Lia Darjes was born in Berlin in 1984 and grew up in Hamburg. She studied with Ute Mahler at HAW in Hamburg and then as a master class student with Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, where she started teaching in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, France, Canada, Russia and Switzerland and published in national and international media such as M, le Monde, and CNN. She has received various scholarships and awards, including the young talent award of the Art Prize of the Lotto Foundation Brandenburg.
Her work 'Tempora Morte' is an authentic documentary still-life study from the unofficial roadside-market of Russia's little exclave Kaliningrad.
Images are, for Nicole Rafiki, a thinking force. She produces imaginaries in a disparity of media, photography one of them. The normativity of thought comes from a multiplicity of machines of knowledge production, including but not limited to education, exhibition spaces, and the media. A social practice means interacting and constantly challenging the presupposed universal self such an information sphere produces. In a global economy and flow of disjunctive hierarchies and modes of being, culture moves in a disruptive way through the migration of people across borders, geographies, and time. Rafiki points to such complex and conflictual past, presentness, and future. The image, the imagined, the imaginary move from a world defined mainly by concrete purposes to structure negotiations and possibilities.
Alice Pallot is a French photographer who lives and works in Brussels. She graduated with honors from the photography section of ENSAV La Cambre (BA and MA) In July 2018 and participated in the Erasmus program at Ecal in Switzerland. In the same year, she won the Roger de Conynck prize for her series L’Ile Himero, also exhibited at The Voies Off Festival in the context of Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.In 2019, Alice Pallot self-edited a book untitled Land which was included in Belgian Photobook at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, Le Bal in Paris and at the Wiels Art Book Fair in Brussels. Her photographic series Oasis was included in the 4th edition of the PhotoBrussels Festival 2019 at Hangar Art Center. This body of work was also shown in collaboration with the Satellite Gallery at En Piste ! in Liège and in Dans quel monde rêvons-nous ? curated by the collectif Xeno at Bozar in Brussels. Alice Pallot’s work was included in several places in Brussels, such as Le Botanique, Gallery Été 78, Adaventura, Vertigo Gallery, La Réserve and La Vallée. She also exhibited in France; in Paris, at Immix Gallery, N’Oblige Gallery and in Dieppe at the Diep-Haven Festival.In 2020, she presented with the Gallery Satellite a new display of L’Île Himero - accompanied with a book edited by Page Works - at the Biennale de L’Image Possible in Liège. Laureate of the PhotoBrussels Festival 05, Alice Pallot presented a new series; Suillus, part of the exhibition «The World Within» at Hangar Art Center in 2021.In September 2021, she presented her Suillus series at the Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam, with Hangar Gallery. In january 2022, Suillus was presented in La Caserne and at Immix Galerie in Paris. Alice Pallot has been published in Libération, La Libre, Fisheye Magazine, Vice and others.
Her works and engagement has been marked by accolades, including the Bayern Innovativ’s Junge Kunst und Neue Wege Stipendium, and grants like the Neustart Kultur Stipend 2022 and Neustart Plus Stipend 2023 from Stiftung Kunstfonds. Albano's works have been showcased in both solo and group exhibitions nationwide and internationally. She premiered her first solo exhibition through the ISO 5000 Prize 2021 of Hans and Annemarie Weidmann Foundation. In 2023 she was part of Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles at the Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz.
Albano's influence extends beyond her art, as she has been an invited guest at the German-British Democracy Forum, and held talks for the Hertie Foundation and the BARCAMP of the German Foreign Office. In 2023, she started to establish an Afro-European artist network, leveraging her Allianz Foundation Fellowship to foster collaboration within the artistic community.
Born in Belgium in 1989, Lionel Jusseret is a documentary photographer. After finishing his studies at INSAS in 2012, a Belgian film school, he photographed children with autism in the French association J'interviendrais. In the search for unpredictable images, Jusseret works in the intimacy of his subject. The approach is anthropological. After seven years of immersion, he finished his first series Kinderszenen.
Lionel Jusseret lives and works in Brussels.
Julia Gaes (b. 1993) lives and works in Hamburg. Her work is primarily focused on ideas of body image and identity. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Photography at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld in 2018, and received a Master of Arts in Photography at the HAW Hamburg in 2022. Gaes has exhibited her work at a range of international festivals, including the Triennial of Photography, Hamburg; Kolga Festival, Tbilisi; and Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam.
Wbsite: www.juliagaes.de
Ines Karčáková (*1993) is multimedia artist from Slovakia, based in Prague, Czech Republic. Her interest is in topics such as light, time, space, and disturbance of their mutual interrelationships.
She reflects on the qualities of the medium of photography through video installations in the space, which are often covered by appropriated visual material, in the long term. She is primarily interested in the changing specificity of photography - its original uniqueness is rapidly changing and today we can speak of it in terms of instability, ambiguity and untrustworthiness.
Recently, she has primarily focused on research in astrophotography, among on cosmic microwave background, or on the boundary between the rough telescope record and the aestheticized photography serving to popularize astronomy itself. Now, she is forming an arc over the schematic and romanticized visions of cosmic distances, coming back to much more terrestrial problems. Her current themes are the misbalance between the pace of technological development and its actual understanding, or the consequences of long-term neglect of environmental problems. She had several exhibitions in Slovakia, Czech Republic, but also abroad - for example in Budapest, New York or Düsseldorf.
