Pleun Gremmen (NL, 1992) is an artist and designer researching ways to create narratives through a variety of media reflecting mainly on internet subculture and politics while pushing the boundaries of her practice.
She graduated in 2018 from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (Master Media Design, Experimental Publishing), and in 2014 from ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (Bachelor Graphic Design). Since graduating in Arnhem she has been freelancing as an artist, designer and researcher and has been connecting and collaborating with artists and institutions in Rotterdam.
The work “Alt Reality Lexicon” (2018) explores the language neologisms of the Alt-right and Manosphere subcultures, acting as a translator between realms of reality. The performance installation “R.E.S.T”(2017) explores contemporary physical and digital expressions of escapism in a politically turbulent time.
Felipe Romero Beltrán (B.1992. Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian photographer based in Madrid, Spain. In 2010, He earned a scholarship in Argentina and moved to Buenos Aires to study Photography. By that time, he had developed an interest in documentary photography and traveled many times abroad for his projects. Years later, in 2016, he moved to Madrid, Spain. He got a MFA degree in photography.
Felipe focuses on social issues, dealing with the tension that new narratives introduce in the field of documentary photography. At the same time, He is currently preparing a Phd dissertation on documentary photography at Complutense University of Madrid. His practice, characterized by its interest on social matters, is the result of long-term projects accompanied by extensive research on the subject.
Mateusz Kowalik is a documentary photographer based in Warsaw, Poland. In his work he explores the issues of contemporary society. He studies at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. He is a graduate of the Sputnik Photos Mentoring Program and the PARALLEL European Photo Based Platform. He showed his works, among others at festivals in Wrocław, Łódź, Kraków, Hanover, Zagreb and Los Angeles, as well as at the Robert Capa Photography Center in Budapest.
www.mateusz-kowalik.com
She works in particular on the question of exoticism and on the family, using in her aesthetics the form of photographic documentary-fiction.
This year, she is one of the photographers selected for the 35th edition of the Hyères Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories Festival at Villa Noailles.
Her art practice focuses on the relationship between the human being and the landscape. She tracks the history of the ways of space use, of the actions and transformations that leave a series of dispersed marks behind. Including archival materials in her practice, she reveals the changeability of the space in time and constructs a visual essay about memory.
Petra Slobodnjak is an artist from Croatia who graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, studying graphic product design, in Zagreb in 2012. Since 2014, Petra has been working as a freelance graphic designer and photographer. She is a Croatian Freelance Artist Association member and has exhibited her work regularly since 2008. For work DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7, she received the Ivan Kožarić award for the best young artist, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City of Zagreb (in 2022) and award for the Best Young Artist in 2022 awarded by the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts. The mentioned work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art collection in Zagreb. Her artistic work intertwined with her personal life, examining the boundaries between these two aspects. She explores the dynamics of society in her works, emphasizing personal responsibility in shaping the environment. Through artistic expression, she fosters awareness of an individual’s impact on broader societal changes, encouraging reflection on one’s actions and relationship to the surroundings. She is currently based in Zagreb.
Uzochukwu has previously exhibited at Bozar (BE), Lagos Photo Festival (NG), Off Biennale Dakar (SN), Photo Vogue Festival (IT), and Unseen Amsterdam (NL). He currently studies philosophy in Berlin.
Since 2008 she is based in Spain where she works as a freelance photojournalist, combining her personal projects with the teaching of photography. She has published in BuzzFeed News, El Pais, XL Semanal, L'Obs, Equal Times, 5W magazine, Interviú, El Periódico de Cataluña, 7k magazine, Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka among others.
Her projects address discrimination and societal dysfunctions in western society. She also works on youth radicalization and the raise of right-wing movements in Europe. Lately she has started to investigate the construction of national identity in post-Soviet regions in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She has won different awards, such as the Third Prize in POY Latam 2015 (Mexico); she has been awarded with the Grant Programa Crisálidas Signo Editores Grant 2019 (Spain), with a Helge Humelvoll Scholarship (USA 2017) and with the “Photojournalism Grant 2015” (GrisArt International School of Photography, Barcelona), among others.
Finalist of the Grand Press Photo 2019 and 2012 in Poland and of the 19th FotoPres la Ciaxa (2013); she was also nominated in 2018 and 2017 Edition of Photography Magazine Grant (London). She has participated in festivals such as PhotOn 2019 and 2018 (Spain), Imaginaria 2019 (Spain), UCL Festival of Culture in London (2017), FOTONOVIEMBRE Tenerife (2015) and the VIII Biennal de Xavier Miserachs (2014) among others.
