Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren

Artist duo Bela:Hagren has extensively explored traditional photography in its multi-layered past, from the technologization of the medium for the sake of science to its more creative uses. Bela:Hagren often address the complexity of storytelling of photographic history, which can’t be reduced only to images, because it is embedded in the cultural context, circulation, and economic infrastructure of the given time. More recently, they have been working on a project about the monopoly of manufacturing paper in the Eastern bloc and the toxic residue left behind by photographic production.

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Joel Karppanen is a self-taught artist working with experimental photography to address class and labor issues and explore the deviousness of a hierarchical economy with issues of privilege, provenance, and access. In his most known work, Beyond Pitkäsilta (Metropolis) (2021–2023), he has worked with “donating” time, which is about putting himself to service or replace someone and giving them time so that they could have the same access or opportunities as himself for a limited period. In that specific work, he addresses how art is still for the few.

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Nayara Leite is an artist and an advocator for the LBGTQI+ community across both Norway and Brazil. In her project In Search of Rainbows (2022) Leite explores the different flags displayed in the north of Brazil. While a growing number of Brazilian flags favored under the then-president Jair Messias Bolsonaro led to notions of nationalism, persecution, and homophobia, the number of pride flags on display had almost vanished, symbolizing growing discrimination for non-normalized individuals.

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Sheung Yiu is a visual artist and a researcher focusing on how image sensitivity is increasing the complexity of algorithms but also bringing back old tropes of eugenics and phrenology, reactivating traumas of a colonial past based on provenance of geographies, genders, and other made-up exclusionary politics. (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How To Read a Face (2023 - ongoing), is one such work where Yiu plays with these AI machines and their “learnings” to visualize their discriminative and presumptive politics.

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Yujie Zhou is an artist who works with expanded photography, publishing, textiles, and performativity to contest censorship. They have worked on legibility and illegibility as forms of protest through language. Panoptic Segmentation (2021-ongoing) parallels the 18th-century disciplinary system, the panopticon, invented to make bodies more docile in prison surveillance system, and a similar system adopted in computation to break down objects into stratified readable components.