The
Artist
Ondřej Kubeš
Lives and Works in
Prague
Ondřej Kubeš (* 1999) is a Czech visual artist working primarily with documentary and staged photography, installation, drawing and performance. His intimate, poetic archive-based artworks examine topics of personal memory, identity, affection, trauma, queerness and family relations. Kubeš’s work has been exhibited in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Belgium. He completed his master's degree at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague at the Photography II. studio led by Alena Kotzmannová.
Projects
2025
Fracture of The Sun
The installation Fracture of the Sun reflects on the author's lived experience with queer adolescence and reconciling with past traumatic experiences. The work tells a story about queer shame, isolation, and escapism. The work presents fragments of a personal archive and detailed craftwork with diverse materials. Kubeš works with various photo printing techniques on textiles and leather and hand embroidery, which, in object and costume elements, evoke the feeling of loss, wear and tear and temporality. The metal structure symbolizing the wardrobe serves as a metaphor for hiding and preserving memories.
Ondřej Kubeš
was nominated by
Fotograf Zone
in
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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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The work of Maite Vanhellemont (1990) moves at the intersection of family stories and collective history. In “A Little Memory of The Beginning”, she reflects on her Dutch-Indonesian background using archive material, photography, video, drawings and text. In May 2026 she will present this project in a solo exhibition during Kraków Photo Month (PL). In collaboration with FW:Books (NL), she will present a publication at the end of 2026.
In 2025, she was selected for the FOTODOK Talent Embassy, and in 2024, the project “Zoals mij gewoon is” (As as is common to me) was presented during SPOOR Art Festival (BE), in collaboration with Plan B Arts Platform.
She is also a lecturer at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (NL), a language volunteer for women at Stichting Dynamo in Amsterdam (NL) and is currently enrolled in the part-time master's program “Education in Arts” at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL).
In 2025, she was selected for the FOTODOK Talent Embassy, and in 2024, the project “Zoals mij gewoon is” (As as is common to me) was presented during SPOOR Art Festival (BE), in collaboration with Plan B Arts Platform.
She is also a lecturer at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (NL), a language volunteer for women at Stichting Dynamo in Amsterdam (NL) and is currently enrolled in the part-time master's program “Education in Arts” at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL).
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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.
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Her main areas of focus include human stories, the mapping of time and reality, and simulation. As an experimental thinker, Kocsi boldly plays with spaces, surfaces, and materials, crafting unconventional situations that actively involve the viewer.
Born in 1991, I grew up in Nancy in north-eastern France.
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My practice focuses on landscape and questions revolving around its use, exploitation and representation. Through my projects, I attempt to reflect on our relationship with what we call nature and to offer a different understanding of it.
In Brussels, in 2020, I co-founded the collective La Nombreuse, composed of eight photographers and an art historian. We opened a multifaceted space, part studio, part exhibition space, conference venue, workshop space, etc.
The monograph Charbon blanc was published in October 2021 by Le Bec en l'air. Since 2017, my work has been exhibited at various festivals and galleries in France and Belgium in particular.
My practice focuses on landscape and questions revolving around its use, exploitation and representation. Through my projects, I attempt to reflect on our relationship with what we call nature and to offer a different understanding of it.
In Brussels, in 2020, I co-founded the collective La Nombreuse, composed of eight photographers and an art historian. We opened a multifaceted space, part studio, part exhibition space, conference venue, workshop space, etc.
The monograph Charbon blanc was published in October 2021 by Le Bec en l'air. Since 2017, my work has been exhibited at various festivals and galleries in France and Belgium in particular.
Zagyvai Sári is an artist based in Budapest. She graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design with a degree in Visual Communication, majoring in Photography. She started her doctorate studies at MOME in 2014 and received her DLA in Multimedia in 2023. Represented by Viltin Gallery, Budapest.
Her works have been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Hungary and abroad. In recent years her solo exhibition entitled Aitotype
was opened in 2023 at the B32 Gallery in Budapest. In 2022 her solo exhibition entitled Excursion was opened at Viltin Gallery, Budapest. In
2023, she participated in the group exhibition Natural Light at the Liszt Institute in Brussels. In 2022 she exhibited at the Off Festival in Bratislava
under the theme Elsewhere.
Naa Teki Martey Lebar (*1989) is a visual artist and author. She studied Fine Arts and Photography in Great Britain, Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Austrian Studies at the University of Vienna. Her work explores themes of belonging and identity shaped by living across multiple cultures, often reflecting on the gaze in and beyond the photographic medium through personal narratives. Working with photography, text, and installation, Lebar creates spaces for reflection, narration, and care where experience becomes both material and method.
Martina Zanin (b. 1994, San Daniele del Friuli) is a visual artist based in Milan. Her practice moves seamlessly between photography, writing, collage, leatherwork, installation, sculpture, and artist books.
Zanin is the author of the photobook I Made Them Run Away, published by Skinnerboox, and Older Than Love, a self-published artist book. In 2024 she is a finalist for the Talent Prize Inside Art. She is the winner of Premio Driving Energy 2023 and is among the recipients of Giovane Fotografia Italiana 2021 and Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, promoted by MAECI and MiC.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at national and international level, including GNAM - National Museum of Modern Art, Rome (2024), IIC Toronto (2024), Cassina Projects, Milan (2024), Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2023), Foto Forum, Bozen (2023), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome (2023), Benaki Museum, Athens (2022), IIC Abu Dhabi (2021), FMAV - Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2021), galleria studiofaganel, Gorizia (2021), Fotografia Europea (2021), Goethe Institute, Rome (2017).
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Pavle Nikolić (b. 2001, Niš, Serbia) works with photography and video, examining fundamental human tensions — authority and powerlessness, dominance and submission, aggression and passivity. He investigates how these opposing forces interact, using the constructive and transformative capacities of his chosen mediums to find the threshold at which they begin to turn into one another. Pavle studied applied photography at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and fine art at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. He now lives and works in Paris.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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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