Jaka Teršek

Martina Zanin (b. 1994, San Daniele del Friuli) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. Zanin’s practice moves seamlessly between photography, writing, collage, leather, installation, sculpture, and artist books. In 2023, she won Premio Terna (youth) with her installation Dear F. In 2021, she won the first prize of Camera Work, and was among the recipients of Giovane Fotografia Italiana and Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI), the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC), and the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity. Zanin is the author of the photobook I Made Them Run Away, published by Skinnerboox, and Older Than Love, a self-published artist book. With Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally, including Cassina Projects, Milan (2024) Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2023), Foto Forum, Bozen (2023), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome (2023), Fondazione Orestiadi, Gibellina (2023), Benaki Museum, Athens (2022), IIC Abu Dhabi (2021), FMAV – Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2021), BACO – Base Arte Contemporanea, Bergamo (2021), galleria studiofaganel, Gorizia (2021), Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia (2021), Goethe Institute, Rome (2017). Her works are part of public collections such as MoMA Library in New York, Haas Library at Yale University, FMAV – Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, MEP – La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and Fondazione Orestiadi in Gibellina, among others. She has been a guest lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University, RUFA, University of Trieste, and FMAV – Scuola di Alta Formazione.

Visvaldas (b. 1990) is a Lithuanian artist s a Lithuanian artist working in the expanded field of the image, who explores photography and its boundaries through personal experiences and reflections on society. His work navigates themes of identity, technology, and power, blending minimalism with layered narratives to examine modern life’s emotional and psychological dimensions At this moment, he is pursuing his MA diploma in Photography at EACL, Switzerland (2025).

Tashiya de Mel is a photographer, environmental advocate, and communications specialist from Colombo, Sri Lanka who uses visual storytelling to create narratives that drive social change. Her practice explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making and deals with themes such as colonial histories, representation, heritage, family, landscapes, and the climate crisis. Tashiya is driven by a curiosity to forge connections with diverse disciplines such as art, history, academia and the environment. And find ways of bridging these disciplines through different forms of image-based media.

She was the recipient of the Visura grants for freelance visual journalists in 2023 for her project ‘Great Sandy River’ and received the Stroom talent award in 2024. Tashiya is a recent graduate of the ‘Photography and Society’ masters programme at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (NL). She is based between Colombo and the Hague.

Laura Van Severen studied Fine Arts and Photography at KASK School of Arts in Ghent, (Belgium) where she obtained her MA in 2015. She develops photographic projects in which she explores the landscape —apparently static, still, distant— to address the relationship we have with it and the trace we leave upon it. She moves away from the immediacy of the medium and creates from stillness and reflection. This has resulted in projects such as Land, Strata or El camp d’elles in which she addresses topics such as the transformation and fragmentation of the landscape, global logistics, waste management in the EU or the condition of women in a rural environment. Under the title Listening–Gathering, she is currently creating a collection of stories in which sound impacts and materialises into concrete realities. Laura lives in Barcelona (Spain) where she also works as a freelance photographer, teacher and studio manager.

Top researches the topics of mass surveillance, privacy, data collection.In his practice, he layers a traditional approach to documentary research with a more experimental use of new technologies (such as facial recognition, movement analysis, and deepfakes). The artist uses these technologies to visualise and examine scenarios in which people can protect themselves and their rights by gaining knowledge and reclaiming control of surveillance tools.  ​ Top’s projects addressing human rights, police misconduct and facial recognition during protests aim to contrast the abstract nature of the algorithmic mechanisms behind mass surveillance, by providing a concrete visualisation of the phenomenon and confronting the public with the extensive amount of surveillance societies are subjected to and the ethical risks deriving, finally offering theoretical solutions.

