Hosted by Ci.clo Plataforma, the FUTURES community will gather in Porto on 6th and 7th of June to take part in the annual Meet-Up.
FUTURES MEET UP 2025: Porto
PROGRAMME
SATURDAY 6TH JUNE
14:00 | Futures Meet-up Porto: Workshop
Location: Entre Quintas
Five emerging FUTURES artists, selected by Bienal Fotografia do Porto, will participate in a two-day workshop. The workshop will focus on supporting Futures artists in improving their communication about the purposes of their artistic work and the importance of how the portfolio is built and presented to enhance their professional career.
Around the same table, the five artists, with the support of four experts, Sonia Jeunet, Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo, Jayne Dyer and Virgílio Ferreira, will analyse principal and practical issues related to each artist’s portfolio, such as the purpose of the portfolio, artist statements, artistic strategies and methodologies, selection of works and sequentiality, and different formats of portfolios and ways of presenting them.
17:30 | Futures Meet-up Porto: Round table
Location: Aula Magna - Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade do Porto
The round table brings together four experts - Sonia Jeunet (Global Education Director at Magnum Photos), Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo (artistic director and co-founder of artistic doubledummy studio), Jayne Dyer and Virgílio Ferreira (co-artistic directors of Bienal'25 Fotografia do Porto) - to talk about strategies for emerging artists to boost their career in photography.
SUNDAY 7TH JUNE
17:00 | Guided tour: Ties That Bind exhibition
Location: Casa Comun - Reitoria da Universidade do Porto
Guided tour of the Ties that Bind exhibition, conducted by the Bienal'25 co-artistic directors, Jayne Dyer and Virgílio Ferreira.
17:00 | Guided tour: Lightseekers exhibition
Location: Centro Portuguêse de Fotografia
Guided tour of the Lightseekers exhibition, conducted by the curator Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo.
Check the complete program here.
Credits image Sheung Yiu.
FUTURES is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Join us for an exclusive open studio with visual artist Laure Winants, our newest resident at the FUTURES Hub.
Laure Winants will present her ongoing project Time Capsule, a transtemporal laboratory that explores shifting ecologies and entangled temporalities.
The project highlights the interdependence between living organisms and their environments, weaving together biological, social, and techno-scientific systems through artistic and scientific approaches. Time Capsule is conceived as a space for experimentation, fiction, and anticipatory storytelling, developed through an interdisciplinary investigation that resonates with the practice promoted by the FUTURES & MPB Residency.
The public event will include in situ performances, readings, and a participatory conversation, creating a living archive of the expedition.
The event will include:
- lab-like installation in progress, combining sound, video, and material experiments
- footage from her fieldwork
- first material samples from the research
📅 Event Details
Date: Thursday, 5th June 2025
- Walk-in: 17:00 – 18:00
- Artist Q&A: 18:30
- Studio Open Until: 20:00
About Laure Winants:
Laure Winants is an artist-researcher based in Paris and Brussels. Laure collaborates with transdisciplinary research groups including the CNRS/CNES on atmospheric pollution in the Pyrenees with Albedo 2021, the Volcanology Laboratory in Iceland on the monitoring of natural and anthropogenic phenomena such as volcanic activity with Phenomena 2022, and the Norwegian Polar Institute on its polar research with the Time Capsule 2023-2024 project.
We look forward to seeing you there!
The opening is part of FUTURES X MPB residency, supported by MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video kit.
Photo Credits: Laure Winants
Join the Open Studio at ISSP in Riga!
Julius Thissen will speak about their multidisciplinary artistic practice, how they developed their current project “Bones of Graphene, Skin of Kevlar”, and the research on trans community rights that they conducted during the residency at ISSP in May 2025.
The exhibition Ties That Bind, featuring Ihar Hancharuk, Sasha Chaika, Angyvir Padilla, Jan Durina, Dev Dhunsi, Sheung Yiu and Donja Nasseri, will be showcased in Porto starting from May 15.
Focused on the 2024 FUTURES annual theme, Ties That Bind explores and challenges the networks of interdependence linking social, natural, and scientific structures.
