His documentary approach uses photography as a link between a habitat and its inhabitants, as well as between the inhabitants themselves. In so doing, he questions notions of territorial, social, architectural and industrial identity.
In 2020, he co-founded La Nombreuse ASBL, a cultural space in Saint-Gilles, Bruxelles dedicated to emerging and contemporary photography. Since 2019, he has been driving a truck transformed into a camera obscura to meet the inhabitants of northern France.
He graduated from the BTS photo de Roubaix (fr) in 2015 and from ESA Le75 in 2018, where he has been teaching since 2023.
He graduated from the Film and Theatre Faculty of the “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, majoring in Cinematography, Photography and Media. He published his first photo album called “Beyond light and shadows” in 2017, an album comprising miscellaneous pieces of his work up to that time. Just like Nietzsche he believes that life without music would be a mistake. Films, books and cats are just some of the activities he likes to indulge in. His daughter Ida was born in 2018 bringing about a totally different perception of life and the way he looks at the stars.
Camarda’s artistic practice focuses on and explores themes such as the construction of identity, and collective phenomena that affect and define the lives of each single individual. Creating a series of dreamlike and suggestive images, he wants to ask questions and trigger reflections, rather than giving simple answers. His works have been exhibited, among others, at the Triennale of Milano and CAMERA of Torino.
http://www.domenicocamarda.com/
He is the author of the photobooks Smog, Near, Infra, Toskana, European Eyes on Japan Vol. 18, and The Most Important Things I Do Not Tell You At All, designed by Thomas Schostock. His works have been published in SZUM, BIURO, LaVie, Machina, POST, and Bad to the Bone. He is a winner of the Show OFF Section of the Krakow Photomonth Festival 2012 and the WARTO 2015 Award.
In 2016 he was selected to take part in European Eyes on Japan—a unique project inviting photographers from European Capitals of Culture to capture everyday life in Japan. He is the winner of Griffin Art Space Prize—Lubicz 2017 for the best portfolio at Krakow Photomonth 2017. Rusznica currently runs a photography gallery, Miejsce przy Miejscu, dedicated to promoting emerging photographers from Poland and abroad.
Kristina Õllek (b.1989, Estonia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She is working in the field of photography, video and installation, with a focus on investigating representational processes, geological and ecological matter, and the human-made environment. In her practice she frequently uses situations when fact and fiction, synthetic and natural, copy and original intertwine with each other and become a hybrid object / matter to obtain new and reconsidered meaning.
Her works are often site-sensitive, analysing the exhibition location and format, questioning modes of presentation and installation politics, viewing it from different perspectives — from a historical museum to online space.
Kristina Õllek has graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts (BA degree in 2013, MA degree in 2016; at the Photography Department, Fine Arts). She has also studied at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016) and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2012). She’s been the laureate of the Estonian Academy of Arts Young Artist Prize 2013 (BA) and 2016 (MA). In 2019 she received the Art Proof Production Grant. Her works have recently been shown in various international group and solo exhibitions in Estonia and abroad. Her works can be found in private and public collections.
www.kristinaollek.com
Jan Kazimierz Barnaś – born in Sandomierz on September 12, 1991; currently permanently connected with Lodz. Student at the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in lodz in the specialty of Photography and Multimedia. In his works, he often takes up the subject of the destruction of the image, his main interest is film and video art. As the FILMMAKER on his account, he has several etudes, video-arts, animations, music videos and feature films.
Wojciech Kamerys – born in 1994, student of the faculty of Photography and Multimedia Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in lodz. Practice based on photography, combined with other media. Participant of several exhibition in Lodz, Gdynia and Bydgoszcz. Cooperation with Academy of Music in Lodz, and The National Film, Television and Theatre School of Lodz and MS1 in Lodz. Theme of works based in relation between human and architecture, funcion of light and shadow in a classic silver photography.
Marie Hervé (b. 1996) is a visual artist and author, currently living between Turin and Marseille. Evolving between Southern France, Italy, Greece, the Maghreb and the Middle East, her work explores Mediterranean landscapes through notions of memory and ruin, the politics of conservation, and historical constructions. The use of the document, the limits of truth and falsity in photography, and the relationship with our personal archives are recurrent motifs in her work – from archaeological museum collections to images compulsively recorded on mobile phones. A co-founder of the collective and publishing house MYTO, Hervé’s work has been exhibited in a series of exhibitions throughout France.
Instagram: marieanneherve
Website: marie-herve.com
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.
Zane Priede (b.1990) a self-taught still life photographer based in Riga, Latvia, has a background in design and a passion for photography. A graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Priede’s work creates imaginary and surreal scenes with everyday objects, infusing them with fantasy. Her deep fascination for architecture and design can be seen in her visual approach, which involves constructing scenes with small-scale objects. Her interest in science, biology, and psychology are also evident in her visual explorations, contributing a playful approach to storytelling, and discovering the fantastical in the mundane.
The Land of Promises is an invitation to explore transnational and transracial adoption in China and Belgium, both in the present day and in the past. One can imagine that during China’s one-child policy era Belgium represented “the promised land” for baby girls whose parents had to give them up. And yet, as Youqine Lefèvre’s work unfolds, and she moves from her parents’ archives to her own images, the perspective shifts. When she visits her birth country, China becomes the land of promises — of finding her roots? Her birth family? Herself?
Such an ambitious promise is easy to break, which explains the palpable melancholy in Youqine Lefèvre’s pictures. Her work also conveys the ambiguity of her position: as an adult adoptee visiting her birth country, she is “an outsider within”, so close to her photographic subjects and yet so far away. From this perspective, art is the new land of promises for Lefèvre, who uses multiple supports (film, paper, etc.) in her photographic practice to create a world where she can live her truths. The work produced by the artist thus generates the artist. Youqine Lefèvre is not only reclaiming her own narrative, but challenging the status of archives that in her hands become both art and a political statement.
Ultimately, The Land of Promises is an invitation to decentre whiteness and the Global North in the visual narrative surrounding transnational and transracial adoption.
- Text by Amandine Gay (.TIFF)
With a background in sociology, Alejandra is interested in individuals and how the communities to which we belong define or identifies us. This is a very popular issues today with so many social movements, political instabilities, a constant search for identity or even the questioning of women role in society, but the interesting thing of this artist is how she takes these issues into concrete cases, but the lecture of her work could be elevated to more global concepts. Her particular artistic approach and experience make this photographer an ideal choice for supporting her projection.
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 2016 she published her first photo book, eden, thanks to the Fiebre Dummy Award. Since 2010 she lives in Madrid, alternating her work as a photographer with her personal projects.