I am a visual artist working primarily with photography, video, and installation. My main area of interest revolves around the idea of destruction perceived as a prerequisite for rebirth – in this regard, my practice serves as a particular form of self-therapy. My creative approach centers around catastrophic events, whether experienced in real life or staged – not merely to document, but to explore their aesthetics and the emotions they evoke. Drawing from the notion of post-photography, I attempt to extend the same approach to my audience, purposefully creating the most photogenic environment. This invites the viewer to try and explore the aesthetics and emotions evoked by my own work. The theme of the car and anything automotive-related is a constant recurrence throughout my practice, varying both in context and form. It can be an invisible companion, as seen in the series of on-the-road photos like "Post Tourism," documenting wildfire sites in Australia and California. It can also be a desirable object deliberately subjected to all kinds of abuse – set on fire, melted, or drowned – in order to test its endurance while creating the perfect catastrophic photo set, as seen in the multidisciplinary installation "Panda" or the photographs published in the photobook "Pyromaniac’s Manual." Finally, the car can be dissected, stripped, and transformed into something entirely new, like a vehicle for poetic miniatures in the "Blind Spot" series. It can even become part of a fancy dinner where the courses are prepared out of car parts and served to the guests of a luxurious retreat, mockingly bringing into the spotlight the consumption patterns of the highest social classes in the "A la carte" project, created during the Chateau de la Haute Borde art residency and subsequently exhibited at Galerie du 13 in Paris. Most recently, my interest has turned to audiovisuality, focusing on short forms of video and their potential for a more poetic style of storytelling.

Karol Szymkowiak (b. 1983) is a photographer, photobook artist, curator and educator based in Poznań, Poland. Self-taught photographer, specializing in documentary photography and photo collages - work with archives. His work revolves around themes such as environmental problems, military and civil defence, physical and mental immobilisation. He is constantly fascinated by finding surrealism in faithfully recording reality using photography. As a photographer, he has participated in over a dozen group exhibitions. Since 2015 he is art curator of a long-term photography documentary project The Września Collection (Kolekcja Wrzesińska) whose patron is the Mayor of the City and Municipality of Września. As part of his work on this project, he is collaborating with leading Polish photographers to create photobooks and exhibitions about his home town of Września. Karol is a member of The Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF) and a scholarship recipient of the Marshal of the Wielkopolska Region in the field of culture. He is also a lecturer in photography at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

Toma Hurduc is a documentary photographer, currently working in Bucharest. His attention was first focused on representing local underground communities and movements, which he strongly feels related to. Nowadays, his narratives are often built on top of the personal experience and relationship with the subject matter, therefore the factual truth is often mixed with the meta, imaginative truth, aiming to question the human perception of reality, dread, anxiety, ephemerality and the construction of memory. Having an academic background in Cinematography, Toma is highly interested in the way light forms images, choosing to work regularly on 35mm black and white film, as a way to render the surreal he sees in ordinary life. Toma’s work has been exhibited both collectively and solo in Romania and abroad and he has been part of multiple mentorship programs, most recent being with Annie Leibovitz and IKEA.

Jaka Teršek (b. 1997, Slovenia) is a photographer and visual artist whose work explores themes of national identity, mythology, and the interplay between geography and human culture. He frequently combines photography with text, creating narratives that blur the boundaries between fact and ction. He holds a BA in Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Ljubljana and an MFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, where he is currently engaged as an artistic researcher. His series OWL, FOX, HEDGEHOG, DEER was analist in the Blurring the Lines competition organized by Paris College of Art in 2022 and was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Photography Grant in 2023. Jaka has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including at FOMU Antwerp, Gallery Artget Belgrade, Plečnik House Gallery, Gallery DobraVaga Ljubljana, and UGM Maribor. He is also a founding member of the collectives Fotosfera and Študio.

Born in 2001, Chernihiv, Ukraine. Started doing photography in 2019. Graduated the cinematography faculty of the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and Television University. In 2019 completed the MYPH school from Serhiy Melnitchenko and the concept photography course from Roman Pyatkovka in 2020. Member of UWPO and UAPP.