Aurélie Scouarnec created her series, Anaon, in the monts d’Arrée, in the Finistère region of Brittany. It is a delicate exploration on what she calls “the margins of the visible” in this legendary land. Inspired by the texts of Anatole Le Braz and François-Marie Luzel, she undertook a photographic investigation, in search of the rites and ancient tales amongst this rocky mountain range. Gateway to hell, according to some beliefs, here she crosses the phantom presence of several animals, called psychopomps, in charge of escorting souls in the kingdom of the dead. In other places, she plays with the syncretism particular to this hilly land and combines in a single stroke veiled female silhouettes – immediately associated with Christianity – and monumental woodland silhouettes, places of pagan worship. The abyssal green of moss and the deep black of the night are at times awoken by the cry of the moon and the animals perhaps surprised by the movement of these heavy fabrics. Stories read, heard, relics of ancient rites and forms of contemporary druidism, all are invited here to take their place in this phantasmagoric narrative which Aurélie Scouarnec constructs, photograph after photograph.
Michał Patycki (b. 1995) is a Polish visual artist based in Czechia. He holds a BA in Creative Photography from the Silesian University in Opava. In his artistic practice, Patycki often applies both photography and other forms of visual art. Photography gives him the opportunity to approach unknown realities, which he can work through with the resulting image. The strength of his work comes first and foremost from its authenticity; each subject he tackles is examined thoroughly through in-depth research – searching in each instance for a suitable method of self-expression. Patycki often works with photographic archives, and plays with stories that may or may not have happened at all. His works have been exhibited in Poland and abroad.
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/
Hajdu Tamás (b. 1976) was born in Transylvania. Today, he works as both a veterinarian and a photographer in Baia Mare, Romania. His work has been recognised by a series of prizes, including the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards, and the 2015 LensCulture Exposure Awards. Tamás’ photographs have been exhibited in multiple exhibitions including the Spotlight Romania Show at GEMAK in The Hague, the Netherlands. His work has featured in a number of international publications, including Punctum, Practical Photography, Vice, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, The Independent, La Repubblica, National Geographic and The Guardian.
The perfect skin and the smooth image which accompanies it, Eva O’Leary knows all too well the different ingredients and recipes of commercial photography. She too, as a teen, ate this cake which now, as an artist, she presents to us on a plateau. In a refrigerator rests a sponge cake, accompanied with printed icing: a saccharine young woman with perfect blow-dried hair watches us. Since it is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, this is the fate which the photographer reserves for the young blonde haired woman with the Colgate smile and her diktat. She grew up in the United States of America in a campus town whose name is almost an order – Happy Valley – and remembers her years spent masking her Irish head in the hood of a must have Abercrombie sweatshirt. The series, Happy Valley, is rooted in her town and her adolescent memories, describing an environment which is intrusive and worrying, modelling individuals whose self identity has been traded for a generic body. With the more recent Spitting Image, it is the years before, the adolescent vulnerability which are exposed. Young girls, around fifteen years old, present themselves to us, tightly framed on a vibrant blue backdrop which permits neither an escape for the gaze, nor breathing room for the model. Eva O’Leary accompanies these photographs with videos: perched upon a stool, we watch them searching for the person they hoped to find in the mirror. In this interval the photographer reopens the field of representations and with it, the freedom to be complex, different, uncertain, unique, human.
Her practice works with photography, collage and installation, often experiments with the medium. She mainly explores topics of identity, personal freedom and systems of oppressions. In her life and work, she questions existing rules and binding canons. Sejud’s main inspirations are daily life, vulgarity, ugliness, dreams and visions.
Jošt Dolinšek (1997, Ljubljana, SI) is a lens-based visual artist. His practice is predominantly stemming from photographic medium and is expanded into moving imagery, installation and sculpture.Dolinšek mostly works on long-term projects, exploring the existential experience of environment and time and our relationship towards both. His work is centred upon the questions on uncertainty — of perspective, duration and change. Form and materiality pose as one of the crucial elements of his works, and are often strongly related to the process and the inquiry behind them.In 2023, he graduated from a MFA Photography programme at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg (SE) and in 2020, he earned a BA in Psychology at the University of Ljubljana (SI). Among others, he has exhibited his works in Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (DE), Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana (SI) and Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg (SE). He lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Josh Kern (*1993), currently based in Leipzig, Germany, graduated with a bachelor's degree in photography at the FH Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2022. Between 2018 and 2021, Josh Kern has published three books: "Räuber" (Eigensinn Publishing), "Love Me" (Eigensinn Publishing), and "Fuck me" (dienacht Publishing).
Yana Kononova (b. 1977) has an academic background in social sciences, and holds a PhD in sociology. She was born on Pirallahi island in the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan – now an important site of oil extraction. During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, her family emigrated to Ukraine. Having later relocated to the countryside of the Trachtemiriv peninsula, Kononova turned to photography. She graduated from the Photoschool of Viktor Marushchenko before following a photography course organised by the Image Threads Collective (USA). In 2019, Kononova won the Bird in Flight Prize in emerging Photography, and in 2022 was the recipient of the Hariban Award, presented by Benrido. Her works have been exhibited in Ukraine and abroad.