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.
Yana Kononova (b. 1977) has an academic background in social sciences, and holds a PhD in sociology. She was born on Pirallahi island in the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan – now an important site of oil extraction. During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, her family emigrated to Ukraine. Having later relocated to the countryside of the Trachtemiriv peninsula, Kononova turned to photography. She graduated from the Photoschool of Viktor Marushchenko before following a photography course organised by the Image Threads Collective (USA). In 2019, Kononova won the Bird in Flight Prize in emerging Photography, and in 2022 was the recipient of the Hariban Award, presented by Benrido. Her works have been exhibited in Ukraine and abroad.
In her works she often focuses on issues connected with migration or its destiny. She is mostly interested in the problematic of constructing identity and how people define themselves and the land of their origins. Recently she is involved in collective photographic research about polish migration to South America. It happens that she gets out of the material world and enters other dimensions of perceiving the world, exploring the paranormal events and believes not connected with any religious system. Finds collective creation as the best way for making photography as permanent process of putting individual thoughts in doubts.
She was born in 1990 by the Polish seaside in Gdańsk. Graduated in Photography on Academy of Arts in Poznań. She is also part of Ostrøv publishing collective.
The Land of Promises is an invitation to explore transnational and transracial adoption in China and Belgium, both in the present day and in the past. One can imagine that during China’s one-child policy era Belgium represented “the promised land” for baby girls whose parents had to give them up. And yet, as Youqine Lefèvre’s work unfolds, and she moves from her parents’ archives to her own images, the perspective shifts. When she visits her birth country, China becomes the land of promises — of finding her roots? Her birth family? Herself?
Such an ambitious promise is easy to break, which explains the palpable melancholy in Youqine Lefèvre’s pictures. Her work also conveys the ambiguity of her position: as an adult adoptee visiting her birth country, she is “an outsider within”, so close to her photographic subjects and yet so far away. From this perspective, art is the new land of promises for Lefèvre, who uses multiple supports (film, paper, etc.) in her photographic practice to create a world where she can live her truths. The work produced by the artist thus generates the artist. Youqine Lefèvre is not only reclaiming her own narrative, but challenging the status of archives that in her hands become both art and a political statement.
Ultimately, The Land of Promises is an invitation to decentre whiteness and the Global North in the visual narrative surrounding transnational and transracial adoption.
- Text by Amandine Gay (.TIFF)
Hiep Duong Chi (b. 1996), who holds a BA from the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, was born in Děčín, Czechia. Photography formed part of his life from the very beginning; his grandfather ran a photography studio in Vinh, Vietnam, where his mother took photographs before she moved to the Czech Republic in the 1990s. His own work began along the lines of classic documentary photography, exploring notions of family, the Vietnamese community, or following events that caught his attention. During the pandemic, the artist instead began arranging, staging and creating still-lifes and portraits. In this new work, he touches on the realities of life as a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant – That time I wished I was a white butterfly combines references to traditional customs with his own inner feelings.
She obtained a master’s degree in Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2016. In 2013, she spent a semester in Brussels with Erasmus, later, she completed her mandatory internship in Paris with Erasmus+.
In 2013 she was selected to the top 100 of Google Photography Prize. In 2014 she won a grant to organise her first solo exhibition titled Bleu, which took place at Gallery Várfok Project Room, Budapest. In 2015 her series Animalia Variabilis was shortlisted at the 5th World Biennal of Student Photography, Novi Sad.
In recent years, her photos gained exposure in various places including the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, the Mai Manó House, the Vienna Photobook Festival, the Berlin Photobook Festival, the Mark Grosset Prize, Vendôme, the Kiscell Museum , and the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center and der Grief magazine.
She is a member since 2012, and a board member since 2020, of the Studio of Young Photographers. She lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.
Verena has a deep interest in personal histories and narrative storytelling. Intrigued by the way cultural and political factors influence one’s life, she uses her lens-based practice to shed light on inner life and everyday “reality” in intimate settings. The encounter with the subject is the core of and the fuel for her work. To a large extent, Blok’s photography and video work is driven by the complex, paradoxical, tragic, and sometimes humorous set of social and cultural relations that form everyday life in Poland. As a Dutch-Polish dual citizen raised in The Netherlands and The United States, Blok has a keen awareness of her position moving between East and West. By coming close to her subjects and embedding herself for stretches of time, she uses these locations as her studio, a backdrop to the narratives that both artist and subject become part of.
