Lara Varat has been studying Cinematography at the Academy of Dramatic Arts at the University of Zagreb since 2019. She participated in several art workshops and other educational programs focused on queer topics. She has experience working on film sets, in smaller (e.g. Eclectica) and larger (e.g. Netflix) productions. Her photographic works have been featured in the series of exhibitions titled "In the process" (2019-2020, 2021) at the F8 Gallery in Zagreb. She participated in building a collaborative light and sound installation in the exhibition Coexistence II: Spaces of Light (Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2021).
lara.varat@gmail.com
Seppe Vancraywinkel (1998) grew up on the countryside in Hoegaarden, Belgium. He has always been surrounded by his close friends and they were always on the go, they still are. Since 2016 Vancraywinkel felt the need to capture these moments analog in black- and-white. Black and white is an important aspect in his work. It’s Seppes way of creating a filter that shields his dreamlike world from reality. He feels like colours are too close to reality, they can cause unnecessary distractions. Seppe Vancraywinkels work revolves around stories, shapes and scales.
vancraywinkel.seppe@gmail.com@seppevancraywinkelhttps://seppevancraywinkel.com/
Claudiu Guraliuc (b.1977) is a fine art photographer and educator based in Cluj, Romania. His work specialises in fine art portraiture and nudes, inspired by the aesthetics of Old Master paintings from the Baroque period. Guraliuc holds a Licentiate from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and has achieved numerous international accolades for his work; in January 2022, he received the International Master Photographer of the Year Award. His images have been published by a range of international photography magazines, and his work is found in both private and public collections in Europe, Asia and the United States. Guraliuc is represented by Katsea Art Gallery, Baltimore, and Influx Gallery, London.
Cloe Jancis (b. 1992) is an artist working with photography, video, drawing and installation. In 2018, she graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a BA in photography, and is currently following an MA programme in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Jancis is fascinated by the social image and daily roles of women – and the related myths, expectations and feelings they evoke. In recent years, her work has focused on objects and rituals associated with performing femininity.
Pauline Hisbacq was born in 1980.
After a master's degree in philosophy, she joined the ENSP in Arles, from which she graduated in 2011. She continued the same year with a post-graduate degree at the ICP in New York.
Since then, her work has been presented at the Rencontres de la Jeune photographie Internationale de Niort (2014), at the Ecureuil Foundation for Contemporary Art in Toulouse (2019), at the Image Satellite in Nice (2018), at the friche belle de Mai in Marseille (2017), and in Paris at Jeune Création (2013), at the Photo Paris Saint Germain festival (2017), at the Bal (2019), at the Rouen Normandie Photographic Center (2021).
She published Natalya at 7 Editions (2016), Le feu at September books (2017), Amour adolescente (chants d'amour) at Rayon Vert . édition (2019), Cadavre Exquis, fanzine co-published by Le Bal Books and September Books (2021), Songs for women and birds at September books (2021).
In 2017, she was awarded the CNAP's Soutien à la photographie documentaire contemporaine grant for the project La fête et les cendres. In 2021, she received the Aide Idividuelle à la Création from the Drac Ile de France for the project Rimorso. She is also the winner of the national commission Les Regards du Grand Paris initiated by the CNAP and the Ateliers Médicis, with the project Pastorale.
She is currently a photographer at the Rodin Museum, and editor at September Books.
Sergey Melnitchenko was born in 1991 in Mykolayiv, Ukraine. Started photography in 2009. In 2018 – founder of school of conceptual and art photography MYPH. Member of UPHA – Ukrainian Photo Alternative. In recent years, he has participated in more than 100 solo and group exhibitions around the world. Winner of Ukrainian and international contests including “Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer” in 2017 (Berlin), “Photographer of the Year” in 2012, 2013 and 2016 (Kyiv, Ukraine), “Golden Camera” in 2012 (Kyiv, Ukraine). Shortlisted for Krakow Photomonth in 2013 and Pinchuk Art Center Prize in 2015, among others. Participant of “Paris Photo”, “Volta Art Fair”, “Photo L.A.”, Photo Basel, etc. Nominated on “Foam Paul Huf Award” in 2020. Sergey’s works are in private and public collections in USA, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, France, Germany, Belgium, Lithuania and Czech Republic.
