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Jungeun Lee

Nominated in

2026

Bienal Fotografia do Porto

Lives and Works in

Jungeun Lee (b. 1993) is currently based in Lisbon and Seoul. Her practice explores how experiences of identity and belonging can be translated into visual and performative forms through photography, video, performance, and sound. After relocating to Germany in 2019, Lee initiated Belonging Nowhere (2020–2022), a project shaped by the lived condition of a fluid and provisional identity as a Korean woman, immigrant, and queer subject. The work focused on developing artistic strategies for sharing narratives that emerge from displacement and social precarity. In Becoming One, Being Plural (2021–2022), Lee expanded this inquiry toward ecological contexts by collecting traces from spaces where different forms of life and material intersect. Through the construction of ecospheres, the project examined layered and relational forms of identity beyond a human-centered perspective. This research into perception and presence continued in Step Back Closer (2022–2025), which addressed invisible yet persistent phenomena embedded in everyday life through sensory-based approaches. Lee’s current project, Folded Bird (2025), originates from the forced departure from a long-term family home caused by familial rupture, economic instability, and rising housing costs in Seoul. The project documents the emotional residues left behind through displacement and examines the family as a site shaped by memory, labor, and power relations. Through performative actions and material elements such as folded paper cranes, rice, and kimchi, Lee reflects on gendered domestic labor, intergenerational care, and embodied memory, seeking alternative ways to reimagine inherited structures of belonging.

Projects

2025

Folded Bird

Folded Bird (2025) emerges from the artist’s forced departure from a long-term family home following familial rupture, economic precarity, and Seoul’s rapidly rising housing costs. Confronted with sudden displacement and the loss of both domestic space and familial support, the project documents emotional residues left behind and examines the family as a contested site of memory, labor, and power.‍Returning to the family structure after prolonged absence revealed how affects and roles are socially coded within the spatial framework of the home. Through performative actions and material elements such as folded paper cranes, rice, and kimchi, the project reflects on gendered domestic labor, intergenerational care, and embodied memory.These gestures operate as attempts to detach the body from inherited structures of kinship and normative expectations, while seeking moments of deterritorialization from familiar social orders.‍Moving beyond autobiographical documentation, Folded Bird situates personal experience within broader social and emotional systems, questioning what constitutes “family” and how its invisible structures continue to shape the body and everyday life.

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2023

Step Back Closer

Trail camera used in Step Back Closer is an unmanned sensor device, originally designed to track wildlife movement. This machine does not choose its subjects or moments; it autonomously captures images in response to motion. What emerges from these random recordings are glimpses into fragmented layers of reality. Framing begins with the simple act of deciding where to place the camera—but what it records remains entirely unpredictable. The trail camera has no moral compass, no narrative intention. It interprets nothing. It merely reacts—to light, to movement. A flash in the dark, the rustling of leaves, smoke drifting through an empty forest—each is captured with the same neutrality. No moment takes precedence; all are treated with equal detachment. Yet within these recordings, an unfamiliar rhythm pulses through familiar surroundings: the daily ritual of tying shoelaces in the same place, clandestine meetings repeated in a cemetery, the shadow of a fox rummaging in a trash bin, a deer pausing to meet the camera’s lens. Each moment leaves a trace, marking quiet rituals of survival and fleeting presence. These are all moments that would not have been captured had a human operator been present. The machine was there, but the gaze was absent; the frame existed, but the filmmaker did not. In this gaze that “gets closer by stepping back,” what normally escapes attention—what is hidden behind other gazes or simply overlooked—is revealed. image is a medium that evokes the unattainable: an attempt to grasp the invisible, to document what has already vanished. It is residue—a record of what was once there. Step Back Closer unfolds like a phantasmagoria, fragmenting and reweaving reality in the space between the visible and the unseen, between intention and accident. It captures what has passed but still lingers—a trace that disappears, yet somehow remains.

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Jungeun Lee

was nominated by

Bienal Fotografia do Porto

2026

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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.

Coming from distinct cultural backgrounds and artistic trajectories, the selected artists develop independent practices within the expanded field of photography and moving image. Their work engages critically with contemporary conditions shaped by visibility, displacement, materiality and power, addressing social, political and affective dimensions of the present. Through diverse methodologies, including documentary and archival strategies, performative gestures and image appropriation, these practices question how reality is constructed, mediated and inhabited, forming a constellation that foregrounds ethical positions of looking and reflects on the role of images in shaping our relationship with the contemporary world.

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Eunice Pais develops a practice that brings together photography, video, sound and material processes as forms of listening and relation, operating in contexts where ecology, memory and labour intersect. Working across liminal spaces between archive and lived experience, her work resists closed narratives and extractive modes of representation, proposing an ethics of care through gestures of containment, opacity and material transformation.

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Francisco Menezes works across photography, installation and sculpture to question the role of objects in the material and symbolic organization of the contemporary world. Situated between representation and presence, his practice exposes mechanisms of accumulation and fixation, using minimal formal operations to reveal the invisible infrastructures that shape everyday life.

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Guillermo Vidal develops a photographic practice rooted in experiences of social invisibility, working in close relation with contexts marked by precarity and structural absence. Rejecting both spectacle and distance, his images operate at the threshold of visibility, proposing asustained ethics of looking grounded in proximity, presence and continuity.

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Jungeun Lee explores experiences of displacement, care and unstable belonging, using photography in dialogue with performance and gesture. Her work brings together intimate and structural dimensions, family, domestic labour, migration and cultural inheritance, to trace processes of transformation and silent resistance, where the body becomes a site of memory and care.

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Maria Peixoto Martins interrogates surveillance as a defining condition of contemporary life, working with appropriated and degraded images captured in contexts of control. Through irony and discomfort, her practice exposes the normalization of the vigilant gaze and places the viewer in an ambivalent position, revealing systems in which continuous exposure has become the norm.

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Members of the jury:

Jayne Dyer - co-artistic director of the Bienal Fotografia do Porto

Virgílio Ferreira - founder and art director of the Photography Platform Ci.CLO and of the Bienal Fotografia do Porto

Vera Carmo - independent curator, lecturer and researcher

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