Kaarina-Sirkku

Mara Palena (1988) lives and works in Milan. Her research focuses on themes such as memory, recollection, and identity. She works with photography, video, and sound, reworking materials from archives, often open and participatory, like home movies, and drawing on a personal archive of photographic images that she has been curating for years to document her life. Her work has been exhibited at various international festivals, venues, and galleries, including the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, Careof, Marsèll Paradise, Nowhere Gallery, Pananti Atelier, and Video Sound Art in Milan, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Madrid, MOPLA in Los Angeles, Artphilein Foundation in Lugano, and Recontemporary in Turin. Between 2021 and 2024, she was a finalist in several art prizes, including the Lucie Foundation, Combat Prize, Premio Fabbri, New Post Photography, and Artphilein Photo Book Contest. In 2022, she was selected by Camera Torino for FUTURES Photography. Her work Oikeiôsis won the 2022 Surprize Award from Sprint and the Marcelo Burlon Foundation. The editorial project was curated and published by Witty Books in 2023 and was included by Photo España among the 100 best books published in 2024.

Dev Dhunsi (b. 1996) is a multimedia artist working at the intersection of photography, textiles, and installation. Utilizing water and movement as central elements in his projects, he creates works that invite reflection on complex themes such as identity, belonging, migration, social justice, and injustice. Through his art, Dhunsi provides space for stories that are often overlooked or suppressed, illustrating how historical, cultural, and political forces shape our lives and experiences. Addressing global issues like migration and colonialism as well as personal experiences of loss and belonging, he creates works that connect past and present, diverse geographies, and identities. His work encourages viewers to reflect on how we understand and relate to the world around us as he simultaneously look at the world through a lens of queer theories and diasporic gaze. Recent exhibitions include: Fotogalleriet (Oslo; NO), Mint abf (Stockholm; SE), MELK (Oslo; NO), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo; NO), National Sports Museum in Stockholm (SE; Stockholm).

Maria Beatriz de Vilhena (b. 1991) is a Lisbon based photographer, with a professional background in architecture. She studied photography at CFP Bauer Milan and holds a master's degree in architecture from the University of Lisbon.

Her photographic work explores the pluralism of human nature through belief and collective identity, as well as issues related to memory and noetic. In recent projects, she has been working on the border between fiction and reality, through myths and tales connected to personal and historical events.

Recent shows include One dark night, Lazarus disappeared (Coruchéus Gallery, Lisbon, 2025), Five Relics, Five Photographers (Museum of São Roque, Lisbon, 2025), and Real Life is Not Black and White (Paris Photo, 2024).

Viacheslav Poliakov is a visual artist, photographer, graphic designer. He was born in 1986 in Kherson, Ukraine. Obtained a master’s degree in art education from Kherson State University. Now based in Lviv, Ukraine. His art practice exists on the intersection of documentary photography and design. He's interested in objects and spaces made by people, the historic background behind the urban landscape. Viacheslav is a finalist of Foam Talents, Vienna Photobook Festival, Circulations, Krakow Photomonth Showoff, Fotofestival Lodz Grand Prix, Prix Levallois. His works were published in the Foam Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, GUP magazine, Lensculture, The Washington Post.

Masha Weisberg (b. 1997, Ukraine) is a visual artist currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Working primarily with photography—ranging from historical and alternative processes to experimental and mixed-media approaches—Weisberg explores themes of generational trauma, cycles of human history, motherhood, and the complex relationship between personal and collective memory. Her practice blends abstract and narrative-driven imagery, engaging with photography as a medium beyond documentation, often intersecting with installation and video art. Her ongoing projects investigate inherited histories, war trauma, and the fragility of human experience.

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?

Parisa Aminolahi (Tehran, Iran), based in the Netherlands, is a freelance filmmaker and photographer. Her series are mostly long-term projects. And her work explores themes such as displacement, exile, homeland, family, and childhood memories, using old family photographs, self-portraits, and her own family members as subjects. Her mediums include photography, documentary filmmaking, animation, painting, and mixed media.She studied theatre stage design (BA) and animation (MA) at University of Art in Tehran and documentary filmmaking (MA) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a recipient of The Firecracker Photographic Grant, The Netherlands Film Fund, GUP New Dutch Photography Talent of the Year and One World Media Student Film Bursary. Her dummy book, Tehran Diary, was shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award, BUP Book Award, and PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant. She has held screenings and exhibitions locally and internationally and is represented by Ag Galerie.

