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.
Anna Ádám (b. in 1983) is a Hungarian interdisciplinary visual artist and performance maker whose work blurs the boundaries between image, object, and choreography. She graduated at ENSAPC Art School in France in 2016, and also studied styling (2010) and makeup (2018). In 2013 she was selected to the 59th Salon de Montrouge, which led her to several solo exhibitions (Budapest, Paris) and residencies (Yerevan and Berlin). In 2014, she co-founded the company Gray Box (grayboxprojects.com) at the intersection of contemporary dance, visual arts, and fashion.
Since 2015, in the frame of her personal practice (www.annaadam.net), Anna Ádám creates hybrid spaces where spectacle and exhibition merge: she "curates theater" and "choreographs exhibitions". She conceptualizes and uses the exhibition space as a theatre and the theater as an exhibition space: the plinth as stage, the installation as setting, the visitor as spectator, and vice versa. Her multidisciplinary and always site-specific projects - including photography, drawing, installation, clothing, performances, and choreographed works - echo the broader socio-political context from a feminist and queer perspective, and challenge the body as both a historically disciplined, shaped archive and a living public/private site, where power is constantly contested and negotiated.
As a photographer, by combining both personal and anonymous photos with different technics (collage, drawing, painting, sewing, embroidery…), she examines the ways vernacular photography influences memory, individual and collective identities, personal and historical narratives, privacy and public life. Her embroidered photographs, photo-objects, and photo-based clothings explore the performative, choreographic, and sculptural potential of photography.
Between 2013 and 2015, Anna Ádám worked as a performance artist in commissioned works (Palais de Tokyo, Musée Georges Pompidou...). Since 2014 she regularly presents her projects in both exhibition spaces and theaters (Museum of Modern Art Yerevan, National Museum of Immigration History Paris, Theater MU Budapest, Théâtre de la Maison d’Europe et d’Orient, Salon de Montrouge, Galérie YGREC, Dorothy’s Gallery…), and holds workshops in universities across Europe (Austria, Hungary, Serbia, France...).
The focus of my work in the past years has been human violence and poverty: how its constant reception can restructure the society and the self. I live and work in Mexico with the aim of completing my visual research on this topic, where I look for cultural movements, group activities, individual destinies which exist as consequence of the persistent violence and repress. My goal is to be engaged from an intimate closeness in order to witness, capture the essence of these realities, emotionally, mentally strongly involve the viewer into the topics I'm working with, to give the audience another perspective on the reasons why their lifestyle may often appear to be controversial and condemned, where I believe the key always lies in a brutal social and political system. I aim to give voice and visibility for people who are social outcasts, victims of injustice, showing contemporary social conflicts in a different context and narrative other than the newspapers. The photograph's focal point is a physical remnant of violence – a scar, a bruise, or a symbolic conduit, landscape – while the non-physical remnants of aggression are left to the viewer to interpret through a gaze, expression or pose and in physical space accompanied with text, interviews, even sound, so the story can become a whole, questioning faith, the nature of human and it's behavior.
More: http://koladel.org/
Characterized by a penchant for sheer entropy and excess, my practice pushes the poetics of chaos to the very limits of the photographic medium. From landscapes and bodies, to human connection, to infrastructure and interior worlds, anything can be sucked into my process and churned back out, transmogrified and transformed through chemical manipulations and surreal photo-collages.
Part travel diary and part love letter to the cities of Tokyo and Osaka, In Bloom is a searing, hyper-visual journey into the heart of Japanese underground culture and an ode to the overwhelming experience of seeing a place with the eyes of a stranger for the first time. The project reads as a frenetic dream sequence, as if the countless nights he spent in the belly of the city have folded into a single never-ending one.
Printing my images onto plastic paper so the ink never quite dries, I then uses water and chemicals to transform the surface of the prints, abstracting and blurring them as if the scenes are melting away.
Eva Bevec (b. 1998) is a designer, visual artist, and photographer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She completed her undergraduate studies in visual communications (with a focus in graphic design) with honors at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2020. She continued her design studies abroad, at the Master Department of Information Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where she graduated with honors in 2023.
She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Slovenia as well as internationally, showcasing her works at the prominent Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, at the Brumen Design Biennial in Ljubljana, and at Layerjeva hiša in Kranj, among others. In 2020, she held her first solo exhibition titled “Madeleines and Linden Tea” at DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana. She has received various awards for her work, such as the student Prešeren Award of the University of Ljubljana and the Brumen recognition for excellent Slovenian design. She also participated in the international pharmaceutical conference Health Services Research & Pharmacy Practice in the United Kingdom with her graduate thesis project, Developing a user-focused standardised design system for prescription medicine packaging in Slovenia.
In her artistic and design practice, Eva explores various media and topics, always connected by a genuine interest in the ordinary and the banal aspects of her surroundings. Through curious and critical investigation and documentation of the seemgly mundane, she reveals deeper and broader social, political, as well as aesthetic questions, patterns and implications. The prosaic becomes the extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes the poetic.
"My work leans on day to day encounters that are or turn narrative driven. With the idea of building an archive which can fit different themes while maintaining a certain interchangeability. With this archive gradually growing it’s possible to move around images and create new narratives."
