The artists nominated by

Fotograf Zone
in
2026

We are pleased to introduce four artists nominated to the international FUTURES platform: Ondřej Kubeš, Jakub Tulinger, Miriam Pružincová, and Linda Zhengová. The nominated artists will take part in FUTURES activities, where they will have the opportunity to present their work to an international professional audience, establish new professional connections, and further develop their practice in dialogue with curators, institutions, and fellow artists from across Europe.

The selection process builds on the long-term collaboration between artists and the Fotograf Zone platform and Fotografmagazine. Publishing and exhibition activities thus function as a natural filter through which talents from the Czech Republic are further selected for the FUTURES platform. The nominations are decided by the Fotograf Zone programme board consisting of Markéta Kinterová, Světlana Malina, Barbora Vanická Čápová, and Viktorie Vítů.

The four projects move along the boundary between personal experience and attentive observation of the world, where intimate encounters intersect with broader social and environmental questions. The artists work with photography, installation, and moving image as means that allow perception to slow down, reality to fragment, and meanings to be reassembled. A shared emphasis lies on process, openness, and the acceptance of unresolved questions.

In Fracture of the Sun, Ondřej Kubeš explores the body, memory, and self-perception through light as a formative force. Fragmented corporeality, nudity, and solitude are interwoven with archival materials and family memory, revealing how social norms shape personal experience. A leather cord threading through the installation becomes a metaphor for systems that simultaneously bind and restrict. Questions of queerness are not articulated explicitly but are rather lived through, as if they were a process the artist primarily observes within himself, allowing only partial insight into his inner world.

Jakub Tulinger has long focused on landscape in its various forms, whether natural or urban, and experiments with 3D video and laser scanning technologies. In Extension, peeling walls are transformed into detailed micro-landscapes that carry traces of time and spatial memory. His broader practice combines documentary observation and field research with virtual environments, most notably in the video essay Sorry I am late, I was dealing with something in the valley (Assembly of things). Recurring motifs of travel, arrival, and departure, as well as a long-term engagement with the tourist landscape of Králický Sněžník, reveal his layered approach that blends personal experience, found material, and subtle irony.

Miriam Pružincová’s cycle Everyday is the most beautiful offers a fragile, poetic record of family life during a period of emotional and generational reckoning. Through intimate bodily fragments and domestic scenes, she addresses separation anxiety, mental health, and the search for safety, suggesting that the path to understanding oneself is never straightforward, but unfolds through constant transformation, searching, and rediscovering meaning in small, seemingly banal situations of daily life and through an emphasis on presence. 

In Maybe, Happiness Is…, Linda Zhengová returns to one of the most universal yet most difficult questions: what happiness actually means. The work draws on personal experience from a relationship-wise complicated period marked by change, relocations, and turbulence, in which people come and go and certainties fall apart. Working between documentary and staging, and returning to analogue photography as a means of slowing down, she questions authenticity, memory, and the possibility of capturing fleeting moments of human closeness.

Together, these projects form a diverse picture of contemporary artistic practice in which personal experience becomes a starting point for broader reflections on the world, relationships, and the environments we inhabit. They collectively show that attentiveness and openness to process can lead to forms that are not closed statements, but invitations to a careful and slow reading of reality. 

Markéta Kinterová

Projects nominations
Linda Zhengová
Linda Zhengová is a Czech-Chinese photographer, writer, and curator based in Paris. Her work is rooted in an exploration of human emotions, ranging from vulnerability and trauma to the search for happiness. Through photography and interdisciplinary methods, she strives to capture fleeting emotional states, the intimate connections between strangers, and personal transformation. Her imagery, evocative of a bygone era, suggests that memory is the space where love most vividly resides. By confronting viewers with moments of vulnerability and intimacy, her work invites a deep reflection on the intensity of human relationships. Through this, Zhengová challenges us to reconsider how we connect with both ourselves and others, offering a delicate balance between discomfort and empathy.
Miriam Pružincová
Miriam Pružincová, also known as MIMI, is a Slovak photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. She is currently studying for her master’s degree at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, in the Photography II studio led by Alena Kotzmannová. In her practice, she works primarily with analogue photography and video, a documentary approach, and her personal archive. Since 2019, she has been systematically collecting fragments of everyday life, which she subsequently connects into carefully composed pairs, diptychs, and visual sequences, thus creating series or an endless, unnamed body of work that is simply about life as such. Through the deliberate connecting and assembling of photographs in installations, as well as the intentional completion of series through newly made images, she disrupts the boundary between chance and staging within documentary practice. She understands photography as a form of play and a tool for storytelling — a visual poem or narrative. At first glance, her work may appear delicate, yet it carries irony, paradox, and intense intimacy. From environmental themes and stories of people searching for their identity, the artist gradually moves toward more personal subjects that address safe spaces and generational anxieties. Her practice also engages with memory, corporeality, mental health, trauma, the relationship to nature, and the natural presence of death in life. Her work has been exhibited, among others, in Prague, Munich, London, Berlin, Milan, Tokyo, and Slovakia.
Jakub Tulinger
Jakub Tulinger (b. 1996) is a graduate of the Department of Photography at FAMU. He took part in the collective exhibitions "The Theory of Tourism" at Prague's Fotograf Gallery (2024), "Drunken Forest" and "Scream to Be Heard" at Prague's AMU Gallery (both 2023). His work was also presented in the Other Visions selection at the PAF festival in Olomouc (2021 and 2023). Currently he is part of a residential program - Transformative Territories: Inter-Species Refuge at ARTMILL – Center For Regenerative Arts, South Bohemia. In his work, he has long devoted himself to the concept of testimony with its overlaps in materiality. He is interested in the relationship of man and material, architecture and landscape, and how these silent witnesses can speak to us. Using the tools of computer 3D graphics and animation together with the creation of books, he lends a voice to the materials and through the stories attempts to look at the problems of today.
Ondřej Kubeš
Ondřej Kubeš (* 1999) is a Czech visual artist working primarily with documentary and staged photography, installation, drawing and performance. His intimate, poetic archive-based artworks examine topics of personal memory, identity, affection, trauma, queerness and family relations. Kubeš’s work has been exhibited in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Belgium. He completed his master's degree at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague at the Photography II. studio led by Alena Kotzmannová.
Newsletter