Laura Paloma (*1995) is an artist and writer based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Her practice questions the relationship between image, object, text, language, and play online. She is interested in the détournement and misuse of corporate social media platforms, as well as the negotiations that take place between the user and the platform. She works with DIY, lo-fi, and self-publishing techniques, as well as with found or recycled physical and digital materials. Her projects address ideas of authorship, materiality, and performativity of digital and networked images and texts. Context-based and site-specific, her practice explores various formats, ranging from installations to online and print publications, as well as long-duration social media performances. She has exhibited her work in several off-spaces in Switzerland, made a live desktop performance for Screen Walks (Photographers’ Gallery London & Fotomuseum Winterthur), was nominated for Prix Photoforum 2023, and has published a zine with Edition Taberna Kritika, Bern. In 2024 she was artist-in-residence at hangar.org in Barcelona and house guest at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.She holds a Master’s in Contemporary Arts Practice in Literary Writing from Bern Academy of the Arts, where she worked as assistant from 2021 to 2023.
Visual artist, performer, author of installations and video art. PhD fellow at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City in 2023. MFA graduate of the Studio of Spatial Activities of prof. Mirosław Bałka at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2020). Also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2010-11) in Amsterdam and during an internship at the Studio of Performance at FaVU VUT in Brno led by Julie Béna and Jakub Jansa (2021). Received the Europe Beyond Access award granted by Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and British Council in 2021 and the Grand Prix at the 10th Biennale of Young Art Rybie Oko (Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Słupsk, 2022). Presented her works and performances at, among others, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2023), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2022), Galeria Miejska Arsenał in Poznań (2022), Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (2021), Sto Lat Gallery in New York (2021).
Sanja Bistričić Srića is a Zagreb-based multimedia artist, photographer and cinematographer. Exploring the possibilities of image, sound and text through various media – film, video, photography, collage – her work explores personal themes in a range of diaristic forms. Srića holds a Master’s degree in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. Her works and films have been widely exhibited in Croatia and abroad, whilst her images have been published by the likes of Elle, Vice and Interview. She is a co-founder and member of the multidisciplinary collective RA’AH, which explores intersections of fashion, art and music.
She has participated in numerous group shows including reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today presented at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne and the Aperture Foundation in New York. She held several solo exhibitions including Futerał at Wschód Gallery, Sunday Night Drama at Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Leakage at the Panopticon in Stockholm and at the Discovery Award show at the Rencontres d’Arles 2015. In 2013 she was awarded a scholarship for the PhotoGlobal program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2017 she received the Overseas Photographer Higashikawa Award.
Lucas Leffler revisits the past. Starting with stories rooted in reality, his projects focus on silver as a source of inspiration and discovery.
Zilverbeek (or Silver Stream) (2017–2020) is a dreamlike investigation of a man who collects mud from a stream in order to extract the precious white metal from it. The silver was the result of years of photosensitive emulsions being discharged into the water from the Agfa-Gevaert factory. The artist documents, deconstructs then reconstructs, history, brilliantly reshaping time and our perception of it to give us an oblique look at photographic materials.
His second work, Crescent (2019–2020), is a speculative study of the scientific and esoteric significance of silver. Here, the artist delves into something that fascinates him: the moon’s influence on the metal. His attempts to synthesise it result in photograms of sculptural objects and the sky — as though the heavens were being radiographed.
For Lucas Leffler, the shoot provides tangible evidence that a fantastical story — the pretext and context for his journeys — is true. He subjects this evidence to an experimental process involving chemicals and manipulation of the film and the subjects, thus creating a synthetic version of reality: one that transcends facts, muddies the path, and allows viewers to come to their own conclusions.
- Text by Emilia Genuardi (.TIFF)
In addition to her art and research, she works on commission for architects and public institutions. She is regularly published in architectural magazines (including Casabella, Domus, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui, Le Moniteur). She gives tertiary lectures (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Florida International University, Polytechnic University of Milan, University of Genoa, Italian Institute of Culture - Addis Ababa) and leads workshops at a university level.
Her projects have been exhibited internationally, in art galleries and public institutions, such as La Triennale, Milan, Venice Architectural Biennale, Cornell University, Ithaca, MAO Ljubljana, and Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art, Genoa.
Anna is based in Genoa, Italy.
Kvet Nguyen (Hoa Nguyen Thi) is slovak-vietnamese artist based in Bratislava. Cultural clash of two different realities is the basis for every thinking process and eventually the dominant subject in her works.
She completed her master’s degree in photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava within she attended interns in Plymouth College of Art in England and the Royal Academy of Art in Netherlands. Her works have been exhibited in slovakian and international context (Soda Gallery, Čepan Gallery, OFF Festival, Nitra Gallery, Karlín Studios in Prague, Galeria Promocyjna, Krakow and at the presentation of photo books in Poznań (2017), and at LIVRE PARIS (2019) in France.
https://kvetnguyen.com/project/you-are-allowed-to-mix-apples-and-pears-here/
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.
Her art practice focuses on the relationship between the human being and the landscape. She tracks the history of the ways of space use, of the actions and transformations that leave a series of dispersed marks behind. Including archival materials in her practice, she reveals the changeability of the space in time and constructs a visual essay about memory.