Her personal work is often photographic, but this is not an exclusive relationship. On the basis of her projects, there is very often a question: How do the campers manage the nearness with their peers (Hidden Living)? Why do some Chinese prefer to live in a false Parisian avenue rather than in a traditional hutong (Abroad is too far)? What is the counterpart that urges a person to gulp down mass amounts of food enough to hurt their body (Rotten Potato)? Where is our relationship with food and our body rooted (To tell my real intentions, I want to eat only haze like a hermit)? Behind these questions lies a desire to understand a social phenomenon. And humor is not excluded.
She also pays very special attention to actively involve people she works with in the construction of the projects.
Her work has been awarded with various prizes, publications and exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. She also took part in artistic residencies (China, France, Japan).
I started off with photography on a late age, because I have a history of pro-basketball player. I decided to go back and study after I quit basketball. After a stop at RITS Drama school in Brussels I started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent where I got my bachelor in Photography.
I have an undeniable curiosity and hunger for both small and large, well-known and less well-known stories. I use my camera as a key to enter a world or to make any contact. It gives me a fly on the wall feeling, with which I can experience a tranche de vie for a while. I always try to approach my subject as objectively as possible and let my eye do the work.
Photography helps me to understand certain facets of life in a better way.
I've always been attracted to uncommon subjects and stories, which aren't mainstream and easy to approach.
Graduated in Political Science and Urban Sociology, his work unfolds in territories left, maintained or deliberately built on the fringes of our cities. In an attempt to exhaust these places, he takes them on over a long period of time and draws up a personal cartography, walking a fine line between documentary and fine art photography. He attaches particular importance to form, colour and material, which serve as points of encounter with his mental universe. In this way, he constructs a visual language that is both frontal and polysemous, offering a singular vision in which human frailties are transfigured by new lines of force.His work is regularly exhibited at festivals in France and abroad, like Athens Photo Festival, Tbilisi Photo Festival, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles or Circulation(s). He was awarded the Maison Blanche Prize in 2021.
Anaïs Boileau was born in 1992 in Nîmes. She is a photographic artist who works exploring Mediterranean cultures as a constant source of inspiration in her projects. She graduated from the art school of Lausanne, ECAL. She lives in the south of France where she alternates between photographic commissions and her artistic projects.Her work is presented in various group exhibitions and selected in several international festivals. In September 2017, she joins a year of master at Central Saint Martins school in London in photography. Since her first collaboration for M le magazine du Monde in 2015, she has worked regularly for the French and international press. Her work can be found in magazines and newspapers such as Le Monde, M le magazine du Monde, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Time or Vanity Fair.
Pleun Gremmen (NL, 1992) is an artist and designer researching ways to create narratives through a variety of media reflecting mainly on internet subculture and politics while pushing the boundaries of her practice.
She graduated in 2018 from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (Master Media Design, Experimental Publishing), and in 2014 from ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (Bachelor Graphic Design). Since graduating in Arnhem she has been freelancing as an artist, designer and researcher and has been connecting and collaborating with artists and institutions in Rotterdam.
The work “Alt Reality Lexicon” (2018) explores the language neologisms of the Alt-right and Manosphere subcultures, acting as a translator between realms of reality. The performance installation “R.E.S.T”(2017) explores contemporary physical and digital expressions of escapism in a politically turbulent time.
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.
The current project Systems of Order examines the hidden relationship between fear and joy - something that is deeply embedded within the Russian condition. The first part of the project focuses on the drag community in Novosibirsk, Russia. In joy, there is a darker reality and often the truth must be hidden in this world and “joy” can only be expressed through beauty - one has to place him/herself within the system.This, in a lot of cases, is based on oppression and boundaries. The theme of oppression vs. exhibition is constantly present in those systems of order. Joy becomes a form of repression in itself, there are moments of freedom in the constructed safe space, but they can only be obtained and permitted behind the masks of beauty and entertainment.
Beauty within a Russian context allows for certain freedoms from the norm. You must fit in the central mass of these systems unless you have power, money or beauty. In this way, beauty can become your safety net. In the country, unsure of its own reality and fearful to discover the boundaries, many struggle to be themselves in the current dystopian hybrid.
One often looks at the work of Arnaud De Wolf with a sense of disbelief. Is that image of a gigantic ice cube really floating in mid-air? Is that colourful picture of an ancient forest a realistic depiction or is it a digital fabrication, a fanciful re-creation? What are we meant to discern in his cyanotype prints: random blue lines surrounding white voids of various shapes and sizes or the contours of a mountainous landscape? By means of an unconventional presentation of the photographic image, simply turning it on its side or projecting it into a corner or using outdated techniques, such as the cyanotype, De Wolf presents us with works that hover between the clarity of description and the artificiality of invention. A projected bundle of light suddenly transforms into a three-dimensional object; abstract lines coagulate into a legible form; colours become deceitfully (un)real. In each of his experiments, De Wolf is testing the boundaries of the photographic system, looking for that breaking point where the photograph loses its readability and easy accessibility. His thorough investigation of colour is particularly revealing: Fading forest makes abundantly clear that colour in photography is always artificial. The colours that we see in a photograph are technologically and culturally coded; they are made in the chemist’s lab or produced by a programmer’s algorithm. Colour is here revealed as the manipulative garb in which the photographic skeleton is dressed.
Text by Steven Humblet