"My work focusses on absence. Absence that we try to fill in with information. My mother found her biological family through a Dutch television show and even though she was reunited with relatives, many questions remain, including why she was given up for adoption. My mother was born in Spain in 1964, when dictator Francisco Franco was ruling. It always felt strange not being able to talk about my mother’s past simply because we don’t know exactly what happened. With my work, I’m there for exploring the process of reconstruction, and the distortion of narrative within memory.
The projects I make are dealing with the relationship between politics, media and citizens. How these three opponents feed each other, need each other, but also exist in a constant power struggle. I examine the reliability of the image in the post-truth era, it forms a grey area where fact and fiction live close to each other. This is the area from where I position myself.
My visual language is based on what I see in the media and comes from the connection I had with the tv show where we discovered my relatives. The show shaped and directed my memory so much and intrigued me a lot. I am therefore also specifically interested in that what has been manipulated.
I use artificial light in order to give a cinematic feeling to the work, which is based on emotions that tries to lure its audience into believing what is created in front of them.
In my work I take on the role of a director that investigates what truth means in modern times."
With his tableaus Hardy welcomes the viewer to a multitude of worlds. In his creative process he draws from a web of observations, memories and imagination, and responds to both large and small events in the world. He explores the complexity of life in an idiosyncratic and compassionate way and in doing so, aims to increase our social sensitivity.
Hardy studied Architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology and afterwards Photography at the Willem de Kooning Academy. He is nominated for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2021 (UK), and launches Vivarium in the accompanying exhibition. His first solo is planned for the end of 2021 in museum MOYA (NL). In 2019 he showed his work for the first time on an international stage during Photo Basel.
Bundurakis’ work focuses on how it feels to be a living organism in this era that lies between the primal, the modern & the post natural-world. Images collide and divide according to the situation. Drawings, video and haikus are incorporated. Extracting fragments of the bodies that surround her and her own, she layers the pure with the artificial and the thirst for something truly crisp with loss and boredom, aiming to create cosmic and organic sensations.
In her project Eating Magma, Elena focuses on 4 ‘F’s: her Flesh, her Food, Fauna, and Flora. Creating an interconnecting universe, by combining these 4 ‘F’s, whose roles and existence, constantly shift and mutate into each other, she attempts to find an emotional and ethical position within a society ruled by control systems.
www.freethecelery.com
Vassilis Pantelidis’ images provide a glimpse of an alternative reality, which consists of a series of conceptual self - portraits. The individual scenes adopt a theatrical approach where the abstraction, the paradox and the absurd as well as the repetitive weave and the claustrophobic thread around the human subject, without any sort of redemption or solution.
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.
His main interest is the correspondence of the photographic medium and perception. He uses the camera as an extension of the human sight and tries to examine the concept of reality and knowledge. He mostly works in the studio environment and seeks to unfold his ideas in a progressive form.
His works were shown at exhibitions at home and abroad. He won the ON_AWARD grand prize of the OFF_Festival Bratislava Contemporary Photography Festival as a member of a group exhibition in 2014. He won the National Scholarship of Hungary in 2015–2016 and the Association of Hungarian Photographers: Photography Scholarship for 2017. He is a member of the Hungarian Photographers’ Association and Studio of Young Photographers. Biró is represented by Trapéz Gallery, Budapest.
http://www.birodavid.com
Born in Gran Canaria in 1973, living in Berlin.
Lorena studied fine art photography between 1992 and 1995 in Boston. Sometime later she went to Barcelona to study filmmaking but moved back to the island after one year in film school. Immediately she joined the team of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, this work got her closer to another one of her passions, films. Being so close to many radical authors and watching their personal films made an impact on her approach to photography.
Mum of 5 children. Since 2008 she has obsessively photographed and filmed her loved ones and their lives together developing over the years a coherent photographic work of a special intensity, building an ongoing project she titled Je reste avec vous. Her images reflects her daily life and focus on her most immediate universe.
She is one of the photographers from collective Temps Zero, an international group of artists working with photographs, films and sound presenting exhibitions and performances around Europe.
