artist and writer based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Her practice questions the relationship between image, object, text, language, and play online. She is interested in the détournement and misuse of corporate social media platforms, as well as the negotiations that take place between the user and the platform. She works with DIY, lo-fi, and self-publishing techniques, as well as with found or recycled physical and digital materials. Her projects address ideas of authorship, materiality, and performativity of digital and networked images and texts. Context-based and site-specific, her practice explores various formats, ranging from installations to online and print publications, as well as long-duration social media performances.
She has exhibited her work in several off-spaces in Switzerland, made a live desktop performance for Screen Walks (Photographers’ Gallery London & Fotomuseum Winterthur), was nominated for Prix Photoforum 2023, and has published a zine with Edition Taberna Kritika, Bern. In 2024 she was artist-in-residence at hangar.org in Barcelona and house guest at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.
She holds a Master’s in Contemporary Arts Practice in Literary Writing from Bern Academy of the Arts, where she worked as assistant from 2021 to 2023.
Visual artist, burned-out climate activist, educator. Born in 1987 in Warsaw, Poland. Graduate of the University of Arts in Poznań , majoring in Photography. She heads the Second Studio of Photography (together with Dr. Mariusz Filipowicz) and the Studio of Photography Basics at the Faculty of Graphics of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A member of the Pracownia Wschodnia Association, the Program Council of the Pracownia Wschodnia Gallery, and the P.H.U. Sitex collective. She is interested in grassroots practices of self-organisation and resistance. She navigates the conceptual realm that exists both within and beyond the binary oppositions foundational to the construction of Western civilization (‘culture versus nature’ and ‘art versus science’). She employs various strategies – visual art, academic research, activist experience – to transcend, deconstruct and rethink these binaries, bringing seemingly heterogeneous fi elds of knowledge to life. Although her practice is based on abstract ideas, the artist always remains close to material reality, focusing on ways of understanding (and feeling) how parts of the ecosystem live and die and how they affect each other.
Katerina Tsakiri was born in Athens in 1991 and she is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied Photography and Audiovisual Arts in Athens and has an MFA in Photography from the University of Gothenburg. Since 2015 she has been working part-time as a visual artist and part-time as a commercial photographer. From 2019 she has been devoting her time to her artistic practice. She works with self-portraiture and her subjects are mainly autobiographical. The theme of her work is the female identity in Western culture with a focus on the female body. Her practice expands from staged photography to video performances and sculptures. In her latest project, she uses documentary photography to share the journey of her breast cancer treatment. She unravels through the photographic medium her body’s fragility and the impact of the illness on her female identity.
Karol Szymkowiak (b. 1983) is a photographer, photobook artist, curator and educator based in Poznań, Poland. Self-taught photographer, specializing in documentary photography and photo collages - work with archives. His work revolves around themes such as environmental problems, military and civil defence, physical and mental immobilisation. He is constantly fascinated by finding surrealism in faithfully recording reality using photography. As a photographer, he has participated in over a dozen group exhibitions. Since 2015 he is art curator of a long-term photography documentary project The Września Collection (Kolekcja Wrzesińska) whose patron is the Mayor of the City and Municipality of Września. As part of his work on this project, he is collaborating with leading Polish photographers to create photobooks and exhibitions about his home town of Września. Karol is a member of The Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF) and a scholarship recipient of the Marshal of the Wielkopolska Region in the field of culture. He is also a lecturer in photography at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Jeroen De Wandel uses photography as a starting point to create new images from all sorts of material (photographic or otherwise), using his own photography in different shapes, contexts and meanings.
His artistic work often starts from a personal need to react within a social context / our society. A common thread is the functioning of our brain: how we deal with zeitgeist, with information, with manipulation, with technology and how all this reflects back on our psychological well-being.
Depending on the angle and location, he uses different techniques, from photography and collages to installations, sculptures and spatial interventions. He showed work in FoMu (BE) and Circulations (FR) and recently had his first solo show (2024).
