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The artists nominated by
Thana Faroq’s most recent work How Shall We Greet The Sun comprises a series of portraits and writing that reflects on the photograph’s ambiguity, power, and inabilities, offering viewers an unprecedented insight into the inner lives of women in exile. Faroq is also nominated by FOTODOK.
Gita Cooper-van Ingen’s work is informed by (female) subjective perspectives and how they relate to larger cultural, and aesthetic discourses. Her Models of Being an Accessory project traces patterns in the visual representation of women posing with iconic handbags.
Tina Faritfeh’s research engages with stories of migration, empathy, borders and bodies. In The Flood, a 4-channel video installation, Faritfeh questions how metaphors
linked to water have been used to dehumanise migrants and refugees.
Mafalda Rakoš’ Stop and Go project looks into Europe and its future through the highway system. Her practice spans film, still photography and text - but is also marked by performative and anthropological methodologies.
Finally, Cooking Potato Stories by Ana Nuñez Rodriguez asks: What can a potato tell us about ourselves? Through a mixture of delicately layered photography and archival media, Nuñez Rodriguez invites her viewers into the rich and entangled history of the potato plant.
Thana Faroq’s most recent work How Shall We Greet The Sun comprises a series of portraits and writing that reflects on the photograph’s ambiguity, power, and inabilities, offering viewers an unprecedented insight into the inner lives of women in exile. Faroq is also nominated by FOTODOK.
Gita Cooper-van Ingen’s work is informed by (female) subjective perspectives and how they relate to larger cultural, and aesthetic discourses. Her Models of Being an Accessory project traces patterns in the visual representation of women posing with iconic handbags.
Tina Faritfeh’s research engages with stories of migration, empathy, borders and bodies. In The Flood, a 4-channel video installation, Faritfeh questions how metaphors
linked to water have been used to dehumanise migrants and refugees.
Mafalda Rakoš’ Stop and Go project looks into Europe and its future through the highway system. Her practice spans film, still photography and text - but is also marked by performative and anthropological methodologies.
Finally, Cooking Potato Stories by Ana Nuñez Rodriguez asks: What can a potato tell us about ourselves? Through a mixture of delicately layered photography and archival media, Nuñez Rodriguez invites her viewers into the rich and entangled history of the potato plant.
Ana Núñez Rodríguez studied Documentary Photography and Contemporary Creation at IDEP Barcelona, holds a postgraduate degree in Photography from the National University of Colombia and holds a Master degree in Photography and Society from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KABK) in The Hague. She was part of Lighthouse 2020-21, a program for upcoming talents at Fotodok, Utrecht.
Mafalda Rakoš was born in Vienna in 1994. In addition to her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, she earned a degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She then moved to the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she taught for a couple of years. Her work has been nominated and honored several times at international awards, exhibited in museums such as the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, Benaki Museum, Athens and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, as well as shown outside an art context at conferences on eating disorders or at the General Hospital in Vienna. Publications such as Die Zeit, Volkskrant Magazin or Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and organizations such as The Wellcome Collection have published her images. Mafalda Rakoš lives and works between Vienna and Amsterdam, her third photo book A Story to Tell was published in 2020 by Fotohof.
Thana Faroq is a Yemeni photographer and educator based in the Netherlands. She works with photography, texts, sound, and the physicality of the image itself, as a way to respond to the changes that have been shaping and defining her life, and sense of belonging both in Yemen and the Netherlands. Thana's positioning as a photographer is informed by her reflections on her subject matter, tuning in to other people’s lived experiences with which she continually grows familiar. She also increasingly seeks her own story in the frame. Thana was a recipient of the 2018 inaugural Open Society Foundation Fellowship Grant and Exhibition and the 2019 Arab Documentary Fund supported by the Prince Claus Fund and Magnum Foundation and Zenith magazine reporting grant. In 2020, she published her first book, I don't Recognize Me in the Shadows The book was shortlisted for the Lucie Photobook Prize 2021, and it has also been listed as one of the Interesting Artist & Photographic Books for 2021 by the PhotoBook Journal. Thana received her BA in Government and International Relations from Clark University, and an MA in Photography and Society at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.
Tina Farifteh is a Dutch-Iranian artist based in The Netherlands. She obtained master’s degrees in Economics and a bachelor’s degree in Arts. Thanks to this academic and cultural background, she is used to seeing the world from different angles.
She is a visual researcher whose work lies at the intersection between arts, politics and philosophy. Her interest lies in human nature and the politicization of ‘life’ – particularly, the administration and control of life. She is inspired by the work of philosophers Agamben, Foucault and Arendt. Specifically their concepts of ‘bare life’ and ‘biopolitics’.
In her work, she reflects on the impact of man-made power structures such as nation states and corporations on the lives of ordinary people. Often focusing on people stuck between the ‘natural’ life and the ‘conventional’ life. People not only excluded from the privileges granted by the ruling political and economic systems, but often damaged by these to make the system ‘work’. Her photographic approach is research-based and conceptual. Often combining images, text and data. The goal is to seduce us to look at topics that we prefer to look away from because of their complexity or discomfort.
In her earlier project Killer Skies (2018), she explored the impact of the ‘dronisation’ of armies. Currently she is researching and reflecting on the situation of refugees on the move or stuck at European borders. This work focuses on borders, bodies, and the political language used to normalize the absurdity of how we are currently dealing with these topics.
