Maxime Guedaly

Sara Perovic’s photography begins with the personal, drawing from her own experiences and memories, and expands into broader themes of repetition, abstraction, and identity. Her work explores how personal moments shape perception and emotional expression. In Palmeral (2017), Perovic uses texture, repetition, and the fragility of nature to reveal the unseen complexities of plants. My Father’s Legs (2020) blends personal reflection with artistic exploration, confronting memory and healing through repetitive gestures, navigating emotional expression and abstraction. TWO (2024) explores human relationships, visualizing emotional connections with metaphorical imagery and a poetic “hugs ballad.” In Home Mirror I, Perovic catalogs her belongings to explore identity as both a collection of material and memory. Her book My Father’s Legs was shortlisted for the Les Rencontres d’Arles Prix du Livre d’Auteur and the Aperture/Paris Photo First Book Award. Perovic also founded aTree, a fanzine promoting young photographers, available at MoMA Library in New York. She works as a photographer and architect in Berlin.

Mara Palena (1988) lives and works in Milan. Her research focuses on themes such as memory, recollection, and identity. She works with photography, video, and sound, reworking materials from archives, often open and participatory, like home movies, and drawing on a personal archive of photographic images that she has been curating for years to document her life. Her work has been exhibited at various international festivals, venues, and galleries, including the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, Careof, Marsèll Paradise, Nowhere Gallery, Pananti Atelier, and Video Sound Art in Milan, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Madrid, MOPLA in Los Angeles, Artphilein Foundation in Lugano, and Recontemporary in Turin. Between 2021 and 2024, she was a finalist in several art prizes, including the Lucie Foundation, Combat Prize, Premio Fabbri, New Post Photography, and Artphilein Photo Book Contest. In 2022, she was selected by Camera Torino for FUTURES Photography. Her work Oikeiôsis won the 2022 Surprize Award from Sprint and the Marcelo Burlon Foundation. The editorial project was curated and published by Witty Books in 2023 and was included by Photo España among the 100 best books published in 2024.

Ornella Mari is a Belgian-born, Hungarian-Italian photographer based in Budapest. Her work explores themes of identity, femininity, and self-perception, often delving into the emotional and psychological landscapes of her subjects. Through a nuanced approach to portraiture, she captures the complexities of human experience, from moments of vulnerability to personal transformation. Mari’s journey with photography began as a means of self-exploration, gradually evolving into a broader investigation of societal expectations and internal struggles. Her images balance intimacy with universality, inviting viewers to reflect on themes of self-acceptance, resilience, and the fluid nature of identity. Rooted in both conceptual and documentary influences, Mari’s photography serves as a visual dialogue between the external world and inner realities. Whether through staged compositions or candid moments, her work seeks to challenge perceptions and offer new ways of seeing oneself and others.

Nayara Leite (b. 1989) is a Brazilian artist and writer based in Bergen, Norway. She holds an MFA from the Bergen Art Academy and an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication. Nayara works across text, performance, film, photography and installation. Through autobiographical narrative, political news, archival material and letters to close friends, she produces a portrayal of the reality in which the LGBTQ+ community lives in Brazil and in Norway. She has exhibited and/or held performances at Bergen Kunsthall, Palmera, Lydgalleriet, Isotop, Bergen Kjøtt and KODE 2 in Bergen; Preus Museum in Horten; Studio 17 in Stavanger; Oslo Negativ, Kunstnerforbundet and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo; and Momentum Biennale in Moss.‍

Marcus Gustafsson (b. 1990) is a Stockholm-based photographer and artist whose practice is autobiographical, exploring memory and its various realities. In 2013, Marcus obtained a bachelor's degree in photojournalism from Mid Sweden University. The recurring theme in Marcus's work is his autobiographical style, with human relationships serving as the common denominator. Marcus works primarily with analog techniques, occasionally manipulating photographs or complementing them with other applications such as drawing and writing. With exhibitions in Stockholm, Helsinki, Athens, and Pelt, Belgium, Marcus released his first zine, Down Here Together, with Fail Books in 2021. In the fall of 2023, Marcus completed a one-year workshop at Atelier Smedsby with photographers JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris, where the project Filling in the Gaps was conceived.

