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The artists nominated by
Ann Vincent was born in Ostend, Belgium, in 1994. She is based in Ghent.
“Can a cardboard disc be mistaken for the moon? Could a streak of paint be perceived as a beam of light?” In her series Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent experiments, fails, plays around and messes with our perception of reality. We are confronted with familiar scenes that we often fail to notice: a puddle of water, a sunbeam on the pavement… In Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent sets out to recreate these fleeting moments in her studio and capture them in photographs. The appearance of a rock in the sand is replicated using industrial chemical components. Each image is painstakingly produced, the result of a tireless pursuit of the right materials, lighting conditions and framing. The process is chaotic but the final image seemingly perfect. Bringing the work to the exhibition space, Vincent continues her game: she cleverly places the photographs in unexpected corners, behind a staircase or floating in front of a window. The photographs become sculptural and encourage the viewer to move around and discover what lies beyond the image.
Ann Vincent plays a trick on us, and in doing so, touches upon one of photography’s most fundamental properties: its disturbing relationship with reality. This body of work is an illusion, disclosing its poetic magic only to the attentive viewer.
Bertrand Cavalier (b.1989, France) is an artist living and working in Brussels, Belgium. His work investigates how political upheaval becomes visible in the urban landscape and how this affects the lives of the people who live in it.
Cavalier has had exhibitions at the FOMU in Antwerp, BredaPhoto and La Jeune Création among others. His work was selected for Plat(t)form 2019 by the Museum of Photography in Winterthur and awarded with the Cosmos Pdf Award 2018 at Les Rencontres d’Arles. More recently, Bertrand Cavalier was the recipient of the Sébastien Van Der Straten Grant for his ongoing project The Grid System.
In 2020, his series Concrete Doesn’t Burn will be published with Fw:Books.
Elena Aya Bundurakis is a Greek-Japanese photographer born in Crete island. She uses her camera as a tactile device, rather than a technological tool. Her current work also focuses on sensations and not necessarily stories. For example, she is interested in questions like: How does it feel to give birth to an egg? Is being alive a collective experience?
Bundurakis’ work focuses on how it feels to be a living organism in this era that lies between the primal, the modern & the post natural-world. Images collide and divide according to the situation. Drawings, video and haikus are incorporated. Extracting fragments of the bodies that surround her and her own, she layers the pure with the artificial and the thirst for something truly crisp with loss and boredom, aiming to create cosmic and organic sensations.
In her project Eating Magma, Elena focuses on 4 ‘F’s: her Flesh, her Food, Fauna, and Flora. Creating an interconnecting universe, by combining these 4 ‘F’s, whose roles and existence, constantly shift and mutate into each other, she attempts to find an emotional and ethical position within a society ruled by control systems.
Jeroen De Wandel (b. 1980) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. He studied photography at Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent. Jeroen De Wandel uses material from his personal archive to generate new images. He combines, recomposes, cuts, tears and pastes both analogue and digital pictures in his search for the unexpected.
De Wandel’s work becomes more and more a mix of photography, collage and other types of visual/installation art. It’s no longer pure photography. He still starts out from his archive of (autobiographical) pictures, interests and experiences. Main themes are time, memories and the working of the brain, relationship of photography with paintings and re-use/recycling.
Every work stands on its own - it’s no longer a series, it’s more an ongoing creation of his own visual world.
Amygdala, his most recent project of which you can see some pictures here, refers to the place in the brains where emotional memories are created, stored and processed. Some memories are very strong anchored in our brains, other memories get coloured or change during the passing of time. De Wandel tries, by using a collage of (digital/analogue) layers of archive pictures (own and found footage), to express the multiple layers of these memories. Fragments from the past loose their context in the present and their attachment to reality gradually fades away.
Léonard Pongo started as a documentary photographer who gradually evolved to include snapshot, diary and abstraction into his approach. Pongo's use of the photographic medium covers Art, Documentary, Photojournalism and assignments work. His long-term project “The Uncanny”, shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo has earned him several international awards and world-wide recognition.
Pongo’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the USA and published in WSJ, The Guardian UK, The Washington Post, National Geographic and several other international publications. He was chosen as one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016 and recipient of the Getty Grant in 2018. His work is also part of institutional and private collections. Pongo was a member of Noor agency from 2017 until 2019.
