Sebastian Vaida

Zoé Aubry (1993) develops a practice of critical, feminist, and experimental visual research through photography, within installations that unfold in space. Her work aims to reveal the mechanisms of visibility, and invisibility of dominant media narratives, notably through the use of poor images, inverting the logics of the attention economy. Holder of a Bachelor’s degree in Photography from ECAL - École cantonale d’art de Lausanne and a Master’s degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices from HEAD - Haute école d’art et de design de Genève, her book #Ingrid (2022), co-published by RVBBOOKS and Gato Negro Ediciones, was shortlisted for the Autor Book Award at the Rencontres d’Arles and won the Most Beautiful Swiss Books award. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions, including « The Lure of the Image » at Fotomuseum Winterthur, «LES RESISTANTES» in Paris, « Concerned » at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, at the Musée des beaux-arts du Locle or in Arles, and several festivals including Athens Photo Festival, Biennale de l’image tangible Paris, Guernsey Photography Festival or Les Rencontres de la Photographie de Marrakech. She was the laureate of the Photographic Survey of the City of Geneva in 2021, and of the Swiss Federal Design Awards in 2018. Converging or in parallel, she fights within collective and associative projects and co-founds several initiatives where cultural work and political commitment meet to militate both towards utopias and direct field perspectives.

Tony Dočekal (1992, Amsterdam) is a photographer and visual artist whose work focuses on identity, belonging, and the shared human condition. Her practice is shaped by encounters with individuals and communities on the road, with a particular interest in the resilience and adaptability of people living on society’s margins. Her first monograph, The Color of Money and Trees, explores the tension between material success and deeper fulfillment, asking if true prosperity lies in community and self-awareness rather than wealth and possessions. The series includes Chad on Skid Row, which won the Zilveren Camera Portrait Award in 2021, and Lyric at El Pais, a portrait of a young girl living off the grid in Arizona. The work navigates the balance between societal expectations and individual freedom. Tony’s debut short film, Pearls on Credit, reflects on how personal identity is shaped by broader economic systems and societal expectations. Shown alongside an installation of The Color of Money and Trees at Biennale Images Vevey, it deepens Tony’s exploration of the pressures individuals face in navigating these structures. Tony holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from ArtEZ University of the Arts and has received recognition, including the Olympus Young Talent Award and De Burgemeester de Bruinprijs.

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.

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.‍

Anton Shebetko (he/him) is a Ukrainian artist, photographer, curator, and writer from Kyiv, currently based in Amsterdam. His practice focuses on LGBTQIA+ experiences in Ukraine, themes of memory, loss of identity, multiplicity of history, and the role that photography and archival materials can play in revealing these stories. Much of his research is dedicated to forgotten and unrecorded queer histories of Ukraine, parts of which were published in his book 'A Very Brief and Subjective Queer History of Ukraine'.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at FOAM Museum (Amsterdam), Schwules Museum and nGbK am Alex (Berlin), Q21 (Vienna), Photo Elysée (Lausanne), CENTQUATRE-PARIS, BWA Studio (Wroclaw), Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart), and PinchukArtCentre and Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv). He participated in the Kyiv Biennial (2023) and was a nominee for the PinchukArtPrize (2025). Shebetko has curated exhibitions and film programs for Schwules Museum, Melkweg Expo, and WORM Rotterdam, and has lectured at Maastricht University, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Between Bridges Gallery. He holds a BA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

Portrait of Anton Shebetko by James Barnett

Máté Bartha (1987) is a Budapest-based visual artist working in the intersection of photography and theory-fiction. His practice is driven by a mission to reenchant the world through world-building, impersonation and constructing personal and collective mythologies. His work proposes new narratives by blending symbolic and subjective interpretations of his usual field of observation, the metropolis, treating urban spaces as arenas for imaginative transformation. Bartha’s works often combine staged and documentary imagery, archival material, and speculative narrative forms, and have been published and exhibited widely. Bartha holds Master’s degrees in Photography (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, 2011) and Documentary Filmmaking (University of Theatre and Film Arts, 2016), and is currently a doctoral student at MOME. His first photobook, Common Nature (2014), explored the ambivalence of urban space as a mirror of the unconscious. Kontakt (2018), a coming-of-age portrait of Hungarian military youth camps, was awarded the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles (2019). His recent project Anima Mundi, a fictional urban encyclopedia of cosmic order, received the Main Jury Prize at Les Boutographies, Montpellier (2024). His ongoing work, The Dice Man, is a chance-based photographic pilgrimage through grief, memory, and city space.

Paweł Starzec (Ph. D) is a documentalist, photographer, sociologist, academic teacher. Mainly interested in long-term projects focusing on envisioning broader processes through their aftermath and consequences. Recipient of the Young Poland 2024 Ministry of Culture scholarship, PixHouse Talent of the Year Scholar award, Artistic Scholarship of the Mayor of Wrocław 2024, winner of Urbanautica Institute Award, Enconctros da Imagem Discovery Award and Spojrzenia Award, received honorable mentions in Allegro Prize, Lodz Fotofestival Grand Prix, and CDS Documentary Essay Prize, finalist of the Polityka Passports Award and Grand Press Photo. His works are in collections of Encontros Da Imagem (PT) and National Institute of Architecture and Urbanism (PL). As a sociologist, he researches modern iconographies and visual narratives. Vice- Dean of the Faculty of Design at SWPS University and Head of Communication Design speciality at the School of Form USWPS. Creator of workshop programs, co-founder of Azimuth Press art/ education collective. Member of APP platform. Graduate of Applied Sociology Department of University of Warsaw, and of Institute of Creative Photography of Silesian University in Opava (MA). Part time musician and sound artist under various monikers. DIY / zine culture enthusiast.

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.

Katarina Radović was born in Belgrade, Serbia. She studied History of Art at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK in the 1990’s and later acquired the BA Degree in Photography from the Academy of Arts ‘BK’ in Belgrade in 2006. As a free-lance artist, she has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions and festivals in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Malta, Egypt, Japan, Senegal, USA, Israel, etc. She received the Kultur Kontakt artist-in-residence grant in Vienna, Austria, in 2007; the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) grant for the project Until Death Do Us Part in 2009; and the artist-in-residence grant from the Fondazzjoni Kreattività in Malta in 2019. She also received a grant for attending a specialised course in photography at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria, in 2020.

Davide Degano is a visual artist whose practice explores how images shape memory, identity, and collective imagination. Rejecting photography as neutral documentation, he approaches it as a site of tension between reality and fiction, visibility and erasure, questioning what is remembered and what is silenced. His work challenges conventional documentary practice through a multidisciplinary approach that combines classical image-making with experimental strategies, opening space for counter-narratives. He holds a BA in Visual Arts from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague, where he received an honourable mention for the Paul Schuitema Award, and an MA in Photography from KASK – Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent, where his graduation project was awarded the Fonds Roger De Conynck Prize.