My name is Claude. As an interdisciplinary artist, I mainly use the media of photography and sound. I am based in Lichtensteig in Toggenburg, Switzerland. I grew up in the 90‘s in a small village on the Swiss side of Lake Constance and was socialised in the environment of the Catholic Church. Today, after studying analogue photography at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin and living in various house and farm projects, I no longer feel that I belong there.

However, the themes in my artistic practice today are still characterised by a tightly structured childhood, youth and apprenticeship: in my work, I have been exploring the concepts of collectivity and intimacy for several years. I am always looking for liberating and solidary acts in performative moments and arts production. My image- and sound-based practice reveals my great affinity for technology, the exploration of boundaries and needs in dialogue and the creation of trusting connections and learning spaces in my collaborations.

As a child of the working class, I am concerned with my own role as an artist in society and what (political) room for manoeuvre this opens up for me. The problem of self-exploitation, especially - but not only - with a body read as female, is a recurring theme in my artistic practice.

Since 2019, the Salon Vert has been a network of artists, a laboratory for sound research and a place for interdisciplinary dialogue. The Salon Vert has found a new home in my studio in Lichtensteig in 2023. I am also co-founder of the audiovisual Glitch Festival in St.Gallen and music editor at the community radio station Stadtfilter in Winterthur.

Marija Mandić (b. 1990, Novi Sad, Serbia) is an artist whose practice spans photography, text, drawing, and found footage. Her work delves into the themes of identity, memory and the past, often within a familial context, blending personal narratives with broader social issues. In 2023, Mandić was a finalist for the Mangelos Award, part of the Young Visual Artists Awards network. She won the Fotograf Magazine (CZ) open call in 2022 and received the VID Foundation for Photography grant in 2021 for her project White Bee. Her accolades also include the Dositeja scholarship, a grant from the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic, and the Mali Princ Foundation award. Mandić holds a PhD in Visual Communication from the Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem, where she lectured from 2015 to 2019.

Thi My Lien Nguyen (b. 1995) is a Swiss-Vietnamese photographer and artist based in Switzerland. She received her Bachelor's degree in Camera Arts from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2017. In her artistic practice she deals with the feeling and understanding of belonging, participation and the sense of home, whereas she is strongly interested in diasporic and post-migrant realities and stories. Through participatory and inclusive methods, performative and culinary activations she seeks to establish more inclusive spaces to create more understanding and representations between communities. She works with traditions, rituals, folklore, photography and food. Her work has been exhibited in multiple exhibitions including the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil in São Paulo (2023), Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zürich (2023), Plat(t)form, Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022), Photo Hanoi, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA) (2021). Nguyen is part of the curatorial team at Les Complices*, a self-organised community-based off-space in Zurich, committed to support the ideas and works of queer, trans, inter, non-binary, women* and BIPoC.‍

Sarah Mei Herman holds a BA in Photography from The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and an MA in Fine Art Photography from London’s Royal College of Art. Her personal projects explore relationships, intimacy, loneliness, longing, and the human urge for physical proximity, often focusing on the vulnerability of transitory life stages. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at institutions and festivals such as The National Portrait Gallery, London; The Benaki Museum, Athens; Photo Elysée, Lausanne; Le Château d’Eau, Toulouse; The Jewish History Museum, Amsterdam; and the JIMEI x ARLES International Photo Festival, Xiamen. Her projects have been recognised by a range of prizes and awards, including the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, the Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography and the Arnold Newman Prize For New Directions in Photographic Portraiture. Her work is found in several public and private art collections, whilst her images have been published by the likes of iD, Vogue Italia, Foam Magazine, Paper Journal and Dear Dave. Herman’s second photo book – Julian & Jonathan – was recently published by the London-based GOST Books. Future 2025 exhibitions include solo shows at Concertgebouw Brugge in Belgium, and at GLAZ festival in Rennes, France.

Tudor Rhys Etchells uses the photograph to challenge fictions created by legal systems. Working within such a bureaucracy in his previous role as a human rights lawyer inspires his closeness to the document and the brutally mundane. For him, the photographic medium, with its own cumbersome structures of viewing and representing, appears the best match for understanding processes that construct the imagined norms of our society. Embracing photography’s performative element, he deconstructs our conceptions of visual knowledge. He achieved a Distinction in MA Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales during which he was awarded the Reginald Salisbury grant. Recently he was awarded an Arts Council of Wales Research and Development grant to fund a residency and his first solo exhibition at BayArt, Cardiff. He is based in Cardiff and an associate artist of BayArt gallery.