She recently published a book with Brazo de Papel/ Fotonoviembre called Himmelskörper, result of the last two years observing her younger children are growing and how their lives unfold fully in the space called Home, reflecting the moment in which we live and what happens outside.
Presently, Lorena diversifies her time between her artist activity and her work as a film programmer and advisor.
Kristina Õllek (b.1989, Estonia) is a visual artist who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She is working in the field of photography, video and installation, with a focus on investigating representational processes, geological and ecological matter, and the human-made environment. In her practice she frequently uses situations when fact and fiction, synthetic and natural, copy and original intertwine with each other and become a hybrid object / matter to obtain new and reconsidered meaning.
Her works are often site-sensitive, analysing the exhibition location and format, questioning modes of presentation and installation politics, viewing it from different perspectives — from a historical museum to online space.
Kristina Õllek has graduated from Estonian Academy of Arts (BA degree in 2013, MA degree in 2016; at the Photography Department, Fine Arts). She has also studied at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016) and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2012). She’s been the laureate of the Estonian Academy of Arts Young Artist Prize 2013 (BA) and 2016 (MA). In 2019 she received the Art Proof Production Grant. Her works have recently been shown in various international group and solo exhibitions in Estonia and abroad. Her works can be found in private and public collections.
www.kristinaollek.com
What does reality look like when it is photographed from its own perimeter, in the uncanny zone between certainty, objectivity and dreams, where an idealised version of the world has infiltrated? Sébastien Cuvelier’s photography may well provide the answer.
In his images, what is real always seems larger than it actually is. The photographs appear to have passed through a fantasy filter, to be projected from a dimension where other rules apply. The sensation is similar to the one felt in the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, when ambiguous landscapes are crossed in what is not quite a dream.
It is not unusual to feel a little uncomfortable when looking at his photographs. To have the sense that one is intruding on someone else’s secret, imaginary territory. Perhaps it’s because the people, places and objects are made unfamiliar by certain details, yet seem a part of daily life. A superficial mundanity, one filled with residential blocks, interiors decorated with ostentatious luxury, ordinary streets and gardens. And yet, our usual references are rendered obsolete.
The colours, the blurring, the inconsistencies: everything conspires to make us doubt that these photographs portray what really exists. Sébastien Cuvelier appears to have found the way to an observation room that provides a mysterious and disturbing view of the human desire to become a utopian incarnation of itself.
- Text by Philippe Marczewski (.TIFF)
The work of Eline Benjaminsen (NO, 1992) studies the lacking visuality of socioeconomic processes and how this effects our ability to engage with them. She deals with the challenge of perceiving market processes through photographic follow-the-money narratives that combine prints, video and text in mixed media installations.
In 2017 she graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (Department of Photography) with the project Where the money is made - Surfaces of algorithmic capital about the infrastructure of algorithmic stock trading. The project was awarded the Steenbergen Stipendium (2017) and was nominated for the Zilveren Camera category Prijs voor Storytelling (2018) along multiple other nominations. She collaborates with a variety of platforms, from museums and galleries to the financial press.
The latest exhibits of her work include Stroom (NL), FOTODOK (NL), Lianzhou Foto Festival (CN), Heden (NL) and Krakow Photomonth (PL).
Dafni Melidou (b. 1990, Greece) is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice combines research, photography, writing and multi-media experimentation. Coming from a scientific background her working and research methods are versatile, and she approaches her projects from many angles. She works with her own photographs, found images, tactile materials and smells, often re-appropriated and constructed into new constellations, shapes or forms.
Melidou's experimental works start with her daily encounters of events in the mass media and her personal observations. Her themes center around gender and social injustices, the complexities of representation and our conflicting perception of reality. A common thread in her work is the understanding of materiality and the physical world in a digital age. Her fascination lies with creating non-conclusive and often confusing stories that call for an open interpretation and invite the viewers to re-think dominantmedia narratives.
Melidou holds a B.A. in Chemistry, a M.Sc. in Food Science and she is currently pursuing her Master's degree in Photography & Society at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). In 2021 she co-founded cartographydigest.com, an experimental visual platform aiming to stretch the boundaries of photography and map new territories. She is currently based between Rotterdam and Athens.
