Toma Hurduc

Catherine Lemblé is a Belgian photographer based in Brussels. She received her MA in photography from Luca School of Arts Brussels. Her work has been exhibited at FOMU (Antwerp), De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), Contretype (Brussels), Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi) and Helsinki Photo Festival, amongst others. She was selected for .tiff (FOMU, Antwerp) and FUTURES (European Photography Platform) in 2024. Her photographs have been featured in publications such as Stern, De Standaard, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Quarterly. She self-published her first book, Cabin Fever, in 2019. Her ana­log pictures examine the ever-chang­ing rela­tion­ship between man and the natural world. She is currently working on her second photo book, Only Barely Still. The project challenges conventional ideas about the Arctic and highlights the underrepresented presence of women in Svalbard. It explores the relationship between women, nature, and the role language plays in shaping our perception of our environment.

Born in Taranto (Itay) in 1994 and his approach to photography came unexpectedly in 2016 with the discovery of some disused cameras belonging to his father. This prompted him the following year to deepen his knowledge by beginning a three-year degree program in Photography and Visual Arts at IED (Istituto Europeo di Design) Rome, graduating with honors in 2019. In 2023 he completed his studies by earning a master's degree at lSIA (Istituti Superiori per le Industrie Artistiche) in Urbino in Photography for publishing and cultural heritage. His work has solo shows in Fondazione Sandretto Re Rabaudengo | Guarene and in KINEMAX (2024); and it has been published in several magazines such as Phroom mag, Photocaptionist, Conceptual Project, Life Framer, Ombra Magazine,Yogurt Magazine, C41 Mag, Urbanautica, Perimetro, Il Fotografo, GUP... also finding space within various group and solo exhibitions in Italy but also all over the world between Thailand, Canada, England and Germany. In 2020 he published "Abisso," his first photobook with DITO Publishing.

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.

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.

Claude Bühler is a swiss artist, who works mainly with photography and sound. Her work examines notions of collectivity and intimacy by creating soft spaces and provoking performative moments, that allow small acts of liberation.

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.

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.

Andrea Camiolo (Leonforte, 1998) is an Italian photographer and editor, currently a PhD candidate in "Science for Artistic Production and Heritage" at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania. In 2022 he was selected as one of the finalists of Paris Photo Carte Blanche, won the Comisso Prize and the Best Portfolio Prize at the Ragusa Foto Festival.
 In 2023 he was selected as one of the finalists for the Luigi Ghirri Prize/Young Italian Photography #10, he was a finalist for the Terna Prize and lastly one of the winners of the ‘Italy is a Desire’ call for new works promoted by Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea (DGCC) of the Ministry of Culture. 
Andrea has exhibited his projects in several group exhibitions at various institutions, including: MUFOCO Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea; Palazzo Binelli, Carrara; Casa Testori, Milan; MIA Photo Fair, Milan; Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia; CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Turin; Palazzo Cosentini, Ragusa; Photo Open Up, Padua; Palazzo Giacomelli, Treviso; Verzasca Foto Festival. His works have been acquired in the collection of MUFOCO - Museo Fotografia Contemporanea in Cinisello Balsamo and in private collections. He is co-founder of DORSOPRESS, a small independent publishing house focused in contemporary photography.

Constantin Schlachter’s research takes place through an exploration of interior and exterior landscapes. Nature, the invisible and matter are dominant entities in his work. His experimental approach to the techniques he employs aims to put a less anthropocentric world into perspective, and to re-enchant nature. This mysterious entity that takes hold of each viewer in its own way, because it’s eloquent for everyone, but never entirely translatable. Through different media linked to photography, he questions matter and its synesthetic power. By inverting the scales, colours and textures of the elements presented, he induces a confusion of senses in the viewer, revealing deeper ones. His images invite us to let go, to enter a contemplative state in which we can project our emotions. His cosmic and telluric images, in which matter plays a predominant role, merge the microcosm and the macrocosm. In the course of his work, the artist increasingly seeks to erase his own presence to highlight that of his subject. Constantin Schlachter was born in Altkirch in 1992 and graduated from Les Gobelins in 2014. He lives and works in Paris.

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.