Laura C. Vela’s work focuses on the everyday, the infinitely small, and the relationship human beings share with their surroundings. She perceives photography as a way of placing herself in the world and a means of communicating with others.
She published her first book, 'Vorhandenheit', in 2014, which was reissued in 2020. In 2016 she collaborated on 'Subculturcide', a book about Madrid during the 2010s. She was a selected artist at Plat(t)form 2018 (Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland) and in May 2019 she published her first photo book, 'Como la casa mía', with the publishing house Dalpine, Shortlisted for PhotoEspaña Best Book of the Year Award 2020. In July 2020 she edited and published 'Las simples cosas', a collective photo book. In 2022, she published 'Siempre van solos, los bichos', a transmedia project (book and web format). Since november 2020, she directed the book collection 'Esto es un cuerpo'.
Laura is a Superior Technician of Plastic Arts and Design in Photography (Arte 10 School, Madrid). Laura graduated in Philosophy (Universidad Complutense, Madrid) and she won the BlankPaper scholarship to study a Master’s in Development of Artistic Projects. She also has a Diploma in Chinese Studies (International Institute of International Studies, UCM, Madrid).
Pongo’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the USA and published in WSJ, The Guardian UK, The Washington Post, National Geographic and several other international publications. He was chosen as one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016 and recipient of the Getty Grant in 2018. His work is also part of institutional and private collections. Pongo was a member of Noor agency from 2017 until 2019.
He is based between Brussels and Kinshasa and shares his photographic career between his long term projects in Congo DR, teaching and assignment work.
Ksenia Ivanova is a documentary photographer based in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on themes of trauma, explored through long-term storytelling. She was a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award (2024) and the Picture of the Year, Online Storytelling (2021), and won the Lucie Foundation Documentary Award (2023).
Ksenia's projects have been featured in The Washington Post, Courrier International, XXI Revue, and Der Spiegel. She has also contributed to The New York Times, Zeit Online, Le Monde, Libération, and GEO France, among others.
David Bakarić Mihaljević, born in 2001. In Zagreb, is an undergraduate student of cinematography at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. With ambitions of completing a master's degree in photography at the academy, David has had three solo exhibitions and participated in five group exhibitions. One of these, named "So Far," he organized himself with the help of his colleagues and friends. Besides photography, and prior to attending the Academy, David filmed two experimental documentaries. His film, "From You I Am Happy," was shown in the non-competition program at the Zg Dox festival.
I started off with photography on a late age, because I have a history of pro-basketball player. I decided to go back and study after I quit basketball. After a stop at RITS Drama school in Brussels I started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent where I got my bachelor in Photography.
I have an undeniable curiosity and hunger for both small and large, well-known and less well-known stories. I use my camera as a key to enter a world or to make any contact. It gives me a fly on the wall feeling, with which I can experience a tranche de vie for a while. I always try to approach my subject as objectively as possible and let my eye do the work.
Photography helps me to understand certain facets of life in a better way.
I've always been attracted to uncommon subjects and stories, which aren't mainstream and easy to approach.
In our work, we explore the result of the interplay between previous and present generations, between the crew and the entertainment we provide for the locals in the places where we shoot. We use tools like traditional film photography, performance, and mixed media, operating at the interface between non-traditional documentary and marginalized fashion photography, in the contemporary environment.
Once a year we put people of our generation in conditions where they intensely experience the conflict between the cultural wealth we inherit from previous generations and the new international, material, spiritual values that impact us in the modern world. Reconciling and integrating this conflict allows us to move on culturally and spiritually and to reveal hidden aspects of life in Ukraine.
Today she lives and works as a photographer in Athens. Her work has been published in magazines from Greece and abroad, and presented in photography group exhibitions.
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.
Lorenzo uses the photography as a way of expression; he refines his technique during a long collaboration in the backstages for several fashion brands, a collaboration that still exists.
The skills acquired will allow Lorenzo to express himself creatively.
Through the use of a camera he captures images that evoke emotions and thoughts; he is not a lover of photographic manipulation through programs, in fact he creates installations to recreate what he thought and felt while visiting those places.
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.
Reinis Hofmanis (b. 1985) is a Riga-based artist and photographer. He studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany, and obtained an MA from the Visual Communication Department of the Art Academy of Latvia. His works are characterised by a socio-anthropological point of view – which manifests in an interest in typifying different groups of society, their behavioural pattern, and tier effect on the surrounding environment. Hofmanis won the main prize at Archifoto in 2012 and 2013, and was awarded 2nd place in the Architecture category of the Sony World Photography Awards. His works have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Der Spiegel, Esquire, Bloomberg, Le Monde, The Globe and Mail, and The British Journal of Photography
His photos combine powerful visuals with compelling stories. He got published by National Geographic, Washington Post, CNN and stern.
With a mindful approach she seeks stillness and hidden messages in ordinary life, often exploring society, human-made landscape and nature.
Rūta Kalmuka is a Latvian photographer whose passion for analogue photography took root during her secondary school years under the mentorship of Andrejs Grants. For roughly seven years, she immersed herself in the art of film developing, darkroom printing, and the finer details of traditional photography. This hands-on experience laid the foundation for her enduring commitment to analogue processes. Despite the demands of a busy editorial career, Kalmuka consistently nurtured her personal art practice. She created bodies of work focused on her immediate family, capturing intimate narratives through the tactile, deliberate medium of film. Over the years, she participated in numerous group exhibitions, both in Latvia and abroad, showcasing her evolving perspective on family life and everyday rituals. In 2022, she transitioned from the news agency to a new role as a photographer in a museum setting, affording her more time and creative freedom to develop her ideas. This shift allowed Kalmuka to delve deeper into the conceptual aspects of her projects, further refining her analogue techniques. Two years later, in 2024, she exhibited a long-term family-centered project at the ISSP Gallery—an exhibition that encapsulated her ongoing exploration of memory, identity, and personal history. Through her distinct blend of traditional processes and reflective storytelling, Kalmuka continues to expand the expressive potential of analogue photography.