Petra Slobodnjak is an artist from Croatia who graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, studying graphic product design, in Zagreb in 2012. Since 2014, Petra has been working as a freelance graphic designer and photographer. She is a Croatian Freelance Artist Association member and has exhibited her work regularly since 2008. For work DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7, she received the Ivan Kožarić award for the best young artist, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City of Zagreb (in 2022) and award for the Best Young Artist in 2022 awarded by the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts. The mentioned work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art collection in Zagreb. Her artistic work intertwined with her personal life, examining the boundaries between these two aspects. She explores the dynamics of society in her works, emphasizing personal responsibility in shaping the environment. Through artistic expression, she fosters awareness of an individual’s impact on broader societal changes, encouraging reflection on one’s actions and relationship to the surroundings. She is currently based in Zagreb.
Luiza Marinas (b.1987) is a Romanian photographer, whose work merges elements of fine art, conceptual photography, portraiture, documentary photography and travel photography. Travel was her entry point into the discipline; for Marinas, photographing other cultures offered a means to better understand herself. She photographed people and places in Romania, Mongolia, Nepal, Argentina, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Jordan, Iceland and Greenland, before later turning to the world of fine art and conceptual photography. Her photographs have been published by the likes of Blur Magazine, National Geographic and Vogue Italia, whilst her work has featured in several exhibitions in Romania and abroad.
Through long term projects she explores the topics of death, immortality as well as the relationship between photography and extinction. She is part of PARALLEL - European Photo Based Platform, Haute Photographie Talents and was selected as the GUP New Talent of the year 2020.
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.
Her personal work is often photographic, but this is not an exclusive relationship. On the basis of her projects, there is very often a question: How do the campers manage the nearness with their peers (Hidden Living)? Why do some Chinese prefer to live in a false Parisian avenue rather than in a traditional hutong (Abroad is too far)? What is the counterpart that urges a person to gulp down mass amounts of food enough to hurt their body (Rotten Potato)? Where is our relationship with food and our body rooted (To tell my real intentions, I want to eat only haze like a hermit)? Behind these questions lies a desire to understand a social phenomenon. And humor is not excluded.
She also pays very special attention to actively involve people she works with in the construction of the projects.
Her work has been awarded with various prizes, publications and exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. She also took part in artistic residencies (China, France, Japan).
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.
After studying aeronautics in Italy, Walter Costa realised that the pilot career was less “romantic” than he thought. In 2009, while completing a degree in Politics and International Studies at Complutense University in Madrid, he started attending photography courses at Blank Paper school, where he also got involved in publications and editing. Studying their postgraduate programme in documentary photography gave him the opportunity to start merging image-making with his interest in visually investigating social issues in relation to power imbalances. Love and curiosity made him move to São Paulo in 2013, where besides working as a news and commercial photographer he started teaching editing and bookmaking while collaborating with several Brazilian and international authors in the development and editing of their photobook projects. In 2017 Costa founded Havaiana Papers, a distribution platform aimed at improving the circulation of Brazilian photobooks. As a curator, he was invited to organize a series of performatic lectures about photobooks for SOLAR Fotofestival (Fortaleza, BR) in December 2018 and was the guest curator of the sixth edition of En CMYK-Photobook Meeting organized by the Montevideo Center of Photography (UY) in March 2019. In 2018 Costa came back to Europe to join the first cohort of the MA Photography&Society at KABK/Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. With the aim of researching, discussing and finding new ways to use photography as a tool for public debate, he completed the program with a wider and more multi-disciplinary practice. In 2020-2021, the artist took part in FOTODOK’s talent support programme Lighthouse. Still based in The Netherlands, Costa keeps editing photobook projects while teaching at KABK and developing his personal projects.
The perfect skin and the smooth image which accompanies it, Eva O’Leary knows all too well the different ingredients and recipes of commercial photography. She too, as a teen, ate this cake which now, as an artist, she presents to us on a plateau. In a refrigerator rests a sponge cake, accompanied with printed icing: a saccharine young woman with perfect blow-dried hair watches us. Since it is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, this is the fate which the photographer reserves for the young blonde haired woman with the Colgate smile and her diktat. She grew up in the United States of America in a campus town whose name is almost an order – Happy Valley – and remembers her years spent masking her Irish head in the hood of a must have Abercrombie sweatshirt. The series, Happy Valley, is rooted in her town and her adolescent memories, describing an environment which is intrusive and worrying, modelling individuals whose self identity has been traded for a generic body. With the more recent Spitting Image, it is the years before, the adolescent vulnerability which are exposed. Young girls, around fifteen years old, present themselves to us, tightly framed on a vibrant blue backdrop which permits neither an escape for the gaze, nor breathing room for the model. Eva O’Leary accompanies these photographs with videos: perched upon a stool, we watch them searching for the person they hoped to find in the mirror. In this interval the photographer reopens the field of representations and with it, the freedom to be complex, different, uncertain, unique, human.