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Zoe is a photographer from Co. Antrim, now living in Edinburgh. Zoe is interested in the relationship between humans and the environment, as well as the systems of classification that we use to make sense of the world around us. She works on long term photographic projects, drawing on scientific and historic research as well as lived experience to tell a story about a place or subject. Her background research has been informed by photography’s history as a tool of imperialism and this is something that she works to recognise and subvert within her photographic practice. She currently teaches on the Stills School, an alternative education programme for young people and is a visiting lecturer at Queen Margaret University. She has received funding from Edinburgh City Council and the Richard & Siobhan Coward Foundation and was recently included in Fantasy Island, a publication documenting the last 50 years of photography in Ireland. Zoe participated in PhotoIreland's New Irish Works III between 2019 and 2021.

Milena Soporowska is a visual artist based in Poland. Her work explores, among other things, the intertwining of everyday life with magic and the occult, questioning the concept of home as a safe, familiar haven. She is interested in the combination of alternative medicine and psychoanalysis, and the overlap between Christianity, esotericism and folk spirituality.She graduated in Art History, presenting her master's thesis on the influence of spiritualistic and mediumistic photography on art in the light of Freud's category of unheimlich. She also studied photography, museology and psychotronics. Moreover, Milena is a graduate of the Sputnik Photos mentoring programme.Read more

Florian Gatzweiler (*1998) is a German artist whose work deals with identity, violence and images of masculinity. His projects are characterized by an empathetic examination of personal and social issues, which he often explores in a photographic context. He combines documentary approaches with staged elements to create multi-layered and complex narratives in which he attempts to do justice to the themes and problems of his work. During his studies at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, which he completed in 2024 under the direction of Irina Ruppert, he exhibited several times, including at EMOP Berlin and Paris Photo. His awards include a scholarship from the Socio-Culture Fund and the Paris Photo Young Talent Award.

Bo Vloors (she/her) is a visual artist, writer, photographer and filmmaker based in Brussels. Using image and text, her work revolves around human relations, within and with their surroundings, and the influential power of images. The Image stands central in her practice. Inspired by natural cycles and symbiotic arrangements, her work finds its origins in the repeated consultation of an ever-expanding archive built up over the past decade. Exploring her role as an image-maker (both in images and words), she defines her writings as The Missing Image, serving a complementary, affirmative or rhetorical purpose in relation to the actual image. Striving to balance aesthetics and content, the formats she uses may vary from publications, spatial installations, audio-visual to audio-performative. Still, The Image remains rooted in the core of her artistic practice, both as subject and material. Her work has been exhibited at Beursschouwburg (BE), Z33 (BE), Argos (BE), Art au Centre (BE), Decoratelier (BE), SB34 (BE), De Studio (BE), Het Bos (BE), OFFoff cinema (BE), CinemaTEK (BE), Bizet Bizar (BE), Radio Panik (BE), RAVI (BE), Folle Béton film festival (FR), Lateral film Festival (IT), San Sebastian film Festival (ES), Cashmere Radio (DE) and Dublin Digital Radio (IE).

Anna Safiatou Touré (Bamako, Mali, born in 1996) is a Franco-Malian multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. She graduated from the Nantes Saint-Nazaire School of Fine Arts and the ENSAV La Cambre in photography. Anna Safiatou was awarded the Médiatine Prize in 2022 and the Roger De Conynck Fund in 2023-24. Her work explores the space that unites or separates the two sides of every migratory narrative. The journey through this personal, historical, and cultural blending fills for her empty or unanswered spaces. On her own scale, she wishes to materialize this absence by creating her own evidence to make history heard—rendering the absence visible to tell stories from these new bodies. Like a certain poetry of emptiness, couldn’t the world be told in reverse, like a stencil, from the edge?

Rui Costa, Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal, 1989. He began his studies at the Portuguese Institute of Photography in Lisbon in 2020, wherehe became interested in developing documentary and authorial projects. In 2022 heattended the Masterclass Narrativa with the photographer Mário Cruz. Since 2023, he has been a teacher at the Portuguese Institute of Photography in Lisbon. Winner of the Fnac New Talents Award 2023, in the Photography category, with the essay “Uma Azeitona Bordada em Azul". ‍

Olga Kocsi (1987) is a multimedia artist based in Budapest and Freiburg, creating multi-sensory experiences that explore topics at the intersection of various scientific fields. Her work investigates the relationship between reality and virtual reality, as well as its potential evolution in the future, while pushing and mapping the boundaries between private and public spheres. Kocsi is known for her complex installations that envelop the viewer, employing a wide range of media including photography, video, animation, and VR. A key aspect of her practice is providing guided experiences that encourage audiences to engage with socially complex messages through self-reflection. Her main areas of focus include human stories, the mapping of time and reality, and simulation. As an experimental thinker, Kocsi boldly plays with spaces, surfaces, and materials, crafting unconventional situations that actively involve the viewer.

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.

Florine Thiebaud (b. 1992, France) is a photographer based in Marseille. With a post-documentary practice that combines photography and writing, she places a significant emphasis on publishing. She explores the notions of imprisonment and isolation, the passage of time, loss of control, identity, and her connection to others. From 2016 to 2019, she developed two projects focused on the consequences of the waiting for papers for exiled people in Greece, placing the relationship with the other at the heart of her practice.The first was the project Exils, which won the Roger de Conynck Prize and was exhibited at the Recylart Gallery in Brussels, followed by Breaking Point. The latter was co-published as a book in May 2022 with Stockmans Art Books, and was exhibited at FOMU in Antwerp and at the Contretype Gallery in Brussels as part of the .TIFF selection and Propositions d’Artistes. Developing her reflections on notions of imprisonment and isolation and their consequences, she is currently working on a project about families of incarcerated people, Des Ondes (On Waves), based on a personal story. This project has received support from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, and part of it was already exhibited in 2023 at the Delta Cultural Center in Namur as part of a group exhibition. In parallel, following confrontations with her own physical and mental limits facing depression, she developped a new series of self-portraits: Revenir (Coming back). Using once again repetitive imagery and a consistent aesthetic, she explores the intersection of vulnerability, isolation, and transformation through self-portraiture. Photographing herself during moments of crisis and depression, she seeks to capture the disconnect between her inner world and reality.