The seven FUTURES artists were invited to embrace, challenge or rediscover various forms of attachments and connections within different social structures and relationships: from exploring intimate family bonds with Angyvir Padilla, to revealing an intricate web of relationships that are the result of human misconduct with Donja Nasseri; from interwoven ties where past meets the present in Dev Dhunsi’s work, to entanglement of biological and technological ecologies in Sheung Yiu research; while Jan Durina's work shows how hate-fueled rhetoric results in violent actions towards queer people, Ihar Hancharuk focuses on tensions and public paranoia that through images become palpable; finally, Sasha Chaika explore new ways of kinship that are not dependent on language.
As part of the FUTURES Meet-Up, the FUTURES community is invited to take part to a guided tour of the Ties That Bind exhibition, conducted by the Bienal'25 co-artistic directors, Jayne Dyer and Virgílio Ferreira, on June 7th at 5 PM.
The 2024 Open Call was curated by The Bienal Fotografia do Porto, Fotogalleriet, Fotograf Magazine and Organ Vida Festival.
Ties That Bind exhibition in porto is curated by Ci.CLO Plataforma, Organ Vida and Fotograf Zone.
Exhibition Run 15 May - 28 June 2025
At Casa Comun - Reitoria da Universidade do Porto (Porto, Portugal)
Credits image Dev Dhunsi
With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Join us on Tuesday 6 May for an online presentation by Matt Black of his long term project American Geography.
Between 2014 and 2020, Matt Black traveled from his hometown in California's Central Valley to hundreds of other communities across the United States. Concentrating on cities, towns, and counties with poverty rates above 20%, he discovered that he could travel from coast to coast without ever crossing above the poverty line. His exploration of this stark American reality grew to cover over 100,000 miles and 46 states, spread across five cross-country trips.
In a 2016 article titled “Economic growth in the United States: A tale of two countries,” economists Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman state, “Our data show that the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States has been completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s. It’s a tale of two countries. For the 117 million U.S. adults in the bottom half of the income distribution, growth has been non-existent for a generation while at the top of the ladder it has been extraordinarily strong.” With his project American Geography, Matt Black chose to focus on one of these two countries. For six years, starting in 2014, traveling by bus and by car across the US, he explored “the geography of poverty” – photographing an America and American lives that to him were the rule, not the exception.
A photobook was published by Thames & Hudson in 2021.
The FUTURES: Learn with Magnum Photos program is designed to help FUTURES artists address challenges in their photography careers, inspire creativity, and build a sense of community. The success of this program relies heavily on your participation. We encourage you to register for the sessions, stay fully engaged, keep your video on, and actively participate with questions and comments. We are working to make the program more interactive, aiming to overcome the limitations of online meetings, and we are confident that together, we can create something meaningful and valuable.
Curated exclusively for FUTURES artists.
Join the Open Studio at Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest!
Tim will present his project, "Prophetic Futures", about the tension between progress and present-day challenges through the lens of his great-great-grandfather Ludwig Stein’s theory of Evolutionary Optimism.
Join us for an exclusive open studio with visual artist Thana Faroq, our newest resident at the FUTURES Hub.
Thana Faroq will present her ongoing project Imagine Me Like a Country of Love, where she explores what happens when we disturb the memories we left behind, inspired by her own return to Yemen after nearly a decade.
She navigates the emotional and physical transformations of a homeland marked by time's passage and the shadows of conflict. By engaging with archival photographs, contemporary visuals of Yemen, and experimental techniques such as animation and text as image, her work reflects on the emotional landscapes of grief, disorientation, and transformation. It treats memory as a living, mutable entity, shaped by the forces of nature, environment, and technology.
The open studio will include:
• Fragmented screening of Imagine Me Like a Country of Love
• Readings from the project’s textual narratives accompanied by Coffee from Yemen and light food
• a Q&A session
📅 Event Details
Date: Thursday, 10th April 2025
- Walk-in: 17:00 – 18:00
- Artist Q&A: 18:30
- Studio Open Until: 20:00
About Thana Faroq:
Thana Faroq is a Yemeni photographer and educator based in the Netherlands. She works with photography, texts, sound, and the physicality of the image itself, as a way to respond to the changes that have been shaping and defining her life, and sense of belonging both in Yemen and the Netherlands. Thana's positioning as a photographer is informed by her reflections on her subject matter, tuning in to other people’s lived experiences with which she continually grows familiar. She also increasingly seeks her own story in the frame.
The FUTURES residency program is supported by Creative Europe.
We look forward to seeing you there!
