The
Professional
Iveta Gabalina
Lives and Works in
Riga
Iveta Gabaliņa (1979) is a curator, artist and educator. She has studied photography at the studio of Andrejs Grants, at Bournemouth Art Institute, and in the MA programme at Alto University in Helsinki. Her work has been exhibited in Latvia and internationally, including at C/O (Berlin, Germany), GESTE (Paris), and Williams Tower Gallery (Houston, USA). Gabaliņa has participated in photography festivals in Singapore, Hanover, and elsewhere. Her work is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Geste Paris, and the Deutsche Börse Art Collection.
Since 2008 she has been part of ISSP team, responsible for numerous educational and curatorial projects. In 2018 she founded ISSP Gallery - an exhibition space dedicated to contemporary photography.
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Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.
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Florine Thiebaud (b. 1992, France) is a photographer based in Marseille.
With a post-documentary practice that combines photography and writing, she places a significant emphasis on publishing. She explores the notions of imprisonment and isolation, the passage of time, loss of control, identity, and her connection to others.
From 2016 to 2019, she developed two projects focused on the consequences of the waiting for papers for exiled people in Greece, placing the relationship with the other at the heart of her practice.The first was the project Exils, which won the Roger de Conynck Prize and was exhibited at the Recylart Gallery in Brussels, followed by Breaking Point. The latter was co-published as a book in May 2022 with Stockmans Art Books, and was exhibited at FOMU in Antwerp and at the Contretype Gallery in Brussels as part of the .TIFF selection and Propositions d’Artistes.
Developing her reflections on notions of imprisonment and isolation and their consequences, she is currently working on a project about families of incarcerated people, Des Ondes (On Waves), based on a personal story. This project has received support from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, and part of it was already exhibited in 2023 at the Delta Cultural Center in Namur as part of a group exhibition.
In parallel, following confrontations with her own physical and mental limits facing depression, she developped a new series of self-portraits: Revenir (Coming back). Using once again repetitive imagery and a consistent aesthetic, she explores the intersection of vulnerability, isolation, and transformation through self-portraiture. Photographing herself during moments of crisis and depression, she seeks to capture the disconnect between her inner world and reality.



Pierre Vanneste is a Belgian photographer and filmmaker based between Brussels and Dakar,specializing in long-term reportage and documentary projects.
His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries (Biennale ofDakar Contemporary Art, Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi, FoMu,Zone i) and published in media outlets such as Médiapart,Libération, DOC! Photo Magazine, Courrier International (webversion), De Standaard, Tchak, Equal Times, and Alter Echo.
In 2018, he co-directed "Bargny, the real face of economic emergence"a transmedia documentary (photos, videos, and texts) about thedesignation of land for industrial purposes. The project wasshortlisted for the Visa d'Or for Digital Information 2019 (Visa pourl'image festival). His project "DREMMWEL" (a photo project with enrichedvideo content) was published in 2020 by Éditions Yellow Now. It is along-term project on the extractivist model through fishing andoverfishing. This project has been exhibited in France, Belgium,Senegal, and Canada. One of the photographs from the project is nowpart of the permanent collection at the Musée de la Photographie deCharleroi.
He received the 2019 Photographic Grant from the FondationJean-Luc Lagardère for his project "P2O5, the Toxic Impact ofPhosphate" which he co-directed with author-journalist Laurence Grun.
Since 2022, he has been working on various videographic andphotographic documentary projects in Senegal.



Irish artist Shane Hynan holds an MFA in Photography (Ulster University, 2019). His practice centres on photography with experimental elements in sound, video, collage, and sculpture. The metaphorical exploration of place, land and architecture is a significant subtext throughout his work. He draws upon conceptual, performative and subjective documentary approaches and works primarily with analogue photography processes as it enhances an emotional and intuitive connection with landscape and topography. He has shown his work extensively in Ireland and received multiple awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland, and Kildare Arts. He has exhibited internationally in China, Germany, and the UK, and was shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society IPE162, IPE163 and IPE166. In 2024 he undertook residencies at the Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris, France), and at the Roscommon Arts Centre (Roscommon, Ireland).



Anna Safiatou Touré (Bamako, Mali, born in 1996) is a Franco-Malian multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. She graduated from the Nantes Saint-Nazaire School of Fine Arts and the ENSAV La Cambre in photography. Anna Safiatou was awarded the Médiatine Prize in 2022 and the Roger De Conynck Fund in 2023-24.
Her work explores the space that unites or separates the two sides of every migratory narrative. The journey through this personal, historical, and cultural blending fills for her empty or unanswered spaces. On her own scale, she wishes to materialize this absence by creating her own evidence to make history heard—rendering the absence visible to tell stories from these new bodies. Like a certain poetry of emptiness, couldn’t the world be told in reverse, like a stencil, from the edge?



