Her work has been recently exhibited in numerous venues, including JAP vitrine, Brussels (2023), IKOB Museum, Eupen (2023), Antwerp Art Weekend (2023), CIAP, Genk (2022), Centrale Vitrine, Brussels (2021), Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France, Dunkerque (2021-22), and S.M.A.K Museum, Ghent (2021). She has also gained international recognition through exhibitions in Paris, Germany, Athens, and Caracas.
In recent years, Padilla has been granted numerous residencies and awards including the Fiminco Foundation residency in Paris (2022-23) and long-term residency at Moussem Nomadic Art Centre in Brussels (2023-). She received the Sabam prize of ArtContest in Brussels in 2020, the prize of the Watch This Space biennial in Lille in 2022, and was one of the laureates of the Friends of S.M.A.K prize in Ghent in 2021. Her work is currently on view at The Kunstverein Friedrichshafen in Germany. In 2024, Padilla was selected for the MINO Female Artist Mentorship program with mentors Otobong Nkanga and Léonard Pongo, and will be part of the MLeuven residency program at Cas-co in Leuven and Morpho residency program in Antwerp.
Josef Janošík (b. 1995) is a photographer based in the Czech Republic. In his work, he searches for and relives his childhood memories – however corroded and unreliable they may be. Exploring the limits of human perception is important for him in general as well as the elusive uncertainty that lies behind them.
Marcin Kruk (b. 1982) lives and works in Rzeszow, Poland. With a background in Archival and Historical Studies, he currently studies Photography at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. A Fujifilm Poland ambassador, Kruk is also a member of the Archive of Public Protest (A-P-P). His practice revolves around a series of long-term documentary projects.
Kata Geibl (1989, Budapest) is a photographer living and working in The Hague. Her work is mainly focused on global issues, capitalism, the Anthropocene, and the ambiguities of the photographic medium.
She is currently working on her new series titled There is Nothing New Under the Sun. The series deals with the rampant individualism that underpins our contemporary social, political, and economic system, and in particular, the environmental impact that it has. By juxtaposing the melting glaciers of Dachstein, animals under human control, almost Greek god-like athletes a narrative of our new age unfolds through the images.
Her previous work entitled Sisyphus received international attention, was exhibited at UNSEEN Amsterdam which was followed by her first solo show in Budapest. She received the emerging talent Paris Photo Carte Blanche Award for the series and in the same year she was nominated for Palm* Photo Prize.
In 2019, she received the József Pécsi Photography Scholarship and was a talent for Futures Platform nominated by Capa Center Budapest.
In 2020 she is a Grand Prix Finalist at Fotofestiwal Lodz, won the PHmuseum Vogue Italia Prize and is shortlisted for Palm* Photo Prize.
More: www.katageibl.com
Prins de Vos (1991, Raamsdonk) is a Dutch photographer living in Amsterdam. In 2013, Prins graduated with a Bachelor Design from the Academy of Popculture (Leeuwarden). Their work touches on themes such as intimacy, sexuality and gender. Prins' first photo book Enclose (2013) was launched in photography museum Foam, and included a poetic introduction, written by Dutch author Arthur Japin. In 2022, Prins published their second photo book BOYS DO CRY, about Levi, who is an artist, poet and trans man.
Yao Yuan (b. 1988) is a non-binary artist born in Sichuan, China. Their practice navigates between photography, design and moving image. Using documentation and staging, their photographic work expresses an intrinsic curiosity for intersectionality and spirituality. Their investigations explore the power of storytelling and dramaturgy, to rethink the binary framework of dominant norms, particularly those that relate to gender and sexuality. In recent years, the focus of Yuan’s work has touched upon topics of non-normative narratives surrounding motherhood, queer intimacy and representation.
Uzochukwu has previously exhibited at Bozar (BE), Lagos Photo Festival (NG), Off Biennale Dakar (SN), Photo Vogue Festival (IT), and Unseen Amsterdam (NL). He currently studies philosophy in Berlin.
Graduated from the Department of Architecture of the State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture (2010) in Dnipro (Ukraine) and from the Faculty of Media Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Poland). She was a participant of the Pla(t)form at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland (2018) and nominated for the Pinchuk Art Center Prize for Young Artists in Ukraine (2018) with her “Daring & Youth project”, recipient of the Solidarity Grant of Krytyka Polityczna (2020) as part of curatorial trio ZA*grupa and is one of the recipients of the Scholarship Program of Warsaw City in 2021.
In 2017 she obtained the PhotoEspaña scholarship to study the Master's Degree in photography "Theories and artistic projects". Ire Lenes attented workshops and seminars of Antoine D’ Agata, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roger Ballen, Eugenio Recuenco and Joan Fontcuberta.