Follow at @jeroen_de_wandel for recent work
Born in 2001, Chernihiv, Ukraine. Started doing photography in 2019.
Graduated the cinematography faculty of the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and Television University.
In 2019 completed the MYPH school from Serhiy Melnitchenko and the concept photography course from Roman Pyatkovka in 2020.
Member of UWPO and UAPP.
Catherine Lemblé is a Belgian photographer based in Brussels. She received her MA in photography from Luca School of Arts Brussels. Her work has been exhibited at FOMU (Antwerp), De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), Contretype (Brussels), Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi) and Helsinki Photo Festival, amongst others. She was selected for .tiff (FOMU, Antwerp) and FUTURES (European Photography Platform) in 2024. Her photographs have been featured in publications such as Stern, De Standaard, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Quarterly. She self-published her first book, Cabin Fever, in 2019. Her analog pictures examine the ever-changing relationship between man and the natural world.
She is currently working on her second photo book, Only Barely Still. The project challenges conventional ideas about the Arctic and highlights the underrepresented presence of women in Svalbard. It explores the relationship between women, nature, and the role language plays in shaping our perception of our environment.
Mara Palena (1988) lives and works in Milan. Her research focuses on themes such as memory, recollection, and identity. She works with photography, video, and sound, reworking materials from archives, often open and participatory, like home movies, and drawing on a personal archive of photographic images that she has been curating for years to document her life. Her work has been exhibited at various international festivals, venues, and galleries, including the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, Careof, Marsèll Paradise, Nowhere Gallery, Pananti Atelier, and Video Sound Art in Milan, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Madrid, MOPLA in Los Angeles, Artphilein Foundation in Lugano, and Recontemporary in Turin. Between 2021 and 2024, she was a finalist in several art prizes, including the Lucie Foundation, Combat Prize, Premio Fabbri, New Post Photography, and Artphilein Photo Book Contest. In 2022, she was selected by Camera Torino for FUTURES Photography. Her work Oikeiôsis won the 2022 Surprize Award from Sprint and the Marcelo Burlon Foundation. The editorial project was curated and published by Witty Books in 2023 and was included by Photo España among the 100 best books published in 2024.
Ilias Lois pursued his education at the Department of Photography & Audiovisual Arts at the UniWA and furthered his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Venice. His artistic endeavours have garnered international recognition, with his works featured in institutions, festivals, and prominent photography publications. In 2018, he received the title of “Young Greek Photographer” from APhF, and in 2019, he earned the “Lensculture Emerging Talent” award for his series, Aisle Seat. In addition to his artistic pursuits, Lois serves as editor of the photography magazine Velvet Eyes. He is also a regular contributor to the Athens Photo Festival, where he recently curated the exhibition Good Advice & Other Recipes (2022) at the Benaki Museum. He contributes to the field of photography education as a teacher at the Hellenic Centre of Photography and Paper Drop Lab, where he is in charge of project development and curation classes. In the summer of 2024 he graduated with a Master of Photography: Research and Methodology from UniWA. Lois’ work is usually developed in long-term series, in which the interplay of different photographic genres is attempted, mixing staged photography and quasi-documentary strategies. His projects are inspired by the systematic observation of communication between people, the human manipulation of materials and technology and body language. The artist’s approach pays close attention to the practices of transferring a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface, as well as to the reverse process that follows. He is particularly interested in the sequencing of photographs while researching and practising non-linear forms of narration, both in his personal and curatorial work.
Florian Gatzweiler (*1998) is a German artist whose work deals with identity, violence and images of masculinity. His projects are characterized by an empathetic examination of personal and social issues, which he often explores in a photographic context. He combines documentary approaches with staged elements to create multi-layered and complex narratives in which he attempts to do justice to the themes and problems of his work. During his studies at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, which he completed in 2024 under the direction of Irina Ruppert, he exhibited several times, including at EMOP Berlin and Paris Photo. His awards include a scholarship from the Socio-Culture Fund and the Paris Photo Young Talent Award.
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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.