Images are, for Nicole Rafiki, a thinking force. She produces imaginaries in a disparity of media, photography one of them. The normativity of thought comes from a multiplicity of machines of knowledge production, including but not limited to education, exhibition spaces, and the media. A social practice means interacting and constantly challenging the presupposed universal self such an information sphere produces. In a global economy and flow of disjunctive hierarchies and modes of being, culture moves in a disruptive way through the migration of people across borders, geographies, and time. Rafiki points to such complex and conflictual past, presentness, and future. The image, the imagined, the imaginary move from a world defined mainly by concrete purposes to structure negotiations and possibilities.
Irene Fenara (b.1990) is an Italian artist. Her research focuses on the way of seeing and practicing observation on images. She reflects on linguistic devices and she use optical and electronic instruments of various kinds, from Polaroid to surveillance cameras, often in an improper manner and transgressing their basic function. It becomes an instrument for observing the world, in the search for a slight poetic sense. The act of vision is the central element of her work that declines in her latest research on optical devices, often used as instruments of control, bringing attention to the always reversible overturning between who observes and who is observed. Her work has been exhibited in art galleries and public institutions, such as Fondazione Prada Osservatorio (2016), Fondazione Fotografia Modena (2017), P420 (2017), MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna (2018), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (2018), Fondazione Francesco Fabbri (2018) e Kunst Merano Arte (2019). She is one of the fifth finalists in ING Unseen Talent Award 2019.
https://www.irenefenara.com/
Sheng-Wen Lo (b. 1987) was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and lives and works in Leiden, the Netherlands. Lo's works investigate the relationships between non-humans and contemporary society through a range of media, including images, installations, and games. He is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and received an MSc in Computer Science from National Taiwan University. His works have been shown at Foam and World Press Photo in the Netherlands; The International Center of Photography in the USA; MMCA in South Korea; The National Gallery of Victoria in Australia; and the Taiwan Biennial, Taiwan. He was selected as a Foam Talent in 2021, and has received fellowships from De Nederlandsche Bank and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds/Prince Claus Fund. Lo is represented by Avocado Art Lab, Taipei.
Kevin Osepa is a photographer born and raised on the island of Curaçao. His work revolves around his identity and the identity of Afro-Caribbean youth in a post-colonial world. The visuals he creates and the stories he tells are highly influenced by his youth. While the themes he explores are autobiographical, his work can also serve as a quasi-anthropological study. Using different experimental techniques, he creates colourful visual stories that explore themes such as religion, African diaspora, and family.
Since graduating his work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including Steenbergen Stipendium, Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst prijs, Unseen photography festival, FOAM Editions - as well as publications such as the Trouw newspaper, Volkskrant Magazine and Unseen Magazine. He was also nominated for multiple awards - in 2018, he became the youngest person ever to be nominated for the prestigious Volkrant fine art prize.
Kata Geibl (1989, Budapest) is a photographer living and working in The Hague. Her work is mainly focused on global issues, capitalism, the Anthropocene, and the ambiguities of the photographic medium.
She is currently working on her new series titled There is Nothing New Under the Sun. The series deals with the rampant individualism that underpins our contemporary social, political, and economic system, and in particular, the environmental impact that it has. By juxtaposing the melting glaciers of Dachstein, animals under human control, almost Greek god-like athletes a narrative of our new age unfolds through the images.
Her previous work entitled Sisyphus received international attention, was exhibited at UNSEEN Amsterdam which was followed by her first solo show in Budapest. She received the emerging talent Paris Photo Carte Blanche Award for the series and in the same year she was nominated for Palm* Photo Prize.
In 2019, she received the József Pécsi Photography Scholarship and was a talent for Futures Platform nominated by Capa Center Budapest.
In 2020 she is a Grand Prix Finalist at Fotofestiwal Lodz, won the PHmuseum Vogue Italia Prize and is shortlisted for Palm* Photo Prize.
