The network

Elena Helfrecht (b. 1992) is a German visual artist based in Bavaria. She graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2019, having previously studied Art and Image History at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität, and Art History and Book Science at Erlangen’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universität. With a dark, eerie aesthetic, Helfrecht’s work navigates thresholds of fiction and reality, exploring existential questions of mortality, trauma, memory and post-memory. With Void, Helfrecht will launch her first solo monograph in the fall of 2023.

Lia Dostlieva (b. 1984, Donetsk, Ukraine) is an artist, cultural anthropologist and essayist. Her primary areas of my research include the issues of trauma, postmemory, commemorative practices, and agency and visibility of vulnerable groups.

As an artist, she works across a wide range of media including photography, installations, textile sculptures, interventions into urban space, etc. since 2012.⁠

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Chai Saeidi (b.1998, pronouns: they/them) is a visual and story-telling queer visibility artist and photographer. They are currently based in Oslo, Norway, with a background from Tehran, Iran. Their work explores themes such as gender, community and visibility. Queer individuals often create their own communities, resulting in non-traditional forms of intimacy and relationships. This is often shown in their work. Chai's analog photography draws from a documentary tradition, more often touched with a free artistic expression.

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.

Maxim Sarychau is a visual artist and photojournalist, based in Minsk, Belarus. He works on long-term visual projects on the edge of photography, journalism and art. He deals with the topics of violence of various forms and grades, both from authoritarian regimes and within traditional society. He focuses on political and human dimensions of collective memory and history.

Maxim is a co-founder of SHKLO – online platform about Belarusian photography and visual arts. From 2020 he is a member of Inland - international cooperative of 13 photographers.

Maxim’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions including shows at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2020, Riga), Kasarna Karlin (2018, Prague) and CECH (2017, Minsk). He was published in Wall Street Journal, Stern Crime, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Courrier International, Meduza, The Telegraph, Le Monde Diplomatique among others.

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Hanna Rédling was born in Pécs in 1993 and now divides her time in Budapest and Rotterdam. She holds a BA and MA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Budapest) and studied Photography at Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam). Her works focus on the uncertainty of present existence and understanding and defining individual and collective nostalgia. Her photographs show childish curiosity and optimism merged with anxieties of unpredictability of the future and virtual world simultaneously. The attitude, that analyses the memories of the past at once, and the fever dream-like present and future at other times, calls forth an alternative world that converges in space and time. The elastic and jelly-like texture keeps recurring on Hanna’s photographs and this element carries the possibility of both ascension and ‘sinking in mud’ feeling. Her main aim is to image those spiritual and physical in-between states that we experience in our lives - during these experiences we have departed already but have not reached our objective yet. She received the scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers in 2020 and won the Pécsi József Photography Grant in 2021 and 2022. Her most recent works were exhibited at Unseen Photography Fair in Amsterdam in autumn 2021. She has been represented by Erika Deák Gallery in Budapest since April 2021.

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redlinghanna@gmail.com
www.hannaredling.com
@hannaredling

Verdiana Albano (*1993) is an Afro-European artist based in Frankfurt and Hamburg. Throughout her studies at the University of Arts and Design Offenbach until 2021, she specialized in photography and installation art. Supported by the DAAD, she studied and lived in Chongqing, China, in 2019, where she created the series "surrounded," which is now part of the Art Collection Deutsche Börse. 

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.

Nominated for Futures by FOMU, Arnaud De Wolf (b. 1981) was born in Ronse, Belgium. He lives and works in Amsterdam and Brussels.

One often looks at the work of Arnaud De Wolf with a sense of disbelief. Is that image of a gigantic ice cube really floating in mid-air? Is that colourful picture of an ancient forest a realistic depiction or is it a digital fabrication, a fanciful re-creation? What are we meant to discern in his cyanotype prints: random blue lines surrounding white voids of various shapes and sizes or the contours of a mountainous landscape? By means of an unconventional presentation of the photographic image, simply turning it on its side or projecting it into a corner or using outdated techniques, such as the cyanotype, De Wolf presents us with works that hover between the clarity of description and the artificiality of invention. A projected bundle of light suddenly transforms into a three-dimensional object; abstract lines coagulate into a legible form; colours become deceitfully (un)real. In each of his experiments, De Wolf is testing the boundaries of the photographic system, looking for that breaking point where the photograph loses its readability and easy accessibility. His thorough investigation of colour is particularly revealing: Fading forest makes abundantly clear that colour in photography is always artificial. The colours that we see in a photograph are technologically and culturally coded; they are made in the chemist’s lab or produced by a programmer’s algorithm. Colour is here revealed as the manipulative garb in which the photographic skeleton is dressed.

Text by Steven Humblet

Vassilis Pantelidis’ images provide a glimpse of an alternative reality, which consists of a series of conceptual self - portraits. The individual scenes adopt a theatrical approach where the abstraction, the paradox and the absurd as well as the repetitive weave and the claustrophobic thread around the human subject, without any sort of redemption or solution.

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".

Weronika Bela (b. 1988) and Ivar Hagren (b. 1986) are an artist duo based in Stockholm. Hagren & Bela's  work originates from the history of photography, often through microhistories of photographic materials and  techniques. They primarily work with analog black-and-white photography as a medium, employing both  traditional and experimental darkroom techniques. In addition to this, they utilize drawing, installation,  archival material, video and text.  

Ivar Hagren obtained his bachelor's degree from the Gothenburg University of Photography in 2012 and his  master's degree in fine art from Konstfack in 2014. Weronika Bela earned her bachelor's and master's degrees  in fine art in 2013 and 2015, respectively, also from Konstfack. Their works have been exhibited both in  Sweden and internationally, including in Poland, Finland, and Greece. In 2022 they where Iaspis artist in  residency grant holders in Stockholm.  

