Sasha Velichko

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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.