In parallel with her artistic and professional work, she has been collaborating since 2022 with the photo collective and cultural association Narrativa, as a founding member. Her photographic work explores the pluralism of human nature through belief and collective identity, as well as issues related to memory and noetic.
Her first long-term project, Fractal, a visual investigation into the heterogeneity of worship and its relationship with the city, was exhibited in Lisbon and was published by several media outlets. The same project was selected by an international jury to be presented at the Descubrimientos event at the PHotoESPAÑA photography festival, with a grant from the Embassy of Portugal in Madrid and the Camões Institute.In 2023 she participated in the group show and book OMNIS, presenting her view on religion through an essay based on the World Youth Day. Her ongoing project, Irene, explores the role of memory in the construction of a present nostalgia, through personal photographs and family archives.
Teresa aspires to delve into the realm of post-documentary photography,characterised by a more intimate connection to the tangible world, and placing strongemphasis on a subjective, poetic method of crafting images and narratives. Shecontinues to be dedicated to the exploration of colour in photography and itsexpression as an individual artistic style.
Alba received prizes in the Tokyo International Photography Competition (Japan, 2017), Landskrona Foto Festival (Sweden, 2017), Flash Forward UK (Canada, 2016) and Zona C Visual Artist Awards (Spain, 2015). He was a finalist for the Best Photobook of the Year Award by PHotoEspaña (Spain, 2020), the GetxoPhoto Festival (Spain, 2019), the BMW Art & Culture (France, 2017), Encontros da Imagem (Portugal, 2016), Grand Prix Fotofestiwal (Poland, 2016) and the Descubrimientos PHotoEspaña Award (Spain, 2015). His work has been exhibited at various galleries and museums worldwide, most recently at the Lianzhou Museum of Photography (China, 2021), Hayward Gallery (London, 2019), the Tokyo International Photography Competition (TIPC) (Japan, 2018), Singapore International Photography Festival (Singapore, 2018), Landskrona Foto (Landskrona, 2018), Format Photography Festival (Derby, UK, 2017), Auditorio de Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2017), La Fábrica Gallery (Madrid, Spain, 2016), Fotofestiwal Art_Inkubator (Lódź, Poland, 2016), PHotoEspaña (Madrid, Spain, 2016), Circulation(s) festival (Paris, France, 2016) DOCfield Barcelona festival at Arts Santa Mònica (Spain, 2016), Bitume Photofest (Lecce, Italy, 2016), and MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (Greece, 2016). His monographs, ‘The Taste of The Wind’ (2019) and ‘The Observation of Trifles’ (2016), are part of collections in institutions such as Tate Library (UK), Harvard Library (USA), Deck (Singapore), The Library Project (Ireland), Lightbox Photography Library (Taiwan), Reminders Photography Stronghold (RPS) (Japan), Fundación Foto Colectanica (Spain), and Landskrona Museum (Sweden).
www.carlosalba.com
The daughter of Chinese emigrants living in Canada, Teresa Eng had an imaginary and fantastical vision of China, until she decided to visit the country. The degree of difference between the Chinese dream that she had constructed and the reality of a country undergoing a frantic development, might have resulted in a documentary which would not have spared us the excessive nature of contemporary China. On the contrary, Teresa Eng, chose to avoid the obviousness of a documentary and the stylistic clarity this entails. Her China seems to evolve beneath a hazy veil. The here and now are erased, the signs of urban frenzy – abundantly illustrated in contemporary photography – are eluded, potentially treated as asides. An infinite head of hair confronts audaciously the curves of a modern architecture: Teresa Eng treads softly, turning her back on the injunctions of a modern China. Which, out of a rock standing in its ceramic pot, or a concrete pillar erected in the water, merits our attention? Teresa Eng’s China seems to navigate between the riverbanks of a capitalist progressionism (China Dream, the title of the series, is also a popular slogan for president Xi Jiping, which in turn refers to the American Dream) and that of an orientalist romantic nostalgia.
In 2016 she published her first photo book, eden, thanks to the Fiebre Dummy Award. Since 2010 she lives in Madrid, alternating her work as a photographer with her personal projects.
Eva Maria Bouillon (b. 1997) currently lives and works in Bruges, Belgium. In 2019, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts and Photography from the LUCA School of Arts, followed by a Master’s degree in 2020. Her work probes at the relationship between storytelling, family history and personal experience. In recent years, her work has featured in several group exhibitions and international film festivals.
Karim El Maktafi (Desenzano del Garda, 1992) is an Italian Moroccan photographer based in Milan. In 2013 he graduated at the Instituto Italiano di Fotografia in Milan. In 2016, he obtained a one-year scholarship at Fabrica, Benetton's communication research center in Treviso.