More: www.katageibl.com
Tamara Eckhardt, born in 1995, lives and works as a portrait and documentary photographer in Berlin. From 2017-2021 she studied at the Ostkreuzschule for Photography in Berlin. Since 2022 she is a member of the renowned German Agency OSTKREUZ. Her photographic works mainly deal with marginalized social groups and minorities – with a particular focus on documenting adolescence. Her analog photography strives to shed a kind light on her protagonists whom she follows up on for months at a time for each project. Eckhardts expressive portraits give the viewer an intimate insight into the lives of youth in Germany and Ireland. With her work Eckhardt has been awarded and shortlisted for numerous awards such as the Kolga Tbilisi Award,International Woman Photo Award, Gute Aussichten 21/22 Award, BFF Förderpreis, Kuala Lumpur International Photo Award, and the German Youth Photo Award. info@tamareckhardt.de www.tamaraeckhardt.com
Wathne studied Visual Arts at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art and Photography at the Norwegian School of Photography.
Inuuteq Storch, born in 1989, Sisimiut, Greenland. Based in Copenhagen and Sisimiut.
I studied at Fatamorgana – The Danish School of Art Photography in 2010 and at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2016. After that, I published the following books: Porcelain Souls, Flesh and Mirrored – Portraits of Good Hope.
My work is based on identity searching, which means the subject is usually around being from Greenland.
I work with my photography and archives.
Ihar Hancharuk (b. 1986) is post-documentary photographer and visual artist from Belarus. With a background in foreign languages, his creative work makes use of photographic and digital archives, including video footage. Haranchuk’s projects refer to questions of national and personal identity, collective memory, and the influence of mass media on contemporary life; he also addresses the patriarchal violence to which he was exposed during a period of mandatory military service, concluded in 2010. Among others, his works have been exhibited at Krakow Photomonth, Poland; National Center for Contemporary Arts, Belarus; and Circulation(s) Festival, France.
To make a photograph, you need a specific apparatus. The most obvious would be a camera. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to consider the camera as a mere tool that works strictly according to the intentions and desires of the photographer. Nobody, not even the operator, knows exactly what is going on inside the box after the button has been pressed. This question seems to haunt the work of Calixte Poncelet. Instead of aiming his camera at the world, he scrutinizes the photographic recording device itself. In Useless Gesture, GX680, a series of 90 images, he slowly moves around a camera, capturing it from all sides as though it were a treacherous thing that needs to be closely observed. Offscreen Interaction, GX680, is a photograph of one camera observing another one: the watcher being watched. But a third camera is also present, the one that took the picture we’re looking at now, acting as the silent observer of the two other cameras. Throughout these and other works, the camera appears as a wild, ferocious animal, as the prowling predatory system that Vilèm Flusser conjures up in his book Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Mimicry, a 9-minute-long video, reinforces this idea of the camera as hunter. As we stand in front of it, we look straight through the lens into its entrails. Now and then, the shutter is released, creating a bright red circle of light. The camera is transformed into an eerie Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey) lookalike. Like that computer gone rogue, the camera tells us that we humans have no business here.
Text by Eveline Vanfraussen
Iben Gad (b. 1997) is a Danish documentary photographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work deals with identity and personal stories and, in her work, she is experimenting with different formats such as archive material, photography, graphic elements and text.In 2021 she graduated from the Danish School of Media and Journalism. She did an internship at the Danish daily Kristeligt Dagblad, studied abroad at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Bangladesh and participated in the Canon Student Development Programme at Visa Pour l’Image. Currently she is working as a freelance photographer.
In 2017 she obtained the PhotoEspaña scholarship to study the Master's Degree in photography "Theories and artistic projects". Ire Lenes attented workshops and seminars of Antoine D’ Agata, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roger Ballen, Eugenio Recuenco and Joan Fontcuberta.
Ire lenes has won several awards such as Ciudad de Alcalá, the DKV scholarship at the Photography and Journalism Seminar in Albarracín, lX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris or Julia Margaret Cameron among others. She has been selected to participate in festivals such as PhotoEspaña or Transeuropa Discovery Week. Her work Archipelagos has been exposed as a solo exhibition in several galleries in Spain and has been published in book format within the Kursala collection of Cádiz, which was recently exhibited at the ¡Hola! event in Taipei, Taiwan.
Currently her work is part of various public and private collections and she has given talks at PiC.A PhotoEspaña, Real Sociedad Fotográfica of Madrid and at the Infotografos conference in Alicante.
In 2017, her personal connection with Lithuania led her to embark on a long-term project, the analysis of ethnic minorities in the Baltic States and the understanding of the particular situation in each country, a trilogy approached from a sociological perspective and materialized through visual narrative.
