Kölcsey Sára is a commercial and documentary photographer from Hungary, Pécs. She started her career at the age of 32, after she gave birth to her fourth child. She thrives on the opportunity to capture a story by framing complex scenes. She works on several long-term projects with subjects closely related to her own life events and experiences. As an artist and mother she captures the life of women, girls, and mothers. She strongly believes that they all deserve to be seen, and also to be heard.
The nature of the female body is also in her scope of interest: both what it stirs within and on the surface; its ability to create and grow life, its cyclical reminder that death is ever-present and, by the potency of 1st prize at the 42nd Hungarian Press Photo Competition: "Every day life" series category
He is interested in the image and imbrication of this medium with other disciplines such as sculpture and installation. As well as visual media, music and the creation of scenography and environments. Trying to convey an experience, an event or a state of mind is his main excuse when developing a project.
He investigates the relationship between the individual and his environment, about the spaces we inhabit and about contemporary forms of domestic life and the state of the objects that inhabit an era of wild mediatic reproduction. His work process is based on finding, combining and remixing poor materials, found objects and waste, signs that encourage him to experiment with new ways of interpreting what surrounds us.
More: https://christianlagata.com/
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/
She is the author of many self-published photographic zines such as "Utopia", "Published" and "Underground". Creating zines gives her the opportunity to reinterpret existing material and create a new full-fledged work with its own meaning. She has presented her work in Belgrade, Budapest, Tel Aviv, Zagreb and Paris. In 2020, she won first place at Slovak Press Photo and the Young Talent of the Year award for her documentary series about the community called Utopia. In 2023, she placed first in the Rovinj Photo Days festival with her series of photographs about the Bratislava community. She received her bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the studio of Olja Triaška Stefanović and Jana Hojstričová. She spent a semester in Finland at the Department of Documentary Photography in Lahti. She is a recent graduate of the Master's degree at FAMU in Prague.
Martyna Benedyka, born in 1991, is a Polish visual artist, vocalist and teacher working in a wide range of media including painting, film and digital photography, collage, installation, and sound art. She studied Art and Design at the Gray’s School of Art in Scotland, UK and graduated with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art Painting in 2014. She has exhibited in the UK, Poland, Romania, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Canada and the USA. Her work has been chosen by the Federation of British Artists for the Futures - UK’s largest annual survey of emerging contemporary figurative art at the Mall Galleries, London, among others. She is the recipient of both Polish and British scholarships for her artistic achievements as well as the winner of international residencies and competitions - the latest being the Photo Romania Festival 2022 and De Structura cross-border project 2022-2023, Tallinn, Estonia. Her work is in private and public collections. She specializes in classical music and has performed in many group as well as solo concerts internationally since 2004.
https://martynabenedyka.com
Olena Morozova is a visual artist from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is interested in themes of spirituality, sexuality, gender identity, stereotypes, psychological and mental disorder, family relationships. "Photography is my passion, lifestyle, philosophy, way of thinking, seeing, understanding the world around me and my inner world, searching for my reflections, feelings and emotions, self-development and movement forward” - she explains. Olena has been engaged in photography since 2015. Her teachers were: Alexander Yakimchuk, Dimitri Bogachuk, Vladimir Seleznev, Viktoria Sorochinski, Sergey Melnichenko and others. Her works were presented in Finnish Museum of Photography (2022), Odesa Photo Days (2021), Photo Kiev Fair (2019, 2020).
Eva Bevec (b. 1998) is a designer, visual artist, and photographer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She completed her undergraduate studies in visual communications (with a focus in graphic design) with honors at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2020. She continued her design studies abroad, at the Master Department of Information Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where she graduated with honors in 2023.
She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Slovenia as well as internationally, showcasing her works at the prominent Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, at the Brumen Design Biennial in Ljubljana, and at Layerjeva hiša in Kranj, among others. In 2020, she held her first solo exhibition titled “Madeleines and Linden Tea” at DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana. She has received various awards for her work, such as the student Prešeren Award of the University of Ljubljana and the Brumen recognition for excellent Slovenian design. She also participated in the international pharmaceutical conference Health Services Research & Pharmacy Practice in the United Kingdom with her graduate thesis project, Developing a user-focused standardised design system for prescription medicine packaging in Slovenia.
