The
Artist
Varvara Uhlik
Lives and Works in
London, UK
Varvara Uhlik (b.1997, Ukraine) is a London-based visual artist who explores themes of Slavic culture and identity, with a focus on the post-Soviet era’s impact on her generation.
Working across photography, installation, and video, Varvara often reworks archival materials, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary narratives and newly produced work. Through this process, she examines the tension between past and present, reality and its digital afterlife, foregrounding the impermanence of our surroundings and the fragility of memory.
In 2024, the British Journal of Photography recognised Varvara as a Ones to Watch artist. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Sunday Painter, London; Photo Élysée Museum, Switzerland; European Photography Month, Tokyo; MIA Milan Photo Fair, Italy; Encontros da Imagem, Portugal; and Liquida Photofestival, Italy. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, Beaux Arts Magazine, Photoworks, Riga Photography Biennial 2025, Der Greif, and LensCulture, among others.
Projects
2025
Lyoh
My grandmother’s root cellar was lined with shelves of jars filled with pickled fruits and vegetables - a common sight in (post)Soviet Ukraine, where scarcity made preservation a necessity. Drawing on this domestic ritual, the work reflects on the desire to preserve sustenance as well as sentiment. By sealing family photographs from holidays in Crimea and school days in Dnipro together with seasonal vegetables, the piece transforms a familiar act of preservation into a metaphor for memory itself. The jars become vessels of nostalgia and impermanence, embodying the desire to preserve and to savour what will be gone.
Lyoh is the Ukrainian word for Root Cellar.
Varvara Uhlik
was nominated by
PhotoIreland
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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Cristóbal Ascencio (Guadalajara, 1988) is a photographer and visual artist whose work
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Younes Mohammad is Born in 1968 in Dohuk, Iraq. He’s a Kurdish freelance photographer mostly active on assignments for newspapers, magazines, etc. He spent his life in Iran as a refugee from 1974 - 1998 and graduated with an MBA University of Tehran. Photography was his passion but he had no chance to follow it while the war situation was still continuing Under Saddam’s time. In 2011 he quits his job and starts his journey as a photographer. His work has been exhibited internationally and published widely in publications.
Anton Shebetko (he/him) is a Ukrainian artist, photographer, curator, and writer from Kyiv, currently based in Amsterdam. His practice focuses on LGBTQIA+ experiences in Ukraine, themes of memory, loss of identity, multiplicity of history, and the role that photography and archival materials can play in revealing these stories. Much of his research is dedicated to forgotten and unrecorded queer histories of Ukraine, parts of which were published in his book 'A Very Brief and Subjective Queer History of Ukraine'.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at FOAM Museum (Amsterdam), Schwules Museum and nGbK am Alex (Berlin), Q21 (Vienna), Photo Elysée (Lausanne), CENTQUATRE-PARIS, BWA Studio (Wroclaw), Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), and PinchukArtCentre and Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv). He participated in the Kyiv Biennial (2023) and was a nominee for the PinchukArtPrize (2025). Shebetko has curated exhibitions and film programs for Schwules Museum, Melkweg Expo, and WORM Rotterdam, and has lectured at Maastricht University, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Between Bridges Gallery. He holds a BA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
Portrait of Anton Shebetko by James Barnett
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Portrait of Anton Shebetko by James Barnett
Born in 1991, I grew up in Nancy in north-eastern France.
Since 2011, I have been living and working in Brussels. I have a bachelor's degree in photography from ESA Le 75 and a master's degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (Belgium).
My practice focuses on landscape and questions revolving around its use, exploitation and representation. Through my projects, I attempt to reflect on our relationship with what we call nature and to offer a different understanding of it.
In Brussels, in 2020, I co-founded the collective La Nombreuse, composed of eight photographers and an art historian. We opened a multifaceted space, part studio, part exhibition space, conference venue, workshop space, etc.
The monograph Charbon blanc was published in October 2021 by Le Bec en l'air. Since 2017, my work has been exhibited at various festivals and galleries in France and Belgium in particular.
My practice focuses on landscape and questions revolving around its use, exploitation and representation. Through my projects, I attempt to reflect on our relationship with what we call nature and to offer a different understanding of it.
In Brussels, in 2020, I co-founded the collective La Nombreuse, composed of eight photographers and an art historian. We opened a multifaceted space, part studio, part exhibition space, conference venue, workshop space, etc.
The monograph Charbon blanc was published in October 2021 by Le Bec en l'air. Since 2017, my work has been exhibited at various festivals and galleries in France and Belgium in particular.
Constantin Schlachter’s research takes place through an exploration of interior and exterior landscapes. Nature, the invisible and matter are dominant entities in his work. His experimental approach to the techniques he employs aims to put a less anthropocentric world into perspective, and to re-enchant nature. This mysterious entity that takes hold of each viewer in its own way, because it’s eloquent for everyone, but never entirely translatable.
Through different media linked to photography, he questions matter and its synesthetic power. By inverting the scales, colours and textures of the elements presented, he induces a confusion of senses in the viewer, revealing deeper ones. His images invite us to let go, to enter a contemplative state in which we can project our emotions.
His cosmic and telluric images, in which matter plays a predominant role, merge the microcosm and the macrocosm. In the course of his work, the artist increasingly seeks to erase his own presence to highlight that of his subject.
Constantin Schlachter was born in Altkirch in 1992 and graduated from Les Gobelins in 2014. He lives and works in Paris.
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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.
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.
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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