Peter Pflügler (b. 1987) is an Austrian visual storyteller based in the Netherlands. He holds a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Pflügler’s work centres on the dynamics of secrets, intergenerational trauma and silence. With the help of photography, video and text, he aims to resurrect the unseen, the unknown and the hidden. His Now is not the right time project has been shown at numerous festivals and exhibitions throughout Europe, whilst the dummy was nominated for several international prizes, including the Kassel Dummy Award.Website: peterpflugler.com



Malte Uchtmann (*1996 in Hamburg) is a photographer and media artist based in Leipzig, Germany. Using different visual media he is interested in how concepts of knowledge, truth and reality are expressed and affect our perception and behavior. His work has been awarded the German Photo Book Prize and was shortlisted for the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2023. He is currently part of the Photography and Media Class and the Expanded Cinema Class of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.

Camille Poitevin (b. Montreal, Canada, 1996) is a french multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. Installation plays a central role in her practice : drawing from lens-based media, sculpture, and sound, she creates time for introspection in a fast-paced society. In doing so, she aims to challenge social norms, unfreezing preconceived ideas in human interactions, social roles, and personal identity. Camille Poitevin earned a BA in applied arts from Concordia University in Montreal (2018) and an MA in photography from ENSAV La Cambre in Brussels (2022), where she was awarded a creation grant by the King Baudouin Foundation and the Servix Prize. Her work has since been exhibited in Belgium (Beursschouwburg, BPS22, Hangar Art Center, Ateliers Mommen, HISK Gosset Site, CAL Charleroi), the Netherlands (as part of Currents#10 program at Marres Huis voor Hedendaagse Cultuur), France (FRAC Franche-Comté), and Spain (InCadaqués Festival OFF). In 2025, she participates in the collective exhibition Art au Centre in public space in Liège in the .tiff Emerging Belgian Photography program.



Constantin Schlachter’s research takes place through an exploration of interior and exterior landscapes. Nature, the invisible and matter are dominant entities in his work. His experimental approach to the techniques he employs aims to put a less anthropocentric world into perspective, and to re-enchant nature. This mysterious entity that takes hold of each viewer in its own way, because it’s eloquent for everyone, but never entirely translatable.
Through different media linked to photography, he questions matter and its synesthetic power. By inverting the scales, colours and textures of the elements presented, he induces a confusion of senses in the viewer, revealing deeper ones. His images invite us to let go, to enter a contemplative state in which we can project our emotions.
His cosmic and telluric images, in which matter plays a predominant role, merge the microcosm and the macrocosm. In the course of his work, the artist increasingly seeks to erase his own presence to highlight that of his subject.
Constantin Schlachter was born in Altkirch in 1992 and graduated from Les Gobelins in 2014. He lives and works in Paris.



Emilia Martin is a Polish artist and photographer based in The Hague, Netherlands, where in 2022 she graduated from Photography & Society Masters at the Royal Academy of the Art. Working with photography, writing, and sound, she explores how the stories we tell shape the realities we inhabit. She investigates mythologies and tales, and how they fluctuate and shift throughout histories. Through her work, she aims to complicate the binary understandings of fiction and truth and their established aesthetics. Her process is based on careful research and personal, often playful approaches, through which she questions dominant narratives.
The belief in storytelling is rooted in her upbringing, where she engaged with both rural mythologies and urban narratives. She grew up between two different realities: a remote farm belonging to her grandmother in rural Eastern Poland and a heavy industry coal mining urban region in the West of the country. The clash between these two realities, the narrative of extractivism against rural mythologies and the proximity of nature, formed a place that continues to ground her artistic practice. Her work is inspired and informed by her rural Polish ancestry and intersectional feminist approaches.



Sara Rman (1992, Ljubljana) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of
photography and craftsmanship. Her work explores identity, freedom, and raw aesthetics, with a strong focus on socio-cultural marginality, self-reflection, and social critique. Fascinated by boundaries, she seeks to reach, transcend, and blend them through a holistic and process-driven approach. She avoids a formalistic view of photography, instead questioning its indexical nature and alternative functions beyond image-making. Her works are often interactive and installation-oriented, shaped by themes of meaning, absurdity, paradox, memory, and hallucination. By integrating multiple media, she challenges conventions and embraces experimentation, making the process itself central to her artistic expression.


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Salvatore Vitale (b. 1986, Palermo, Italy) is a Swiss-based artist, director, and professor whose work explores the complexity of contemporary societies. Using expanded and speculative storytelling through mixed media techniques, he focuses on the politics of systems that regulate modernity and the impact of technological transformations.
Vitale is the Artistic Director of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival and FUTURES Photography, both international platforms dedicated to contemporary photography. He also serves as a Professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where he leads the Transmedia Storytelling Programme. Previously, he was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of YET magazine, an international photography publication.
Vitale’s work has received international awards. It is featured in several public and private collections and has been widely exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.