In her artistic and design practice, Eva explores various media and topics, always connected by a genuine interest in the ordinary and the banal aspects of her surroundings. Through curious and critical investigation and documentation of the seemgly mundane, she reveals deeper and broader social, political, as well as aesthetic questions, patterns and implications. The prosaic becomes the extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes the poetic.
In 2022 she was shortlisted at Sony World Photography Awards, Open Competition: Portraiture. In 2023 she was shortlisted at Sony National & Regional Awards. She had collective exhibitions in: Romania, France and The United States. Maria is interested in documentary photography, remote places, youth, notion of home and the relation between humans and environment.
Her work is centred around reworkings of historical tropes relating to the black female body, taking from contexts that include art historical paintings and sculptures as well as 19th century colonial photography. She works to subvert established notions about black female sexuality and the standard of beauty ascribed to black females. By placing historical imagery in a contemporary context, the relationship between the treatment of the black female body in the past and its treatment in the present day is explored. Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Photography, she has been a recipient of the SSA New Graduate Award and the Degree Show Purchase Prize, resulting in her work becoming part of The University of Edinburgh Art Collection.
Her work has been shown internationally and was featured in multiple printed and online publications. She was one of the artists selected to be part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019 and was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2021.
Her work A Blurry Aftertaste is part of the Government Art Collection and it was published as a book form as part of Paper Journal Annual 2019. In the last few years Eleonora has exhibited in galleries and museums such as L21 Gallery in Palma de Mallorca, South London Gallery and Borough Road Gallery in London, Leeds Art Gallery in Leeds, MAR Ravenna, National Museum of Gdansk, and festivals such as Circulations Festival in Paris and Format Festival in Derby.
She works editorially with The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Port Magazine, among others.
Agostini uses photography, video, performance and sculpture to tell stories that raise questions about the construction of personal identities and behaviours. Her work is strongly connected with the experience of our surroundings and she is interested in exploring how the relationships that we form inform who we are.
Through the study of preconceived structures, whether physical or psychological, Agostini aims to investigate the difficulties of how human experience is constructed and she is interested in finding a possible fracture within our socially constructed rules and the spaces we inhabit. Her work often starts from personal experiences andit is the result of a long process of internalization of memories and experiences that she re-elaborate and recontextualize to give it order and gain control over them. She is interested in the psychological action of reenactment used as a tool to investigate and gain insight into one’s life: re-enacting and re-imagining old memories and past experiences become a way to unfold and observe our personal histories.
Agostini refers to the every-day as a space full of potential and possibilities for quests, incorporating ordinary objects and activities within her images to express and navigate its different layers and meanings.
Florian Amoser (1990), lives and works in Olten. Florian graduated in 2017 with honors from ECAL in photography. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from ETH Zurich (2011). After working for the last five years in the BA and MA Photography at ECAL as well as conducting the research project Automated Photography (with Milo Keller, Claus Gunti), he is now focussing on his personal artistic practice. Florian is also part of the curation team of annual young art show JKON / Junge Kunst Olten. Florian Amoser’s works explore the different aspects of human perception. Since photography’s invention, human beings use it as an instrument to expand the limits of their observational capacity. Consequently, the technological development of the photographic apparatus has a significant influence on our perception. Florian Amoser builds his own original tools for his artistic works, which make new photographic images possible. His photographs bear witness to a material dissolution of the environment in which the view of physical reality is strongly influenced by experiences in digital space.
Federico Berardi, a graduate of ECAL (University of Art & Design of Lausanne), is a Swiss-born artist and still life photographer living between Paris and Switzerland. His work explores photography’s potential for creating illusion, while interrogating the technical boundaries of commercial and fine art photography.
Benedek Bognár (1986) lives and works in Budapest. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. In 2012 he studied performance and video art at the Estonian Academy of Art in Tallinn on an Erasmus scholarship. His series of works address issues related to current social phenomena, aiming to create unusual or new perspectives. He is primarily concerned with the symptoms of virtuality, digitalization, and the age of image-based communication. In his work, he often reflects on photography itself as a medium capable of creating the illusion of an objective representation of the world and its role in the process of human cognition. In his recent work, he has been concerned with modern myths and the general human need for irrational stories to explain the world. In his thesis, Genesis, he examined how the entertainment and advertising industries use the patterns, archetypes, and topoi from which humanity’s ancient great myths were built, from the perspective of the functioning of consumer society. In his work CUI PRODEST, which he is working on under the József Pécsi Photography Scholarship, he deals with the pseudo-news and disinformation of the world, which are based on irrational contexts and enemy images instead of scientific paradigms.
