His work explores aspects of religious belief, mysticism and phenomenology and aims to understand how photography can be used to communicate such themes. Michael’s latest body of work, Noema (2020), follows the search for the Virgin Mary’s presence in two locations in which she has reportedly been seen.
Tamara Janes is an artist based in Bern. After studying photography at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and at the School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA), she completed a master's degree at the Institute of Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel University of Art and Design. She then returned to New York on a Studio Scholarship from the City of Bern to continue her research at the Public Library. Among others, her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Glarus, HeK Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Kunsthaus Baselland, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Stadtgalerie Bern, on the occasion of Plat(t)form15 at Fotomuseum Winterthur and at the Bieler Fototage. Her projects have been supported and awarded several times. Tamara Janes received the Swiss Design Award 2023 in the category photography with her work “Copyright Swap”. Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at the photography class, F+F School of Art and Design, Zurich.
Artist Statement
In my work I deal with the conditions of digital images. I take a critical view of current photographic behaviour because our perception and our handling of images is increasingly determined by technology and algorithms. Mostly we unreflectively consume images every second and strive for more and more unrealistic sharpness and brilliance. This development is at the same time thought content and friction surface for my work. By shifting through and contextualizing my own and other people's visual material, I want to create new perspectives and visual commentaries.
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
Laura Fiorio is an artist working with photography, performance and relational practices. Her projects interact with archival objects, questioning the power dynamics embedded in the editing process of creating memories, their political use and their critical and transformative potential. In her practice, she facilitates collaborative narratives by addressing the entanglement between intimate and institutional histories and fosters discussion on heritage. She holds a BA in Performing Visual Arts (Venice), an MA in Art and Social Work (Berlin) and a Postgraduate Degree in Decolonizing Architecture (Stockholm). Her work was internationally exhibited and produced independently or in collaboration with institutions, including Biennale, Sale Docks (Venice/IT), CeCuT (Tijuana/MX), Shanti Road (Bangalore/IN), Festival International de Fotografia (Valparaiso/CL), ECCHR and House of the Cultures of the World (Berlin/DE). Furthermore, she has been working on social projects in prisons, refugee shelters and with homeless people in Mexico, Italy and Germany.
Helcel received an honorable mention in the European art thesis competition START POINT Prize 2020. He is a co-founder and active member of the theatre group Akolektiv Helmut.
Irene Zottola is a self-taught photographer; in 2016, she began honing her skills in the laboratory of Madrid’s Slow Photo collective. Her poetic works probe at the limits of analogue photography, which she often pairs with text. Working simultaneously as an arts educator, Zottola explores photography as a tool for social intervention amongst vulnerable groups. Her first photobook, Icarus, was published by Ediciones Anómalas in 2021. With the same project, Zottola was a finalist at PhotoEspaña, and at the Photobook Awards of Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2022. Her work has been exhibited in Spain, Italy and Morocco.
My research that for formality can be described as photographic due to the medium used, even if the dimension that belongs to me is more related to the image, to what it communicates to us and how it is perceived. Like the graphic design my photographs tend to a clear reading, which privileges functionality to pure aesthetic beauty, to finalize the reading to a deeper stage of cognitive perception. I have two different aspects: the construction of the image by the sculpture, and the archiving of the photos that I collect in certain carefully chosen environments. It’s very important to me to return many times to the settings that I selected. Both approaches are always formalized and captured through photography.
In 2019 I was finalist of the FFF Fondazione Francesco Fabbri award. My work has been featured in many national and international exhibitions: Audi Studio by Nevven Gallery, Stockholm; Villa Vertua Masolo, Milano; Spaziosiena, Siena; LOFT, Lecce; Las Palmas, Lisbon; Galleria Giuseppe Pero, Milano; BASIS, Frankfurt; Spaziobuonasera, Torino.
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.
Van Wyk is a member of the African Photojournalist Association with World Press Photo, Women Photograph and Black Women Photographers. Her work has been featured by the internationally based i-D, The Washington Post, Photo Vogue, Der Greif and The Times UK.
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)
A self-taught photographer, he has built his creative practice by travelling around Kazakhstan and shooting uncanny, unpredictable vistas.
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.
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.
Sasha participated in the 5th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art in MMoMA, previous year took a part of “Somewheres & Anywheres: Young Photography from Eastern Europe” exhibition in Berlin gallery EEP and join BERLIN PHOTO WEEK.
His short film “Swallowed by the Routine” was selected for the Fashion Film Awards 2019 by SHOWstudio X HARRODS and was shown in London last October.
The main themes explored by Sasha now are the struggle with the language, because words controls us and reduces our worldview; queer theory, that means infinite pluralism of identities, meanings without hierarchy, ever-changing flexible self-definition; and criticism/decentration of the concept of truth.
This three ideas are really close to each other like the liberation from automatisms, habits and the aspiration to independent, affective perception and action.
Inês Quente (1992, Avintes, Portugal) is a visual artist who lives and works between Vila Nova de Gaia and Porto.She has a master's degree in Documentary Filmmaking from the University for the Creative Arts (UK, 2017) and a degree in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (PT, 2015).She was a grantee of the Culture Moves Europe (2024), a program funded by the European Union and the Goethe Institut.Her practice navigates themes of ecology, memory and transformation.She showcases her work regularly since 2013, both nationally and internationally, such as her latest individual site-specific installation For Every Light Its Place, at Gallerí Úthverfa, in the city of Ísafjörður (ISK, 2024).She took part in the ArtsIceland international artistic residency (ISK, 2023 and 2024) and Grão research and artistic residency (PT, 2023).