Her work retraces her personal family history drawing on her Togolaise heritage, and the idea of origins. The theme of family is explored through self-portraits in which she plays her mother and father, narrating their experience of migration from Togo to Italy. Her images are partially informed by the West African studio portrait tradition.
Their ongoing work focuses on the relationship between climate change, development, environmental degradation, human rights and geopolitics through which they consider how documentary film and photography inherently reveal the presence of pervasive power relationships , power structures and the mechanism of othering within the political landscape of our globalized society. Through a study of the landscape, the portrait and the still life they consider the shifting cultural meaning of nature, how this is changed by the definition of the Anthropocene and how we may decolonize nature.
They have worked extensively in climate change stress zones producing work in China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Uganda and Laos PDR. Their work has been exhibited internationally including exhibitions at Krakow Photomonth (2016), Fotofestiwal (2014), Fotograf festival (2014), Mpm Gallery (2015) and The Grey House Foundation (2016).
Katerina Tsakiri was born in Athens in 1991 and she is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied Photography and Audiovisual Arts in Athens and has an MFA in Photography from the University of Gothenburg. Since 2015 she has been working part-time as a visual artist and part-time as a commercial photographer. From 2019 she has been devoting her time to her artistic practice. She works with self-portraiture and her subjects are mainly autobiographical. The theme of her work is the female identity in Western culture with a focus on the female body. Her practice expands from staged photography to video performances and sculptures. In her latest project, she uses documentary photography to share the journey of her breast cancer treatment. She unravels through the photographic medium her body’s fragility and the impact of the illness on her female identity.
Joud Toamah is an interdisciplinary graphic designer and visual researcher based in Antwerp, Belgium. The project 'Archive of Traveling Images, an Image Amidst the Heart' (2018–ongoing) is an archive of digitised images of family albums that the artist sources from acquaintances, friends and family members in Syria and the diaspora. Toamah collects pictures that have undergone processes of scanning, uploading, searching, cutting, pasting, renaming, compressing, downloading, forwarding, etc. As such, she is creating digital archives of private and intimate images. But her research highlights something more interesting than the photographs themselves: the way that this digital circulation within personal networks becomes reflected in the image itself. Digital reproduction and circulation — the conditions of recreating bonds after displacement — leave their traces. In its digital journey of relocation, the image acquires consecutive layers of relationality.
Toamah’s art and research are deeply relatable despite the fact that her archive of travelling images is not publicly accessible. Although she chooses to share only the project’s conditions and context, her approach is poetic rather than analytical. We are invited to see how she secures the invisible, the inaccessible, the untranslatable. The artist’s research suggests that to safeguard one’s humanity, one must retain agency over one’s images — and protect them from the othering gaze. Yet her project moves beyond this aspect: through the recollection of private and personal images, she creates personal bonds based on reciprocity, generosity, care and feedback. Photography becomes an interaction between people, a tool to talk and share. A tool for knowledge production, for telling and retelling, for activating each other’s stories and memories.
The digitised images reveal their unique materiality: the fading of the paper, the despair that one will forget certain places, the writing scribbled on the backs of photographs to remind us across generations and distances that to remember is to relate. Toamah’s research moves beyond the binary oppositions between digital and material, here and there, past and present. She establishes a relational archive and an aesthetics of care: the archive of travelling images creates simultaneously belonging and protection.
- Text by Petra Van Brabandt (.tiff)
She very often travels to remote places, far away from the big cities, where she is able to find more simpler ways of existence.The subjects she photographs are often isolated with little context around them. While this visual isolation is the way Juliette presents herself to the world, she also craves human connection. A direct confrontation with the camera is a way for her to connect with the subjects she photographs and through them with the rest of the world.
In a few words, her practice in documentary photography is a search of self-knowledge and an attempt to reencounter the essence of a life without noise.
In her works she often focuses on issues connected with migration or its destiny. She is mostly interested in the problematic of constructing identity and how people define themselves and the land of their origins. Recently she is involved in collective photographic research about polish migration to South America. It happens that she gets out of the material world and enters other dimensions of perceiving the world, exploring the paranormal events and believes not connected with any religious system. Finds collective creation as the best way for making photography as permanent process of putting individual thoughts in doubts.
She was born in 1990 by the Polish seaside in Gdańsk. Graduated in Photography on Academy of Arts in Poznań. She is also part of Ostrøv publishing collective.