Toma Hurduc is a documentary photographer, currently working in Bucharest. His attention was first focused on representing local underground communities and movements, which he strongly feels related to. Nowadays, his narratives are often built on top of the personal experience and relationship with the subject matter, therefore the factual truth is often mixed with the meta, imaginative truth, aiming to question the human perception of reality, dread, anxiety, ephemerality and the construction of memory. Having an academic background in Cinematography, Toma is highly interested in the way light forms images, choosing to work regularly on 35mm black and white film, as a way to render the surreal he sees in ordinary life. Toma’s work has been exhibited both collectively and solo in Romania and abroad and he has been part of multiple mentorship programs, most recent being with Annie Leibovitz and IKEA.

Sybren Vanoverberghe (b. 1996, BE) is an artist who lives and works in Belgium. Vanoverberghe has had recent solo exhibitions at Deweer Gallery, Otegem (BE), UZ Brussels (BE), CC De Factorij, Zaventem (BE) and Keteleer Gallery, Antwerp (BE). He had two-person exhibitions at De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (NL), Contretype, Brussels (BE), Barbé Gallery, Ghent (BE), Ontsteking, Ghent (BE). His works have been shown at various fairs such as Unseen, Amsterdam (NL); Miart (IT), Art Brussels (BE) and Art Cologne (DE). Vanoverberghe’s works are published in artist books such as 2099 (2018), Conference of the Birds (2019), 1099 (2020), Sandcastles and Rubbish (2021), Desert Spirals (2023), MUSA (2024) by Art Paper Editions (BE). His works are included in the public collection of the Flemish Government – FoMu, Antwerp, BE. Vanoverberghe received his MFA from The School of Arts – KASK in Ghent, (BE). Vanoverberghe engages with photography, employing diverse printing techniques, installations, structures, and discovered objects in his artistic practice. His creations capture landscapes and their remnants in a perpetual state of transformation, revealing the intricate interplay between place and time. Through his works, Vanoverberghe explores the convergence of history, nature, and heritage, presenting viewers with a visual dialogue that spans both the historical ruins and commonplace locales. His art challenges established notions by juxtaposing present-day structures with what might be interpreted as artefacts from an envisioned future. Vanoverberghe’s pieces possess a pronounced anachronistic quality, with certain images portraying a bygone era that never truly existed. Within his monographs, he often delves into the cyclical nature of specific sites, transcending their original geographic context. His work prompts speculative inquiries that traverse time, oscillating between past and future with equal resonance. A perpetual tension permeates Vanoverberghe’s oeuvre, inviting contemplation on the dual nature of images — whether to accept them as historical documents or dismiss those that seem to foretell a future yet to unfold. Sybren Vanoverberghe is represented by Keteleer Gallery, BE.

I am a visual artist working primarily with photography, video, and installation. My main area of interest revolves around the idea of destruction perceived as a prerequisite for rebirth – in this regard, my practice serves as a particular form of self-therapy. My creative approach centers around catastrophic events, whether experienced in real life or staged – not merely to document, but to explore their aesthetics and the emotions they evoke. Drawing from the notion of post-photography, I attempt to extend the same approach to my audience, purposefully creating the most photogenic environment. This invites the viewer to try and explore the aesthetics and emotions evoked by my own work. The theme of the car and anything automotive-related is a constant recurrence throughout my practice, varying both in context and form. It can be an invisible companion, as seen in the series of on-the-road photos like "Post Tourism," documenting wildfire sites in Australia and California. It can also be a desirable object deliberately subjected to all kinds of abuse – set on fire, melted, or drowned – in order to test its endurance while creating the perfect catastrophic photo set, as seen in the multidisciplinary installation "Panda" or the photographs published in the photobook "Pyromaniac’s Manual." Finally, the car can be dissected, stripped, and transformed into something entirely new, like a vehicle for poetic miniatures in the "Blind Spot" series. It can even become part of a fancy dinner where the courses are prepared out of car parts and served to the guests of a luxurious retreat, mockingly bringing into the spotlight the consumption patterns of the highest social classes in the "A la carte" project, created during the Chateau de la Haute Borde art residency and subsequently exhibited at Galerie du 13 in Paris. Most recently, my interest has turned to audiovisuality, focusing on short forms of video and their potential for a more poetic style of storytelling.