During his residency period, El Maktafi made the project Hayati and, one year later, won the PHMuseum 2017 Grant - New Generation Prize. With the same project, El Maktafi has been finalist of the CAP Prize 2017 (Contemporary African Photography prize) and second prize at the Kassel Dummy Award 2018. In 2017 he won a mentorship with the American photographer Maggie Steber (VII Agency), while in 2018 he gets the Magnum Photos scholarship with Alex Majoli.
Karim works on long-term projects between Italy and Morocco exploring concepts as identity and sense of belonging through documentary and portrait photography. His work has been exhibited at La Triennale Museum in Milan, Museum in Der Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, Macro Testaccio Museum in Rome and in other photography festivals in Europe, as well has been published, among others, on The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic USA, Internazionale, Vice, GEO.
www.karimelmaktafi.com
Jan Durina is a Slovak interdisciplinary artist who utilizes a diversity of medium to develop personas and grow the complex narratives they exist in. Through performance, photography, and sound Durina unfolds the nuance of each narrative, grappling with themes of loneliness, loss, the boundaries between nature and the body, and the distortions of the human mind as experienced within an ever developing gender and identity. Through this process Durina produces art works in the form of music, performance, lm, and photography, seamlessly and con dently moving between exhibitionary to performance contexts.http://jandurina.com/projects/recent-works/cute-tragic/
Ieva Baltaduonyte (b.1988 in Kaunas, Lithuania) is a lens based artist and graduate of thePhotography BA programme at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Informed by her own personal experience of displacement, her artistic practice engages with topics and issues relating to migratory culture. Central to her work are the psychological consequences of migration, such as displacement trauma, as well as the concepts home, identity and the in-between state. After spending seventeen years living in Dublin, Ireland, Ieva has recently returned to her native Lithuania, where she is currently based. Transnational migration is perhaps the most highly contested issue across Europe. For new migrants spatial and temporal displacement is potentially traumatic, resulting in shifting identities where home can no longer be understood as a fixed knowable entity. Ieva is preoccupied with revealing personal and collective narratives where trauma, identity and memory encourage a deeper engagement with cross-cultural dialogue. By using photography for both personal expression and to foster a critical dialogue with contemporary society, she invites the viewer to participate in societal debates, foregrounding human experiences, and exposing what is otherwise obscured or ignored. Her carefully constructed projects combine politics and aesthetics inviting a dialogical relationship with the viewer.
Gulsah Ayla Bayrak (born 1997), is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgium, working on the larger themes of identity and belonging, in a complex world of interactions between her the different fragments that she embodies: Her Turkish roots and her political identity as a citizen of modern Europe, juxtaposed for the ramifications of feminist theory when thinking about the body and the self and the cultural and political consequences of queerness in an era of increasing polarization, but also of multiple polarities. Taking the migration stories in her own family as a starting point, Bayrak draws on personal biographies, to re-narrate events in such a way as to reconstruct the experience of lived time, and not merely chronologies. In her practice, moving seamlessly between Asia and Europe, both physically and emotionally, the polarity of global north versus global south emerges sharply, around the political definition of “East”—a borderland of European modernity, wholly constructed by it. The idea of the fragment resurfaces in Bayrak’s projects as a partial narrative, constitutive of our shared, social experience, and which cannot be dovetailed or manipulated, so that it remains always alive, fresh, fragile, and unfinished. In this inconclusiveness the artist finds paradox, and within paradox, the complexities of modern identities fabricated from torn off bits of different, larger structures. In dealing with objects as markers of memory, and with memories as physical objects Gulsah Ayla Bayrak creates unfinishable threads of historicity, unfolding in simultaneity, searching for a lost, but ultimately unidentifiable, temporal index.
Her photography has appeared in National Geographic, der Spiegel, Newsweek China, Die Zeit, and many others. For her photography she was awarded with the Inge Morath award, received the VG-Bild award and won the Lotto Brandenburg Prize and many more. She has exhibited worldwide in countries like Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland - as well as China, Iceland, Ukraine and the US.
Wathne studied Visual Arts at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art and Photography at the Norwegian School of Photography.
Gillespie's themes explore queerness, mortality and conflict with youth and anxiety through her current ongoing series titled 'This Hurts' last exhibited at the Mac, Belfast, in 2020.
The images mainly feature personalities from the world’s nightlife, fashion and art communities. The work is an exploration of queer identity, self-invention and LGTBQI culture informed by a love of high-camp, kitsch aesthetics and art history. They aim to capture both the surface and the interior world of the subject halfway between truth and fantasy. Much as Susan Sontag elucidates in ‘Notes on Camp’, Studio Prokopiou is the lie that tells the truth.
Alessandro Zoboli (b. 1990) graduated from the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia in 2014. Between 2015 and 2019 he worked in Alex Majoli’s studio as an assistant, refining his skills as a photographer, printer and retoucher. In 2019 he joined Cesura Agency as an official member. Over the past years he has worked on a number of different long-term projects exploring the relationship between North Africa and Europe. Zoboli has also documented the Covid-19 pandemic and housing crisis in Italy; travelling the country from North to South, he photographs the conditions of inequality that characterise western societies, highlighting the forgotten discomfort experienced by millions of families. His ongoing Shine On project explores the multifaceted and elusive face of today’s Britain: a liquid form, constantly changing and contradicting itself in search of a new identity.