Ire lenes has won several awards such as Ciudad de Alcalá, the DKV scholarship at the Photography and Journalism Seminar in Albarracín, lX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris or Julia Margaret Cameron among others. She has been selected to participate in festivals such as PhotoEspaña or Transeuropa Discovery Week. Her work Archipelagos has been exposed as a solo exhibition in several galleries in Spain and has been published in book format within the Kursala collection of Cádiz, which was recently exhibited at the ¡Hola! event in Taipei, Taiwan.
Currently her work is part of various public and private collections and she has given talks at PiC.A PhotoEspaña, Real Sociedad Fotográfica of Madrid and at the Infotografos conference in Alicante.
In 2017, her personal connection with Lithuania led her to embark on a long-term project, the analysis of ethnic minorities in the Baltic States and the understanding of the particular situation in each country, a trilogy approached from a sociological perspective and materialized through visual narrative.
The project 'The lost paracosmist' is an animated short film by multimedia artist Josephina van de Water. Using digital photography, printed celluloid film, paint, digital scans, video montage, cardboard and extreme patience, she brings a fictitious world to life in fascinating detail. The film was made in the traditional, time-consuming way that requires particular dedication, with each frame individually handcoloured as was done in the first colour movies.
The imaginary island of Paperland is inhabited by a colourful collection of talking animals. Josephina van de Water wrote and narrated the dialogue, giving each animal its own voice, tone and place in her universe. The chronicle guides us through a logical, yet fictitious, tale, in which we learn about Paperland’s geography, history, language, culture and religion.
As in every good fable, imagination is closely accompanied by reflection. While The lost paracosmist focuses on the irresistible charms of storytelling, it also warns the audience to beware of stories. They have the power to contort our perception of the world and disturb our relationship with reality.
The endearing cardboard animals in their warm, glowing colours, and the gentle, motherly voice of the narrator, are reminiscent of children’s programmes. However, the topics covered in this allegory are anything but childish: territorial disputes, political and religious authority and mechanisms of exclusion and esteem all make an appearance, allowing inequality and frustration to creep into this seemingly safe cosmos.
- Text by Geert Goiris (.tiff)
Her artistic practice is developed under the motto No one left behind. It consists of the production of photo-objects and working with marginal/hidden objects and photographs, together with research materials transformed into photo-video installations reflecting the life of unknown people.
Cristina participated in over 35 exhibitions in Romania and abroad, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Portugal, and Hungary. Cristina's recent projects focus on interpreting memory objects and integrating photographic material into contemporary spaces through visual installations. Notable displays include her contribution to Fragmentum at Palatele Brâncovenești and Here they lived at Carol 53 and the International Visual Art Biennale Brașov (2021, 2023).
Cristina has published studies in Anthropology of East Europe Review, Indiana University; History of Communism in Europe, IICCMER; Studies and History Articles, Romanian Society of Historical Sciences; Romanian Contemporary Photography Influx; Revelar, Universidade do Porto. She is also the author of "Photographic collections and archives today, in the digital world," published by Tritonic.
Laura C. Vela’s work focuses on the everyday, the infinitely small, and the relationship human beings share with their surroundings. She perceives photography as a way of placing herself in the world and a means of communicating with others.
She published her first book, 'Vorhandenheit', in 2014, which was reissued in 2020. In 2016 she collaborated on 'Subculturcide', a book about Madrid during the 2010s. She was a selected artist at Plat(t)form 2018 (Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland) and in May 2019 she published her first photo book, 'Como la casa mía', with the publishing house Dalpine, Shortlisted for PhotoEspaña Best Book of the Year Award 2020. In July 2020 she edited and published 'Las simples cosas', a collective photo book. In 2022, she published 'Siempre van solos, los bichos', a transmedia project (book and web format). Since november 2020, she directed the book collection 'Esto es un cuerpo'.
Laura is a Superior Technician of Plastic Arts and Design in Photography (Arte 10 School, Madrid). Laura graduated in Philosophy (Universidad Complutense, Madrid) and she won the BlankPaper scholarship to study a Master’s in Development of Artistic Projects. She also has a Diploma in Chinese Studies (International Institute of International Studies, UCM, Madrid).
The work of Thomas Nolf examines the ways in which national myths are formed, instrumentalised and frequently suppressed. Confounding fiction and documentary, fabled event and scientific enigma, his work looks into how nation-building ideology influences modes of storytelling, and vice versa. Nolf handles his subjects with a close appreciation of narrative and its ambiguous relationship with veracity and considers the ways in which heritage and eroded beliefs can be re-established and repurposed.
For his long-term project Peculiar Artefacts in Bosnia and Herzegovina - an imaginary exhibition, for example, Nolf’s point of departure was the so-called “Bosnian pyramids” and other disputed historical sites and artefacts, including stone spheres and medieval monuments. Juxtaposing his own documentary work with kitschy acrylic paintings of dream-like, bucolic landscapes and an assortment of found photographic footage —including shots of a triangular mountain looming over a scenic village and a shepherd carrying a sheep on his back — Nolf keeps adding elements to our already confused reading of the phenomenon, its emergence and reception. By doing so, he revives the public controversy over the existence of an ancient civilisation in the region.