Emese Mucsi is a Hungarian-born curator, and art critic. Emese curates exhibitions where photography is interpreted in the context of contemporary art and works with artists who have an expanded idea of photography and produce photo-based works. Her projects bring together artists and photographers with photojournalists, writers, editors, and other thinkers to experiment with new approaches to photography. She graduated from the Faculty of Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2013, and from the Faculty of Hungarian Literature and Linguistics at the University of Szeged in 2017. She is a member of the curators’ collective BÜRO imaginaire since 2012. Since 2013, she ran projects as a freelance curator. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Editor-in-Chief of Artmagazin Online. Emese is a curator of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest since 2018. She is the member of Global Photographies Network since 2020. She founded DOXA exhibition space and editorial den in 2022. She is doing her PhD in the Film, Media, and Contemporary Culture PhD program at Eötvös Loránd University. Emese is a guest lecturer at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (2023) and the University of Szeged (2024).

Ángel Luis González Fernández is a designer, artist, and curator supporting engaging visual arts practices, winner of Business to Arts David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards 2011.
His work manifests through PhotoIreland, which he founded in 2010 to stimulate a critical dialogue on Photography. He devises curatorial projects placing conversations in the public realm around visual culture, critical thinking. These include events (PhotoIreland Festival, Halftone Print Fair, arts residency How to Flatten a Mountain, and New Irish Works), a cultural hub (The Library Project: Ireland’s Art bookshop, host to a unique resource library of photobooks and a productive arts programme), publishing projects that distribute inexpensive access to local practices, research projects (Critical Academy: examining contemporary art practices). He works collaboratively with a growing network of organisations, noticeably through ambitious Creative Europe partnerships.
During the Summer 2020 lockdown he launched the critical publication OVER Journal, now distributed globally. He received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Bursary to deepen research on the broad historical and specific artistic context of Photography in Ireland, to curate an ambitious survey exhibition in PhotoIreland Festival 2022 and to publish a series of publications on the matter. He regularly contributes to publications such as the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies, edited by Lucy Soutter, Duncan Wooldridge.
See some of his Graphic and Web Design work in the 100 Design Archive.

Julia Gelezova is a Cultural Producer and Curator, specialising in contemporary lens-based practices. She is General and Project Manager for PhotoIreland, producing events throughout the year like the annual PhotoIreland Festival and Critical Academy, while collaborating on ambitious projects like Creative Europe Photography Platforms—Parallel and Futures. Julia is co-editor of OVER Journal: The Critical Journal of Photography and Visual Culture for the 21st Century. In 2024, she has founded vicinities.network - a peer network for Visual Arts curators and professionals based in Ireland.
She has ample experience in producing exhibitions and events, including curatorial work and project management, has vast and successful experience in personal and collective application writing for bodies like the Arts Council of Ireland and local councils. She has participated in portfolio reviews, acted as visiting lecturer, and also worked in an editorial capacity and translation for artists and other arts professionals, including work for The Routledge Guide to Photography and Visual Culture. Most recently, she curated the 2021 edition of PhotoIreland Festival and was the Centre Culturel Irlandais cultural producer resident 2022. She is a member of the AICA International Association of Art Critics.

Danaé Panchaud is a Swiss exhibition curator, museologist and lecturer specialising in photography. She has been the director of the Centre de la photographie Genève since 2022, after serving from 2018 to 2021 as director and curator of the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland. She trained in photography at the Vevey School of Photography before completing a bachelor’s degree in visual arts with a specialisation in curatorial practices at Geneva University of Art and Design. She later studied museology at Birkbeck, University of London, earning a master’s degree in 2017. She has held positions in several Swiss institutions in the fields of contemporary art, design and science, including the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, where she was a research associate from 2007 to 2012, the Gallery SAKS in Geneva in 2012-2013, the Fondation Verdan in Lausanne as scientific collaborator, and the mudac in Lausanne, where she was in charge of the public relations from 2012 to 2017. As a free-lance curator, she has curated exhibitions for several Swiss and international museums, independent spaces and galleries since 2012. She regularly writes texts for monographs of contemporary artists, exhibition catalogues, and thematic publications such as Flora Photographica, co-authored with William Ewing and published by Thames & Hudson in 2022. She was a lecturer at the Vevey School of Photography from 2014 to 2018, and regularly lectures at art and photography schools in Switzerland. In 2023, she joined the teaching faculty of the CAS in Theory and History of Photography at University of Zurich.

I’ve always loved photography, even if it sounds like a cliche. The first photos I took, I did without knowing how to do that, without paying any attention to framing, subject or composition. After a while, I began to understand what is happening in the space between me as a photographer and the subject I was photographing. And many years later, I also understood why I love to photograph. To communicate. A message, a concept, an emotion.
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