Martyna Benedyka, born in 1991, is a Polish visual artist, vocalist and teacher working in a wide range of media including painting, film and digital photography, collage, installation, and sound art. She studied Art and Design at the Gray’s School of Art in Scotland, UK and graduated with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art Painting in 2014. She has exhibited in the UK, Poland, Romania, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Canada and the USA. Her work has been chosen by the Federation of British Artists for the Futures - UK’s largest annual survey of emerging contemporary figurative art at the Mall Galleries, London, among others. She is the recipient of both Polish and British scholarships for her artistic achievements as well as the winner of international residencies and competitions - the latest being the Photo Romania Festival 2022 and De Structura cross-border project 2022-2023, Tallinn, Estonia. Her work is in private and public collections. She specializes in classical music and has performed in many group as well as solo concerts internationally since 2004.
https://martynabenedyka.com
My photographic work is structured around a single series: Gravity and Grace. The staging is the main focus of my research. It coordinates my relationship with the subject and my desire for images. I photograph my relatives and the objects I surround myself with. I seek to provoke the tensions that coexist or confront each other in the domestic space and that of the staging.
The DUNA group is an open collective of artists (Lenka Bakes, Ladislav Kyllar, František Svatoš) focusing on themes of the future topics such as ecology and technology. Adaptus is a speculative project in which we explore the borders of humanity and complexity of fragile relationship network between various entities.
DUNA has presented in a number of solo exhibitions, presented the first volume of the Adaptus series in 2019 as part of the 4+4 Days in Motion festival in Prague, and has continued to develop the series through the NoD exhibition in Prague and online platforms. The Duna group was included by the French publication NONFICTION 02 on Nature, among a selection of artists born after 1980 setting the trends of the future, with recent works presented by Duna in the exhibition HOLY MATTER at Below Grand in NYC and in the exhibition Baitball at Polignano a Mare Italy.
dunagroup.tumblr.com
Marc-Antoine Garnier (b. 1989) is a French photographer and visual artist, who graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d’art et Design Le Havre-Rouen. In recent years, he has presented his works in numerous exhibitions. His pieces have been collected by the FRAC Normandie-Rouen, as well as several art libraries in France. Garnier’s research finds particular appreciation in Japan, where he exhibited at the Nishieda Foundation as part of the Nuit Blanche de Kyoto in 2017, and at the Tezukayama Gallery in 2016.
website: marcantoinegarnier.com
Instagram: @marc_antoine.garnier
Her works and engagement has been marked by accolades, including the Bayern Innovativ’s Junge Kunst und Neue Wege Stipendium, and grants like the Neustart Kultur Stipend 2022 and Neustart Plus Stipend 2023 from Stiftung Kunstfonds. Albano's works have been showcased in both solo and group exhibitions nationwide and internationally. She premiered her first solo exhibition through the ISO 5000 Prize 2021 of Hans and Annemarie Weidmann Foundation. In 2023 she was part of Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles at the Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz.
Albano's influence extends beyond her art, as she has been an invited guest at the German-British Democracy Forum, and held talks for the Hertie Foundation and the BARCAMP of the German Foreign Office. In 2023, she started to establish an Afro-European artist network, leveraging her Allianz Foundation Fellowship to foster collaboration within the artistic community.
In 2020 she won the photography scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers. In the same year she was among the winners of Carte Blanche Students, a scholarship founded by Paris Photo, the world's greatest photo art fair. The works of the four winners were exhibited at the Parisian Gare du Nord. Her diploma series, entitled "Three Colours I Know in This World," was chosen for the 10 New Talent 2020 programme by the curators of BredaPhoto Festival and was exhibited in The Netherlands.
Her work is often applauded by the foreign press. Also her photos are part of the Blurring the Lines 2020 issue. From 2020 she is represented by TOBE Gallery, Budapest.
Poly’s art practice is merging her previous experience in documentary and staged photography. The photographer interprets cultural and visual codes of typical Ukrainian everyday life, predominantly in the fields of eroticism, fashion, and novel notions of beauty. The artist states that she finds herself constantly inspired by “trivial things, everyday events, stories from the lives of friends, and own experience”.
Julie Poly’s exhibitions serve as a continuation to her artistic message. Her ‘mockumentarian’ and slightly grotesque projects often come back to the areas of their genesis, like railway station (Ukrzaliznytsia series) or arcade centres (Kosmolot playing cards).