With his interest in the glorifying and influential nature of photographs and images, Jeroen Bocken investigates the increasingly prominent role of hyper-idealised aesthetics in today’s world. Bocken is fascinated by natural science, human criteria and calculations and the limitations of the camera. He combines a variety of digital processes with natural patterns and algorithms. This experimental and associative process results in illogically constructed images. The photographer alternates these with classic “documentary” images – often iconic and familiar – to create an ambiguous context.
The interplay between real and constructed images requires vigilance. By playing these extreme methods off against each other, Bocken reminds us that an image never really shows the ultimate reality but is only capable of representing it. The image is a documentation, a snapshot and a notion of reality. It has the unequivocal power to steer our interpretation and perception in one direction.
New digital advances, such as 3D renders, mean that hyper-constructed images are being unleashed on the world at a dizzying rate. These immaculate, aesthetic and fabricated renderings are increasingly wrong-footing us and impacting on our perceptions. It is only with effort that we can distinguish the “picture perfect” from reality. Bocken is very intrigued by this ironic and surrealistic fact. By twisting and distorting the technical processing of his own images, and embracing the faults, Bocken explores the boundaries of our sense of reality.
Text by Eléa De Winter
UNSTATED is a Zürich–based practice that merges the physical and digital worlds through innovative strategy and design.We are committed to creating work that adapts to our changing environment.
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.
The polish photographer Natalia Kepesz (*1983) lives and works in Berlin. After studying cultural studies and art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she graduated in 2021 with a degree in photography at the Ostkreuzschule Berlin. Since 2016 she has been working as a freelance photographer. She is a member of bbk Berlin, VG Bild and Women Photograph.
Natalia Kepesz got third place in the World Press Photo Contest 2021 (Portrait Series). She also won the residency prize in the Portraits Hellerau Photography Award 2021, Les Jour Prix at Les Boutographies - recontres photographiques de Montpellier 2021 and was named GUP Fresheyes Talent 2021, among others.
Her works have been exhibited at the Belfast Photo Festival, Helsinki Photo Festival, Festspielhaus Hellerau Dresden, Münzenberg Forum Berlin, Noorderlicht Photo Festival and the World Press Exhibition Foto Tour, among others.
Sofie Flinth (b. 1996) is a Copenhagen-based visual artist with a BA in Art & Design from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Working primarily with portrait and staged photography, her works touch upon themes of nostalgia, vanity and manipulation. By combining storytelling with everyday life, Flinth creates semi-docu scenarios featuring herself and the women close to her. Her projects explore the imaginary, asking to what extent images portray reality. In 2020, Flinth’s graduation work When the Sun Sets was part of two group exhibitions in Amsterdam; one at Galerie Ron Mandos and another at Foam Fotografiemuseum. In 2022, she was named as one of the Fresh Eyes Talents with her ongoing series, A Million Dollar View.
sofieflinth
sofieflinth.com
Luciana M. Vulea is a PhD student in Visual Arts and a university assistant at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Living in a world of images, she draws inspiration from a broad range of imagery and artistic techniques – many of which she integrates into her own practice. As a doctoral student, Vulea’s research examines the insertion of virtuality into the contemporary imaginary. Her role as a university assistant involves teaching 2D and 3D animation to students. Vulea’s work also spans conservation – through the restoration of old photographs – as well as various curatorial activities.
He often follows the subjects of his photo essays for many years. His series are mostly people-focused, trying to explore the problems of individuals or social groups with the tool of photography. His work has been rewarded with honored awards: shortlisted in the See.Me The Exposure Award competition in landscape category, and his image was exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. He has won several awards at the Hungarian Press Photo Competition, including the André Kertész Grand Prize, the Károly Escher Prize and the Zoltán Szalay Prize for three consecutive years for the best-performing photojournalist under 30. He has been participant in international masterclasses such as the Nikon-NOOR Academy Masterclass and is now a third-time scholarship holder to VII Academy seminars.
His latest photo essay on air pollution in Northeast Hungary was chosen by the Reuters news agency as one of the most important Wider Image story.
Marta Machado is a Portuguese-Cape Verdean artist who lives and works in Braga, Portugal. A graduate of Architecture from the University of Minho, she also holds an MA in Photography from the School of Arts at the Catholic University of Porto. Her photographic work analyses the ambiguities of history and the so-called ‘official’ narratives of the Western world, focusing on themes of colonialism, identity and territory. Machado’s Beyond Solid Ground project was exhibited at Braga’s Encontros da Imagem festival, whilst her Nos Txôn series was presented at Lisbon’s Imago Gallery. Her academic research, meanwhile, has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals.