They are currently developing a project on the defunct East German manufacturer ORWO, best known for  affordable black-and-white photo paper, who held a monopoly over photographic darkroom material in the  Eastern bloc market before ceasing operations in connection with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

IG @hagrenbela

Website www.hagrenbela.com

Armando Perna (Reggio Calabria, 1981) is a documentary photographer. Since 2013 he has been involved in a long term research focused on the process of militarization and compartmentalization of space seen as a result of practices rooted in the history of the Lebanese civil war, when Beirut was fragmented into well delineated territories each controlled by a sectarian militia. Armando Perna looks to what anthropologists call “prohibited spaces”: urban sites that were originally public and became “private”, inaccessible and out of reach for the majority of the population, because of the war and the urban renewal projects.

In 2013 his project “A3_Sa-Rc” is shortlisted for the architekturbild - European Prize for Architectural photography - (DAM, German museum of Architecture, Frankfurt ). Selected exhibitions: Museum of Estonian Architecture, KazimKuba, Kassel (2014); Vhs photogalerie, Stuttgart; International tag der Architektur, Vilnius; DAM, German Museum of Architecture, Frankfurt, GER (2013).

In 2014 the first version of his book project “Dahiye” is shortlisted for the fotobookfestival dummy award (Kassel, Germany). Selected exhibitions: Athens Photo Festival, The Photobook Museum, Cologne; PhotoIreland, Dublin, MIA Image Art Fair, Milan; Fotogaleriet, Oslo; Le Bal, Paris; Fotoleggendo, Rome (2014). In the same year Armando Perna joins the “Third Island Ag ’64 ’94 ’14” a research project dedicated to the promotion of an interdisciplinary and historical reflection on large-scale infrastructures in Italy curated by Antonio Ottomanelli. In this frame he presents “A3_Sa-Rc”, his work on the Southern Italy A3 Sa-Rc highway. “The Third Island” is published in 2016 by Planar books, and exposed at the Triennale Museum in Milan and at Palazzo Poli in Rome.

In 2017 his work on Dahiye and Shatila is presented at Pino Pascali Museum of Polignano a Mare (BA).

Io Sivertsen is a photographer and filmmaker working between Norway and the Netherlands.

In her work she explores the boundary between truth and fiction. Using reality as a starting point, her image-making anchors the subject matter in her own personal perspective. Depicted themes include technology, internet culture, sexuality and identity. Alongside her practice she has initiated and developed short-films, exhibitions and a film festival. She is the co-founder of the independent film festival Cinema Underexposed - a The Hague based platform aimed for new voices and perspectives.

After graduating from The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, she is now attending the master program at the Norwegian Film Academy in Oslo. In 2020 she attended the Canon Student Development Programme at Visa Pour l’Image. Her work has been shown at Eye filmmuseum and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. San Mei Gallery in London, Grimstad short film festival in Norway, gallery CK13 in Serbia and cultural platform Page Not found in The Hague, among others. She has been published in Morgenbladet, Aftenposten and Zweikommasieben magazine.

Kincső Bede (b. 1995) is a Romanian visual artist with Hungarian roots, who grew up in a small city in Transylvania, Romania. She is fascinated by the communist past of her homeland, the power of the leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, the control exercised by the security agency Securitate, and how this history is passed down across the generations. Currently, Kincsõ lives and works in Budapest, Hungary and she studies at the Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design. She is part of the Studio of Young Photographers.

In 2020 she won the photography scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers. In the same year she was among the winners of Carte Blanche Students, a scholarship founded by Paris Photo, the world's greatest photo art fair. The works of the four winners were exhibited at the Parisian Gare du Nord. Her diploma series, entitled "Three Colours I Know in This World," was chosen for the 10 New Talent 2020 programme by the curators of BredaPhoto Festival and was exhibited in The Netherlands.

Her work is often applauded by the foreign press. Also her photos are part of the Blurring the Lines 2020 issue. From 2020 she is represented by TOBE Gallery, Budapest.

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Balázs Fromm (B.1991) is a photographer, currently living and working in Budapest. He studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, and new media at the CityUniversity of Hong-Kong, Hong-Kong. Fromm's field of work revolves around Eastern European topics, the historic legacy of socialism, the power of masculinity, local issues, and youth culture. His photographic approach involves documenting the disappearing working class of rural Hungary and it's gloomy industrial cities ( A city built of steel 2018-2022), and unveiling the non-conventional beauty norms and the precarious identity of the Z generation. ( East and Eden 2021) Guided by an intuitive sense of connection, Fromm captures the bonds of communities and their environment in the amidst of democratic backsliding, and rising nationalism throughout the region. He works regularly on documentary commissions, shedding light on regional stories for publications as Zeit and Republik, and many others. Balázs Fromm is part of the Studio of Young Photographers of Hungary. He received the Jozsef Pecsi photography grant from the state of Hungary in 2021. Presently, he is working on two ongoing photgraphic series, Casting and Csango Land.

Susanne Fagerlund (b. 1969) graduated with an MFA in Fine Arts from Gothenburg’s Valand Academy in 2021. She is currently following a post-master course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. As a lens-based artist, Fagerlund explores the extended complexities and boundaries of the medium. Her installations oscillate between photography, video and digital technologies – with the subject of human and nonhuman relationships an underlying current throughout. Since 2021, Fagerlund’s works have featured in several group and solo exhibitions in Sweden. In collaboration with Hasselblad Center, a forthcoming venture will mark the 100th anniversary of Gothenburg's Natural History Museum; using AI to process the museum’s photographic archive, the project establishes a speculative future where images of new plants and species are formed. 

Instagram: susannefagerlund

Website: susannefagerlund.com

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