Drawing on the mythological dimension of the triangle-shaped hills, Nolf proposed an exhibition that would exploit the stories and objects surrounding the “Bosnian pyramids” to the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, in 2012, had temporarily closed its doors due to a lack of state funds. If myths and legends have proven to be valuable assets in branding a particular place as a unique tourist experience, its effectiveness in generating local informal economies might as well be explored.
Even if Nolf’s project-based practice is driven by a pragmatic desire to formulate alternatives to the status quo, he poetically engages with particular sites and times, carefully tending to a range of subjects — from the promise of a desirable ancient past to the current funding realities devastating cultural institutions in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina — while, at the same time commenting on photography's rhetorical qualities and its — at times deceptive — relationship to representation and truth-telling.
Text by Laura Herman
She has been changing places from Slovenia to Greece for nearly a decade and after to Paris - for a quest of a home while on the other side she was always urged by the necessity to move.This is also the main focus she explores in her work, the question of her home, geographically as well as emotionally. Tereza’s life can be read within her photographic motives, her work stretches between diary and documentary photography, characterized by a minimalist reality that grows into surreality. Based on intuition and on her everyday life, the images spread from the north of Japan to the south of her kitchen. She is a self-thought photographer, mostly using 35mm film.
In 2020 she was the winner of Fotofever prize, the photo fair held every year in the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. Her work was exhibited at Voies Off in Arles, La Nuu Photo Festival in Catalonia, at Institut Francais in Phnom Penh, Analixforever Gallery in Geneva, Inselgalerie in Berlin, Photon Gallery in Ljubljana, etc. She selfpublished photozines that were exhibited at Athens Photo Festival.
Joud Toamah is an interdisciplinary graphic designer and visual researcher based in Antwerp, Belgium. The project 'Archive of Traveling Images, an Image Amidst the Heart' (2018–ongoing) is an archive of digitised images of family albums that the artist sources from acquaintances, friends and family members in Syria and the diaspora. Toamah collects pictures that have undergone processes of scanning, uploading, searching, cutting, pasting, renaming, compressing, downloading, forwarding, etc. As such, she is creating digital archives of private and intimate images. But her research highlights something more interesting than the photographs themselves: the way that this digital circulation within personal networks becomes reflected in the image itself. Digital reproduction and circulation — the conditions of recreating bonds after displacement — leave their traces. In its digital journey of relocation, the image acquires consecutive layers of relationality.
Toamah’s art and research are deeply relatable despite the fact that her archive of travelling images is not publicly accessible. Although she chooses to share only the project’s conditions and context, her approach is poetic rather than analytical. We are invited to see how she secures the invisible, the inaccessible, the untranslatable. The artist’s research suggests that to safeguard one’s humanity, one must retain agency over one’s images — and protect them from the othering gaze. Yet her project moves beyond this aspect: through the recollection of private and personal images, she creates personal bonds based on reciprocity, generosity, care and feedback. Photography becomes an interaction between people, a tool to talk and share. A tool for knowledge production, for telling and retelling, for activating each other’s stories and memories.
The digitised images reveal their unique materiality: the fading of the paper, the despair that one will forget certain places, the writing scribbled on the backs of photographs to remind us across generations and distances that to remember is to relate. Toamah’s research moves beyond the binary oppositions between digital and material, here and there, past and present. She establishes a relational archive and an aesthetics of care: the archive of travelling images creates simultaneously belonging and protection.
- Text by Petra Van Brabandt (.tiff)
For the past 6 years, Snizhko participated in several group exhibitions, festivals and international fairs in The Netherlands, Japan, Ukraine, Austria and Czech Republic. Her installation “TINI” was awarded the Best Artwork Award and Public's Prize at Smart Illumination 2016, Yokohama, Japan, Honorable Mention and Public's Prize of Steenbergen Stipendium 2016, The Netherlands.
Browsing through Allyssa Heuze’s photographs is, one rapidly remarks, like taking one path and unexpectedly finding oneself on another. A slide leads us to a pair of buttocks encircled by a hoop, a baseball player hits a home run which leads us to two small breasts drawn by the shadowed outline of two plump apples, and even to those gazed upon by another young man, his head submerged beneath a t-shirt. References to play punctuate Allyssa Heuze’s labyrinthine journey between her images: ball games, gymnastics, role play. This photographer’s preferred terrain is the studio, where she seems to take pleasure in constructing her dramas and her absurd scenarios. Herein this white cube willingly yields, where one may make believe that the real, the duration of the photographic shot, has no hold. She invites her friends within, a banana and doughnuts, an erupting volcano, and an aeroplane vulva in an inventory that is all the more burlesque as it is presented through a precise, almost clinical, photographic vocabulary. A balanced light, controlled reflections, a careful composition: together they hold all of the attributes of a style with a perfect appearance that this photographer – who certainly knows all of its rules – takes pleasure in making slip.