Louiza Vradi is a visual artist working with photography, video, new media and textile. She holds a BFA and MFA in visual arts, new media, sculpture, and art education from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work explores social documentary practices, addressing themes such as personal and collective memories, human movement, gender issues, intergenerational trauma, and our relationship with the land. She often examines the impact of sociopolitical contexts on individuals and rituals in contemporary society. In addition to her artistic practice, Louiza is an art educator trained in art therapy, working with individuals with mental and psycho-social disabilities, as well as those recovering from addiction. Since 2020, she has been a freelance visual journalist for Reuters, completing a Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT) in 2023. Louiza is a member of Women Photograph and Greek Documentary Association. She was named one of 30 Under 30 Women Photographers for 2020 by Artpil and she has been awarded with the VII Academy Scholarship. Her work can be found in international media such as The Economist, The New York Times, Vogue, Le Monde, Reuters, The Guardian, Monocle, Penguin Books, BBC, Dazed, Paris Fashion Week, etc. She has showcased her artworks in museums and galleries such as The Benaki Museum, Onassis Stegi and The Breeder gallery, among others. In 2023 she was awarded by the Greek Documentary Association for her documentary film, later supported by the Greek Film Center. She is one of the Futures Photography talents selected by VOID for 2024 and an Onassis Air Fellow. She is a recipient of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and iMEdD Fellowship. She currently lives and works in Athens.
In her most recent work, Rie Yamada stages self-portraits through other people, finding her source matter in family photo albums acquired from Japan, her homeland, and Germany, where she now lives, recreating scenes in her own likeness. Highlighting gender stereotypes and social archetypes, her often humorous work questions not just the family, but the changing role of photography itself in expressing how we want to be perceived. The images are, in a sense, a search for her own image, in the same way a family photo is intended to define and project their identity.
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.
She graduated from the Rheinmain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden with a bachelor’s degree in communication design with a focus on photography. She is currently working on various projects and completing a master’s degree in photography at the University of Applied Sciences (HAW) in Hamburg.
Hien is interested in identity, clichés and symbols. She has investigated these topics in various projects and in different ways. She experiments with arrangement, staging and installation in order to place ordinary objects and scenes in a new context and thus symbolically recharge them.
Kinga Wrona (b. 1983) is a Polish documentary photographer currently living in Krakow. She is a student at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. In her latest projects, Wrona explores the relationship between humans and nature in relation to climate change, natural disasters and environmental degradation. Her images have been published by FOTO Magazine, The Calvert Journal, National Geographic and New York Post, whilst her projects have been exhibited internationally. Her recent 85 project will soon be exhibited at Circulation(s) Festival in Paris, France.
Marin Håskjold is an artist and filmmaker based in Oslo, Norway. She studied moving images at Nordland School of Art and Film in Kabelvåg on the Lofoten islands. Identity is a central theme in Håskjolds work, where she philosophically explores different notions of gender and sex in a queer and feminist perspective. Håskjolds work has been exhibited and screened at a number of art institutions and film festivals, such as Tate Modern, London, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal, Coast Contemporary, Oslo, Kyiv International Short Film Festival, Helsinki International Film Festival, the Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad, Trøndelag Center of Contemporary Art, and Vega Scene, Oslo, as a part of Fotogalleriet’s programme. Her short film «What is a Woman?» (2020) has also been awarded with a Norwegian Academy Award in 2021, the Amanda, for Best Short, and Best Script at Beirut International Women Film Festival.
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
Marc-Antoine Garnier (b. 1989) is a French photographer and visual artist, who graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d’art et Design Le Havre-Rouen. In recent years, he has presented his works in numerous exhibitions. His pieces have been collected by the FRAC Normandie-Rouen, as well as several art libraries in France. Garnier’s research finds particular appreciation in Japan, where he exhibited at the Nishieda Foundation as part of the Nuit Blanche de Kyoto in 2017, and at the Tezukayama Gallery in 2016.
website: marcantoinegarnier.com
Instagram: @marc_antoine.garnier