Andrey Anro (born 1987 Smarhon, Belarus) Lives and works in Berlin, Germany / Minsk, Belarus. His basic tools are painting, photography, digital collage, and installation. Anro explores topics such as collective memory, historical heritage, politics, dictatorship, religion, disappearance and death. He is author of the photobook "Happy Death Society", 2019.
The artist's works are in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow(MOCAK), Poland, in the ART4 Museum in Moscow, in private collections in Lithuania, Sweden, Canada, Russia, and the USA. In 2007 he graduated from MMT L.B. Krasina (Moscow, Russia), speciality "Advertising".
Lesia Vasylchenko (b. 1990 Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway) is an artist and curator. Her work with installations, moving images and photography raises questions around temporality, history and memorialising. Vasylchenko is a co-curator of the artist-run gallery space Podium and a founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her works have been shown among others at Louvre Museum, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg; Tenthaus Gallery, Oslo; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale.
Born in 1991 in Willemstad, Curaçao
Lives and Works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gilleam Trapenberg (1991, Willemstad, Curaçao) moved to the Netherlands at the age of nineteen and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2017. He participated in multiple group exhibitions, such as In The Presence of Absence at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020). In 2017 he published his first photo book Big Papi and in 2018 he was one of the nominees for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He’s the fourth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis grant (2020). His first solo exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam opened in 2021. Gilleam Trapenberg lives and works in Amsterdam. Through his work, Trapenberg reflects on the contradictions that are part of the social landscape in Curaçao, were the idea of a utopian paradise is diametrically opposed to the realities of post-colonialism and tourism. He explores stereotypes and tropes that have manifested themselves through social culture and the Western media.
Agnieszka Sejud is an interdisciplinary visual artist operating between Hamburg and Wrocław. She holds a Master’s degree in Law from the University of Wrocław and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Silesian University in Opava (Czech Republic). In her artistic practice, Sejud engages with various media as tools for critical reflection on identity, the notion of individual freedom, and the oppressive structures that constrain human autonomy. Her work aims to deconstruct and dismantle these mechanisms through an experiment-driven artistic approach. She works with photography, both digital and analog collage, artist publications, installations, and video art. A distinctive feature of her aesthetic is the deliberate deformation of the image, which serves as an expressive vehicle for conveying complex ideas and emotions. Sejud’s works have been exhibited in numerous international contexts, affirming their universal resonance and significance within the discourse of contemporary visual art.
Giya Makondo-Wills is a British-South African documentary photographer. Makondo-Wills is concerned with identity, race, colonisation, the western gaze and systems of power. Her practice continues to develop and pushes to engage and collaborate with marginalised communities. She holds a BA (hons) and a MA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales (formerly Newport). In 2021 she began teaching on the BA Photography at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). She lives and works between the U.K and The Netherlands. She also works with other educational institutions as a visiting lecturer. She has exhibited her work internationally, some highlights include; Lagos, Johannesburg, Dusseldorf, Milan and Paris as well as widely within the UK. Featured in several ‘graduate of the year’ profiles, she has won an IFOR documentary photography award and been shortlisted for other prizes.She was nominated for the 2019 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and in 2018 selected as one of the '31 women to watch out for' by the British Journal of Photography. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Royal Photographic Society journal, It’sNiceThat, Unseen Magazine and Source Photographic Review, amongst others. Her first photobook was released in 2020 They Came From The Water While The World Watched is available via the Lost Light Recordings. In 2022-2023, Makondo-Wills is commissioned by FOTODOK to produce the body of work about Utrecht communities, with which she will partake in a group exhibition opening FOTODOK at the new location of De Machinerie.
"Porosity is probably the concept that best characterises Etienne Courtois’s approach to his photographic work. One of the threads in his creative process is his distinctly plastic treatment of the medium through integrated and often barely noticeable interventions that are both sculptural and pictorial by nature. These interventions are evident in how he prepares his support as well as in the compositions themselves.
The interventions often originate from the confrontation between various random objects gathered by Courtois during his walks and rambles through the city or in nature, leading to surprising encounters that have a contemporary surrealistic quality, which is further accentuated by the treatment or plastic and pictorial transformations he applies. Courtois adds a subsequent layer of ambiguity to the reading of this process by creating sculptural forms - often in plaster, but also in wood - that are integrated into the images or applied in relief on the prints.
Occasionally, the ambivalence of the treatment is emphasised by multiple exposure of the same photographic negative, which modifies the chromatic values as well as the shapes in the initial image, creating the effect of a shift or spectral motion.
The work of Etienne Courtois clearly surpasses the dichotomy between figurative and representational art. The ambiguity in interpreting and understanding these interventions leads to completely new and surprising formal encounters between everyday objects in a whimsical, alienating atmosphere. Courtois’s work is marked by a distinctly free, singular and often witty approach that evokes the pictorial work of Walter Swennen or the sculptures of Koenraad Dedobbeleer."
Text by Emmanuel Lambion