Peggy van Mosselaar is a documentary and visual storyteller motivated by curiosity and human interest. Van Mosselaar creates photographic and video works based upon the stories and memories of the people she meets. The artist graduated from PhotoAcademy, Amsterdam and Foto Vakschool, Rotterdam. Peggy has exhibited at Loods 6, Amsterdam; Museum Hilversum, Hilversum; and SKVR, Rotterdam. In August-November 2022, she will present her work in FOTODOK’s group exhibition Part of Me… Shaping Mental Spaces.
Mirielle Rohr (b. Berlin) is a visual artist and photographer based between Paris and Berlin. She graduated from ECAL’s Master in Photography (Lausanne) in 2025. Through analogue photography, ceramics, sculpture, and AI-generated imagery, she examines the aesthetics and emotional economies of digital culture, how bodies, desire, and identity are mediated, performed, and consumed. Her works often combines tactile processes with synthetic image-making to produce psychologically charged narratives.
Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Der Greif, Schema Magazine, SLEEK, and Fisheye Magazine, among many more. She was a finalist for the Picto Fashion Photography Award (2024) and presented her work at Paris Photo (Carte Blanche Étudiante, 2025) last year. In March 2026 she will exhibit at PhotoVogue Festival, is shortlisted for Un/Fund & Residency.
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.
Julie Hrnčířová is a photographer based in Oslo. Her long-term interest lies in her sensitivity to the details of the urban environment and the periphery. Observing these neglected places, non-places, urban coincidences and structures reveals the author's interest in a broader social context.
She graduated at Ecole Nationale Supérieure of Photographie (ENSP), Master degree, Arles, France in 2018. She participated in exhibitions as Les Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles, the GapGap Gallery in Leipzig, Gallery Fotogalleriet, Oslo , Industria Art, Brno.
https://juliehrncirova.xhbtr.com/everyday_sculpture
In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.
“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”
Paolo Ciregia (b. 1987) is an Italian artist. After experience as a reporter at the forefront of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, in the last five years his artistic research has been focused on Ukraine context, manipulating and reworking his personal archive in a new way. Investigating and deconstructing both archives symbols and language, Ciregia aims to reveal the atrocities behind the war, destroying the propaganda patina through installations and sculptures. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Among the major prizes are Winner of Talent FOAM Amsterdam 2016, Winner of “LOOP, Giovane Fotografia Italiana”, Festival Fotografia Europea 2017, “Honorable jury Mention” at Premio Francesco Fabbri 2016, TU35 at the Museo Pecci in Prato 2017, Winner of Leica Talent 2012.
http://www.paolociregia.eu/
Eunice Pais is a Luso-Mozambican artist who works with video, photography, sound, and sculpture—particularly metal and textiles—to investigate themes of visibility, invisibility, ecology, memory, and labour as dissident and counter-colonial strategies. Her practice operates within speculative and post-nature frameworks, engaging material, spatial, and sonic forms to unsettle extractive logics, imperial modes of knowledge production, and fixed archival methodologies.
Rather than offering resolution, Pais is interested in opacity, porosity, and the productive space of the non-answer, allowing meaning to remain embodied, fragmented, and relational. Through gestures of repetition, contamination, and material transformation, her work foregrounds forms of rebellion that emerge within—and against—histories of extraction and coloniality embedded in everyday structures, landscapes, and bodies.
Her practice is shaped by transnational histories between Portugal and Mozambique, approached not as identity markers but as sites of tension, inheritance, and refusal.
In 2020, she founded PAIS Agency, a photography studio and production agency focused on the intersection of environmental and social justice. Since 2023, her work has been exhibited across the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, with recent and forthcoming exhibitions in Portugal and across Europe.
She is a recipient of the Alumni Exchange Innovation Fund from the U.S. Embassy in Portugal, and her project Sargassum is supported by Directorate-General for the Arts (Portugal).
Karim El Maktafi (Desenzano del Garda, 1992) is an Italian Moroccan photographer based in Milan. In 2013 he graduated at the Instituto Italiano di Fotografia in Milan. In 2016, he obtained a one-year scholarship at Fabrica, Benetton's communication research center in Treviso.
During his residency period, El Maktafi made the project Hayati and, one year later, won the PHMuseum 2017 Grant - New Generation Prize. With the same project, El Maktafi has been finalist of the CAP Prize 2017 (Contemporary African Photography prize) and second prize at the Kassel Dummy Award 2018. In 2017 he won a mentorship with the American photographer Maggie Steber (VII Agency), while in 2018 he gets the Magnum Photos scholarship with Alex Majoli.
Karim works on long-term projects between Italy and Morocco exploring concepts as identity and sense of belonging through documentary and portrait photography. His work has been exhibited at La Triennale Museum in Milan, Museum in Der Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, Macro Testaccio Museum in Rome and in other photography festivals in Europe, as well has been published, among others, on The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic USA, Internazionale, Vice, GEO.
www.karimelmaktafi.com