Julius Schien came to photography in his late 20s and studied documentary photography at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
In his photography, he is primarily looking for answers to the question of what it means to confront Germany's political legacy and the country's right-wing continuity in the 21st century. In doing so, he aims to highlight long-forgotten stories of right-wing violence that lie beneath the surface of everyday life in seemingly sombre landscape and city portraits. His works are created on analog large format.
For three years now, he has been working on the research and realization of his long-term project »Rechtes Land«, in which he documents all the actual places where people have died through acts of right-wing violence since the German reunification.The publication fund of the Kulturwerk Foundation supports the conception and realization of the visual archive. Furthermore, the work was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Swiss »TruePicture« funding program in 2023 and received »Best Portfolio 2024« at the Open Portfolio Walk at Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Schien is also part of the »Masterclass On Documentary Photography 2024/2025« at the PhMuseum in Bologna, Italy.Julius lives and works in Hanover, Germany.
Giulia Vanelli (b.1996) is an Italian photographer based in Tuscany whose work explore concepts such us memory and identity, always driven by an evocative approach. She uses symbols as a causal link between visible and invisible, capturing the most enigmatic and hidden aspect of reality. She graduated from the BA Photography at Libera Accademia di Belle Arti of Florence in 2019 after spending a schooling period at Stephen F. Austin University, Texas. In 2020 she was selected for the artistic residency at Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center. In 2023 she was selected by the British Journal of Photography as one of the fifteen most promising emerging photographers from all over the world. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibition in international festivals and galleries, including Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2021), Galerie Joseph Le Palais (Paris, 2022) and 1014 Gallery (London, 2022). In 2024 her first book The Season has been published by Witty Books.
He debuted as a photographer in 2016 at Krakow Photomonth with the “Olympia’s Diary” project. From 2017 to 2019, he was part of art collective Fashion House Limanka, whose works were presented as individual exhibitions in the Museum of Art in Łódź and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He currently works at the Museum of Art in Łódź, where he is curating the “Save as a draft” program of Instagram art residencies.
Sheng-Wen Lo (b. 1987) was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and lives and works in Leiden, the Netherlands. Lo's works investigate the relationships between non-humans and contemporary society through a range of media, including images, installations, and games. He is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and received an MSc in Computer Science from National Taiwan University. His works have been shown at Foam and World Press Photo in the Netherlands; The International Center of Photography in the USA; MMCA in South Korea; The National Gallery of Victoria in Australia; and the Taiwan Biennial, Taiwan. He was selected as a Foam Talent in 2021, and has received fellowships from De Nederlandsche Bank and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds/Prince Claus Fund. Lo is represented by Avocado Art Lab, Taipei.
In 2020 Erien Withouck’s fascination for overlooked figures and myths led her to the Shetland Isles. Several islanders told her of the mythical “Selkie”, a hybrid creature which has the ability to remove its seal skin and take on human form. On Midsummer’s eve, a female Selkie emerges from a foaming sea and sheds her seal skin. A man sees her on the shore: he carelessly steals her skin and makes her his wife. Always longing for the ocean, the Selkie prefers the freedom as a seal to her expected role as a good mother and housewife, she eventually reclaims her skin and returns to her former home.
This myth is the sort of transient tale that chimes with Withouck’s aesthetic and sensibility. The antagonism between the fleeting nature of oral history and the desire to capture things permanently on film raises an important question: what do we wish to remember, and what would we rather forget? A literal reconstruction of the past is neither useful nor appropriate. The camera offers the chance to play, to intersect the paths of history and imagination.
Her photographs illuminate the traces of these unknown figures and mythical creatures which escaped the pages of history books, subtly capturing the unwritten habits, routines and cultures that still slumber on in remote communities. In scenes that beautifully evoke the fisherman’s world of pounding waves and craggy cliffs, the sea – with its continuous ebb and flow between eternity and fluidity – is clearly the protagonist. This ambiguity is exposed in the imagery of Erien Withouck.
- Text by Dagmar Dirkx (.tiff)