The FUTURES: Learn with Magnum Photos program is designed to help FUTURES artists address challenges in their photography careers, inspire creativity, and build a sense of community. The success of this program relies heavily on your participation. We encourage you to register for the sessions, stay fully engaged, keep your video on, and actively participate with questions and comments. We are working to make the program more interactive, aiming to overcome the limitations of online meetings, and we are confident that together, we can create something meaningful and valuable.
On Tuesday 1 April for an online presentation of Olivia Arthur’s latest book published by VOID: Murmurings of the Skin.
The book looks at both human and machine, not in contrast with each other, but melded together into one lyrical examination of the body. From page to page, we see depictions of people and robots through gentle black-and-white portraits, images of natural and artificial body parts in close examination, moments of stillness, and moments of movement.
For the making of the book, Arthur’s process was slow and purposeful. Changing her approach to work in 5×4, she was obliged to set up her box camera and tripod for each image, ducking underneath the dark sheet each time to get the shot. Working in large format is a slow, intimate, and deliberate process, one that obliges photographer and subject to really spend time with each other, and one in which the person being photographed knows what is going on. “You don’t grab a picture, you really work on it together, and I found it felt very honest to me,”
In this session, Olivia will specifically talk about this project and the making of the book. As always, there will be plenty of space for questions so please come prepare!
Curated exlusevily for FUTURES artists.
FUTURES & Magnum Photos are excited to launch a new public talk series: Artist Spotlight.The inaugural Artist Spotlight will feature Raisan Hameed.
Raisan Hameed (*1991) is an Iraqi-German multimedia artist based in Leipzig. He joined FUTURES in 2023, nominated by Der Grief.
During this talk, he will present his latest body of work Pixels of Memories, an attempt to address the disappearance of institutional and personal archives in the war-torn city of Mosul by re-constructing them using Google maps. Hameed’s work is a reflection on the construction of an Iraqi identity and reveals how political conflicts shape landscapes and people.
About FUTURES x Magnum Artist Spotlight:
Every two months, we’ll invite a photographer from the FUTURES platform to join us for an engaging online conversation about their artistic journey. This series offers a unique chance for audiences worldwide to hear directly from the artist, gaining insight into their practice, motivations, and creative processes.
We also hope to inspire the next generation of photographers, providing them with the opportunity to connect with artists who recently began their careers.
Join us for an exclusive open studio with visual artist Hiền Hoàng, our newest resident at the FUTURES Hub.
Hiền Hoàng will present her ongoing project, A Body of Past and Future. In Amsterdam’s parks and along its canals, certain trees bear silent testimony to centuries of global exchange. Many arrived as seeds or saplings through colonial trade routes, reflecting an era when botanical exploration and economic ambition shaped Europe’s landscapes.
This project examines one such colonial-era tree species, using archival research, photography, and 3D scanning to reveal how past technological and ecological encounters inform current environments—and how these green legacies might evolve amid future climate shifts.
📅 Event Details
Date: Thursday, 27th February 2025
- Walk-in: 17:00 – 18:00
- Workshop with Hiền: 17:00-17:30
- Artist Q&A: 18:30
- Studio Open Until: 20:00
As part of the event, Hiền will hold a workshop with other 5 participants on 3D Scanning and Virtual World Building on everyday objects—from tree logs and leaves to cups or even your own face!
Participant can discover how to import those scans into Blender to construct a small virtual environment. By the end of the workshop, they can have a scene to explore and mix with the real world (depending on the device they use) or to share online forvia a VR website.
What to bring with you:
- An iPhone 11 or later, or an iPad 12 with XR / AR Viewer and / or LiDAR: https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/
- The Polycam app (please install and register for the free/trial version in advance)
- A laptop (any OS) with Blender installed (free download from blender.org)
- You can also bring objects you want to scan with you.
⚒️ Workshop Details
- Time: 17:00
- Duration: 20-30 min
- Participant: Max. 5 people
🔗 Workshop RSVP by 25th February 2025 to book your spot!
About Hiền Hoàng:
Hiền Hoàng (b. 1990) is a Vietnamese-born, Hamburg-based multimedia artist whose work bridges the intersections of human memory, nature, and technology. Through a practice that spans scientific data, installation, video, virtual/augmented reality, and performance, she creates multisensory experiences that uncover unseen narratives and explore ecological and emotional connections.
The FUTURES residency program is supported by Creative Europe.
We look forward to seeing you there!