Riccardo Svelto (Florence, 1989) is currently based in Florence, where he works as a professor and freelance photographer. Svelto is graduated from the BA Photography at LABA (Libera Accademia di Belle Arti) in Florence (2015).
He has been the winner of the FOLIO International Online Photobook Masterclass (2020) by PhMuseum & Witty Books. In 2021, Witty Books published his first photobook entitled La Cattedrale. His work has been selected for Giovane Fotografia Italiana GFI 2022, exhibition in Fotografia Europea Festival 2022. At the same time, his work is featured in printed and online publications like Ignant, i-D, Booooooom, VOSTOK magazine and others.
His work is mainly focused on the relationship between empathy and social dynamics, trying to understand the emotional interaction and mind shapes we all face at the different ages and circumstances of life.
After studying aeronautics in Italy, Walter Costa realised that the pilot career was less “romantic” than he thought. In 2009, while completing a degree in Politics and International Studies at Complutense University in Madrid, he started attending photography courses at Blank Paper school, where he also got involved in publications and editing. Studying their postgraduate programme in documentary photography gave him the opportunity to start merging image-making with his interest in visually investigating social issues in relation to power imbalances. Love and curiosity made him move to São Paulo in 2013, where besides working as a news and commercial photographer he started teaching editing and bookmaking while collaborating with several Brazilian and international authors in the development and editing of their photobook projects. In 2017 Costa founded Havaiana Papers, a distribution platform aimed at improving the circulation of Brazilian photobooks. As a curator, he was invited to organize a series of performatic lectures about photobooks for SOLAR Fotofestival (Fortaleza, BR) in December 2018 and was the guest curator of the sixth edition of En CMYK-Photobook Meeting organized by the Montevideo Center of Photography (UY) in March 2019. In 2018 Costa came back to Europe to join the first cohort of the MA Photography&Society at KABK/Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. With the aim of researching, discussing and finding new ways to use photography as a tool for public debate, he completed the program with a wider and more multi-disciplinary practice. In 2020-2021, the artist took part in FOTODOK’s talent support programme Lighthouse. Still based in The Netherlands, Costa keeps editing photobook projects while teaching at KABK and developing his personal projects.
Kwabena Sekyi Appiah-nti (b. 1994) is a Belgian-Ghanaian photographer based in Amsterdam. Straddling the boundaries of documentary and fashion photography, his projects reveal a fascination for people who face societal prejudice, aspiring to cut through the clichés of stereotyped representation. Delving into his subjects’ worlds and observing their behaviours, Appiah-Nti documents their true essence; he describes ‘boyhood’ as the overarching theme in his work.
Noémi Szécsi (b. 1998) is a half-Hungarian, half-Romanian photographer, currently living in Budapest. She studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, from which she holds an MA. A member of the Studio of Young Photographers, Hungary, Szécsi’s projects are centred on specific groups of people living on the margins of society – from gravediggers to far-right protesters, to the witches she is currently working with. Her conviction is that the medium of photography offers no universal truths, but it does maintain a mediating and sensitising power. For the artist, the camera is a passport to the places where she interacts with people, allowing her to experience these different positions.
Maria Leonardo Cabrita lives and works in Lisbon, where she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Fine Arts. She holds an MFA in Multimedia Art from the University of Fine Arts, Lisbon; a Diploma in Photography from the Art Academy of Munich; and a BFA/BA in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon. Cabrita’s practice engages a range of subjects, from history and science to other non-artistic practices. She often seeks to question the nature of photography, inverting the relationship between the referent and the referenced, and between what’s seen and what’s perceived. Her current project questions the interconnectivity between optical mirages, images and the act of seeing. Her works have been exhibited throughout Europe and beyond.
Luna Scales (b. 1992) graduated as a visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2020. Several of Scales’ works have been exhibited in a number of group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and in 2019 she had a solo exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden.
Her artistic practice reflects a consistent interest in and references to the iconography of western art history, which comes to expression through photographs and videos of the female body in particular, patterns of movement and directions of the gaze. Scales often portrays herself, playing in her works with the public’s ideas of physical functional abilities. In so doing she questions these very notions, and in this connection also simultaneously presents a critique of the gaze at and notions about the body.
