The artists nominated by
The two artists selected by Photo Elysée for FUTURES Photography in 2026 are Johanna Hullár and Santiago Martinez. Both articulate practices in which the image functions as a contested site: a field of tension between memory and erasure, between private and shared narratives, between material density and perceptual surface.
Johanna Hullár’s work departs from perceptual slippage—the cognitive impulse to recognize forms within forms—and unfolds as an inquiry into how images produce meaning through projection and association. She stages encounters between still and moving images, activating zones where the real and the speculative interpenetrate. Objects, synthetic materials, and organic matter coexist within installations that speculate on possible futures and on the entanglement of human-made and natural agencies. Inflected by a subtly humorous and distinctly feminine perspective, her installations construct immersive environments in which sculptural arrangements encased in ice remain in a state of suspended transformation. Melting becomes both process and metaphor: a choreography of appearance and disappearance that foregrounds impermanence as a material condition.
Santiago Martinez, by contrast, interrogates the apparatus itself. Working at the limits of DIY lens-based devices, he develops photographic systems that displace conventional hierarchies between reproduction and production. His recent projects operate through a hybrid protocol combining large-format optics, mirrors, and a laser printer, effectively reprogramming a machine of duplication into an image-generating device. The resulting works foreground the frictions, distortions, and temporalities embedded within the apparatus. As a photographer formed in the wake of digital dematerialization, Martinez reclaims the mechanical and the tactile as critical positions, insisting on photography’s haptic and processual dimensions.
Across their distinct methodologies, Hullár and Martinez mobilize abstraction and the sublime not as aesthetic categories, but as operative strategies—modes of resistance within a culture structured by acceleration and obsolescence. Through processes of metamorphosis, material instability, and technical détournement, they re-situate photography as an expanded field: a space where image-making becomes an embodied negotiation with matter, time, and perception.
In addition to their participation in FUTURES in 2026, both artists have been selected by Photo Elysée for a residency at the Fondation Fiminco in Paris, culminating in an exhibition in fall 2026.
The members of the jury:
Nathalie Herschdorfer - Director at Photo Elysée
Manuel Sigrist - Curator, Head of exhibitions and programmes at Photo Elysée
Hannah Pröbsting - Curator, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée
Sarah Bourget - Scientific Collaborator, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée
Julie Dayer - Exhibition manager, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée
Lydia Dorner - Exhibition manager, Exhibitions Department at Photo Elysée