Since the beginning of 2020, he is now fully dedicated to his photographic activity. This year he exhibited an excerpt from his series Dystopia at the Halles du Faubourg in Lyon and participated in a group exhibition around Dante’s Hell at the Polo Museale Santo Spirito in Lanciano (Italy). Recently selected by GUP magazine to be part of Fresh Eyes 2020 talents that bring together 100 emerging European photographers in a book published in July 2020. His series The Shelter was exhibited at the Athens Photo Festival 2020 and will be at Photographiques du Mans in spring 2021. In January 2021, Fisheye magazine published a large portfolio of its Médusa series. He's been recently shortlisted for the Gomma Grant 2021.
His first work ‘Dreaming of Figure Eights’ (2017) saw him return to South Lebanon to explore the affect of power and influence on the landscape. The work was selected for the Kassel Dummy award 2017 and was exhibited both in Ireland and abroad. In 2017 he was selected to represent PhotoIreland as part of Parallel - European Photo Based Platform, the body of work which was produced through the program was exhibited at a number of photo festivals throughout Europe. In 2018 he was nominated for the World Press Photo Joop Swart masterclass and in 2019 became the inaugural Irish participant in the European Investment Bank’s Artist Development Program in Luxembourg.
Mark is currently working on a number of projects and in 2018 started a Masters degree in photography at Aalto University School of Arts, Design, and Architecture in Helsinki. His ongoing research is focused on 19th century colonial activities in Ireland, particularly the mapping of Ireland, and the affects these activities had on Irish cultural identity and representation.
A combination of experimental analogue and digital photography, research-based, documentary elements and scientific imagery searches for the supposed truth content of photography and deals with the ecological effects of human action. Photography is used as an aesthetic object, medium and object of investigation.
After his apprenticeship at the Lette Verein Berlin until 2010 he studied from 2015 at Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in the class of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and from 2017 in the master class of Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in July 2017 and continues with the MFA at HfbK.
The newest work 'blast from the past' clashes two time scales: Amber is being examined as a time capsule and its possibilities to function as a photographic negative which shows snapshots of insects, frozen in its movement 20 million years ago. But the seabed of the Baltic Sea also keeps bombs and ammunition which were dumped after WWII in order to get rid of it, irrespective of the ecological disaster.
Ana Núñez Rodríguez studied Documentary Photography and Contemporary Creation at IDEP Barcelona, holds a postgraduate degree in Photography from the National University of Colombia and holds a Master degree in Photography and Society from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KABK) in The Hague. She was part of Lighthouse 2020-21, a program for upcoming talents at Fotodok, Utrecht.
In 2013, she published her debut book "Fitting Rooms," which examines the role of women in her generation. Between 2009 and 2016, Karolina was based in India, where she produced her second book "When We Lie Down, Grasses Grow From Us," exploring the migratory experience (published by GOST Books in 2019). She is an editor of several Strike Newspapers published by the Archive of Public Protest.
In recent years, she has initiated and completed several participatory projects involving refugees, creating spaces for collaboration and self-expression.
Karolina is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation (K. Kieślowski Film School), which centers around the subjective narratives of historical migrations. She is a member of Sputnik Photos and the A-P-P
In 2020, her work was shortlisted for the Prix Elysée and the Galicia Contemporary Photography Award. She also was a winner of the Fine Arts and Photography grant given by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and nominated at the Swiss Design Awards, amongst other recognitions.
She has exhibited in places such as Wilde Gallery (Geneva), Images Vevey, Verzasca Photo (Switzerland), Galería C19 (Ibiza), Galería Serendipia, Galería OTR (Madrid) and others.
Her book “Aya” published by RM (in conjunction with Yann Gross) has been recognized as one of the best books of 2020 by institutions such as PhotoEspaña or the Lucie Foundation (NY).
Prominent media like Aperture Magazine, El País, Fisheye, Gup, Le Temps, Liberation, Vogue Italia and Vistprojects have published her work.
I currently live in Paris, and I'm finishing my last year of a double master's degree at La Cambre Bruxelles and Ecole d'art de Cergy. It was music and black life that brought me to different environments and countries in 2021, like Chicago, where I worked with local communities for four months. There have been several venues where I have presented my work, including Treize in 2021 and Cherish in 2022. Earlier this year, I self-published a book of photos and texts, "2 strong for 2 long".
In 2022 she was shortlisted at Sony World Photography Awards, Open Competition: Portraiture. In 2023 she was shortlisted at Sony National & Regional Awards. She had collective exhibitions in: Romania, France and The United States. Maria is interested in documentary photography, remote places, youth, notion of home and the relation between humans and environment.