She lives and works in Copenhagen.
One often looks at the work of Arnaud De Wolf with a sense of disbelief. Is that image of a gigantic ice cube really floating in mid-air? Is that colourful picture of an ancient forest a realistic depiction or is it a digital fabrication, a fanciful re-creation? What are we meant to discern in his cyanotype prints: random blue lines surrounding white voids of various shapes and sizes or the contours of a mountainous landscape? By means of an unconventional presentation of the photographic image, simply turning it on its side or projecting it into a corner or using outdated techniques, such as the cyanotype, De Wolf presents us with works that hover between the clarity of description and the artificiality of invention. A projected bundle of light suddenly transforms into a three-dimensional object; abstract lines coagulate into a legible form; colours become deceitfully (un)real. In each of his experiments, De Wolf is testing the boundaries of the photographic system, looking for that breaking point where the photograph loses its readability and easy accessibility. His thorough investigation of colour is particularly revealing: Fading forest makes abundantly clear that colour in photography is always artificial. The colours that we see in a photograph are technologically and culturally coded; they are made in the chemist’s lab or produced by a programmer’s algorithm. Colour is here revealed as the manipulative garb in which the photographic skeleton is dressed.
Text by Steven Humblet
Cristina Galán (b.1992, Spain) is a visual artist working mainly with photography and video. Her work explores the subversion of identity and the appearance of the sinister beneath the visually polished surface of reality, reflecting on the search for individual identity through collective identity. Galán builds in each work a universe with its own symbols and codes where everything that is there is there to be seen. Galán's work has been exhibited in Festivals and art centres such as Festival F2, Dortmund, Germany / Photo Israel, tel Aviv, Israel / CEART (Art Center Tomás y Valiente), Madrid, Spain / ProyectArte 19, Sevilla, Spain / Athens Photo Festival, Athens, Greece / XVI Bienal internacional de fotografía de Córdoba, Spain / 2018 Muestra de Arte Joven, La Rioja, Spain. She was also selected in ViPhoto Fest, Vitoria, España / Encontros da imagen, Discovery Awards and Emergentes, Braga, Portugal / Fotonoche, Art Center Alcobendas (CAA), Madrid, España. In 2018 PAUL received the Silver Prize in Fine- Art-Portrait category in TIFA. Tokio, Japón.
Paul was also published in Pewen photography notebooks (publishing house Muga) #38 and in Revista VA! #4.
Maximilian Glas (1998) works in multimedia artistic practice, focusing on the influence of technical images on social power relations.
Current projects investigate the production of scientific representations of the natural and how moral conclusions are constructed on their basis, claiming universal validity due to their natural origin. The medium of photography and its relationship to objectivity and the circulation of knowledge through representation, serves as a thinking model for these explorations.
Website: www.maximilianglas.de
Giulia Parlato (b.1993) is an Italian visual artist based in London and Palermo.
She graduated from the BA (Hons) Photography at London College of Communication in 2016 and from the MA Photography at the Royal College of Arts in 2019.
Her practice delves into histories, myths and cultural heritage, involving photography and video. She analyses the historical use of photography as a document of truth, specifically in its scientific and forensic uses, and challenges this language, by creating a new space in which staged scenes take place. The melancholic and frustrating state, caused by humans’ impossibility to understand the past constitutes the foundation of her work.
Giulia’s work is shown nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions including Podbielski Contemporary Gallery (Milan, 2021), Photo London Fair (London, 2020), Photo Fringe (Brighton, 2020), Palazzo Rasponi 2 (Ravenna, 2020), Galleria Cavour for Photo Open Up (Padova, 2020), Gare Du Nord for Paris Photo (Paris 2019), Kunstgebaude for Soft Power Palace Festival (Stuttgart, 2018); and featured extensively in printed and online publications. She is the recipient of the BJP International Photography Award (2021), the Innovate Grant (2020), Camera Work Award (2020) and the Carte Blanche Éstudiants Award (2019).
Talks and Commissions include Paris Photo, The Photographers' Gallery, Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts, and Art Licks.
She is a founder member of Ardesia Projects, a curatorial platform dedicated to contemporary photography, and of the Carte Blanche Collective.
Giulia's work is held in public and private collections.