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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.

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.

Ana-Cristina IRIAN is a visual arts researcher, curator, and research-based artist who works with collections, photo archives, and multimedia materials. She studied sociology (Trento&Regensburg) and visual anthropology (Bucharest&Perugia). She holds a PhD in visual arts at UNARTE. Her artistic practice is developed under the motto No one left behind. It consists of the production of photo-objects and working with marginal/hidden objects and photographs, together with research materials transformed into photo-video installations reflecting the life of unknown people. Cristina participated in over 35 exhibitions in Romania and abroad, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Portugal, and Hungary. Cristina's recent projects focus on interpreting memory objects and integrating photographic material into contemporary spaces through visual installations. Notable displays include her contribution to Fragmentum at Palatele Brâncovenești and Here they lived at Carol 53 and the International Visual Art Biennale Brașov (2021, 2023). Cristina has published studies in Anthropology of East Europe Review, Indiana University; History of Communism in Europe, IICCMER; Studies and History Articles, Romanian Society of Historical Sciences; Romanian Contemporary Photography Influx; Revelar, Universidade do Porto. She is also the author of "Photographic collections and archives today, in the digital world," published by Tritonic.

Emilia Martin is a Polish artist and photographer based in The Hague, Netherlands, where in 2022 she graduated from Photography & Society Masters at the Royal Academy of the Art. Working with photography, writing, and sound, she explores how the stories we tell shape the realities we inhabit. She investigates mythologies and tales, and how they fluctuate and shift throughout histories. Through her work, she aims to complicate the binary understandings of fiction and truth and their established aesthetics. Her process is based on careful research and personal, often playful approaches, through which she questions dominant narratives. The belief in storytelling is rooted in her upbringing, where she engaged with both rural mythologies and urban narratives. She grew up between two different realities: a remote farm belonging to her grandmother in rural Eastern Poland and a heavy industry coal mining urban region in the West of the country. The clash between these two realities, the narrative of extractivism against rural mythologies and the proximity of nature, formed a place that continues to ground her artistic practice. Her work is inspired and informed by her rural Polish ancestry and intersectional feminist approaches.

He approached photography as a self-taught artist after earning a diploma in Graphic Design and Art Direction from NABA Milan in 2014. In 2015, after spending one year in Tbilisi (Georgia) working on a documentary about Abkhazian refugees, he returned to Italy and joined the photography collective CESURA, where he remained for two years. During this time, he worked as an assistant to photographer Gabriele Micalizzi and collaborated with Alex Majoli (MAGNUM) on the production of several major exhibitions. While at CESURA, he shifted away from a photojournalistic approach, developing a long-term, research-driven photographic practice with a strong focus on photobooks. After leaving the collective in 2017, he began working as a freelance photographer. His journey took him first to Siberia, where he worked on the project I Don’t Try to Feel Awake Anymore. In 2019, in Oklahoma, where a chance encounter with Kristal and her son Skyler led to Love Mom, an ongoing project that explores the sometimes toxic relationship between a mother and her son while also reflecting on emptiness and the profound solitude embedded in the vastness of the American suburbs. In 2020, driven by the need to find a place to call home, he moved from Milan to a small village of 50 inhabitants in the Val di Noto. There, he began working on All These Goodbyes, a body of work that serves as both self-reflection and the story of an escape. In the spring of 2021, he spent three months in Denmark collaborating with photographer Jacob Aue Sobol (MAGNUM) on the production of his book James House (2022). In 2022, he was selected as one of the 25 winners of Italian Panorama, an open call organized by Vogue Italia and PhotoVogue. In January 2023, the Penumbra Foundation (New York, USA) awarded him a full scholarship for its Long-Term Photobook Program.

Independent Ukrainian documentary photographer currently residing and working in Kyiv, Ukraine. Master degree in International Economics of the Institute of International Relations of Kyiv National University. He has pursued photography since 2008. Since 2012 member of the Ukrainian Photographic Alternative (UPHA) and since 2014 of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPF). In 2014 - 2019, he was the official photographer of the President of Ukraine. Founder of “Untitled” online magazine and co-founder of Ukrainian Street Photography group. Member of PEN Ukraine since 2022. Author of the photo book “Anamnesis” (2020) and art-book “Maidan Faces” (2020). Since the beginning of full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine concentrated mostly on documenting war crimes and impact of war on civilians.‍

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.

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.