He is based between Brussels and Kinshasa and shares his photographic career between his long term projects in Congo DR, teaching and assignment work.
Born in Belgium in 1989, Lionel Jusseret is a documentary photographer. After finishing his studies at INSAS in 2012, a Belgian film school, he photographed children with autism in the French association J'interviendrais. In the search for unpredictable images, Jusseret works in the intimacy of his subject. The approach is anthropological. After seven years of immersion, he finished his first series Kinderszenen.
Lionel Jusseret lives and works in Brussels.
Maroussia Prignot (BE, 1981) and Valerio Alvarez (BE, 1976) have been doing a collective photographic work since 2015. Their collaboration began on the issue of migration, and more specifically the way in which migrants are received within the Belgian state. Considering that any image is a construction, and not a faithful reproduction of the "reality", their approach is integrative, setting up workshops, joint creation actions, trying to collaborate with those who make their photographs.
The photographers focused on one reception centre, creating links and generating encounters by refusing to submit the refugees to further interrogation or to create stereotypical images of misery. The result of these relationships - nurtured over time - is a series of portraits.
This first project - Here, Waiting - is divided into three photographic forms. Firstly, reportage, showing the physical spaces and the realities of the reception centre. Secondly, portrait workshops were organised with the aid of a studio that was assembled during each visit. The subjects were encouraged to manipulate, colour, distort and obscure the printed images. Finally, self-portraits were taken by the children using photocopy machines – the primary bureaucratic tool of their detention.
The photographs are situated within this relationship: there is neither a sovereign author nor centre of action but instead pictures of varying intensity that allow for multiple impressions and interpretations.
Titus Simoens (b. 1985) is a photographer based in Ghent, Belgium. In 2015, Titus Simoens made his first book Blue, See - Mount Song - Los Domadores, published by Hannibal. From 2016 to 2018, he followed a master’s program at KASK School of Arts in Ghent, where he made three consecutive publications on encounters, “Tu me dis”, published by APE (2016), “For Brigitte”, published by APE (2017) and “11:00 am”, published by APE (2018). With his book “For Brigitte” he was shortlisted for the Author Book Award in Les Rencontres d’Arles 2018, nominated for the best Photography Book at PHotoESPANA 2018 and for the Kassel Photobook Award 2018.
As a visual artist I work with photography, text and video. With my work I investigate the relationship between myself and my subject. "The encounter" is a central concept here. In practice I combine a documentary approach with a search for my position as a storyteller. It focuses on a few questions: What is the real topic? Where is the thin line between finding and creating stories? Which (un) conscious strategies do I use as a maker in producing a story?
Currently Simoens is working on a project with his father and painter Richard Simoens.
Ulla Deventer, born 1984 in Germany, holds a Master of Fine Arts and is an international working artist and research candidate at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten Antwerp.
Since 2019, she became part of TIME-LABS: Cuba Photography Missions, a research project in Havana, Cuba, supported by VLIR-UOS Belgium and in collaboration with European and Cuban photographers and the Instituto Superior de Arte Havana.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been supported by several scholarships and awards. It has been selected for the “Ones to Watch” by the BJP, as well as for the .tiff talents by the Fotomuseum Antwerp. She studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
In her works, Deventer questions the interdependencies of women on social norms. She explores the female body, ideas of beauty, taboos, and sexuality. Recently, she has been involved in international research on sex work, based in Brussels, Athens, Paris and Accra.
Throughout my practical and theoretical based art, I work across mediums, with a focus on photography. I explore forms of the female body, ideas of beauty, desires, taboos and sexuality. Subsequently, I analyze the interdependencies of women on social norms. I am interested in how society shapes norms that influence the representation and perception of women and how the female body can be used as a tool of power.
Sex workers are sensitive observers of our society, especially about what we do not dare to see. Thus, I consider this work a reflection on society as a whole. Sex is at first place about pleasure, desire and lust, addiction and ecstasy. At the same time, it is about power, about hierarchies, about interrelationships of men and women. It appears that the female body becomes a political weapon. How we live and talk about sex says much about our taboos and fantasies and finally how society is created by a world that exists by judging the unknown instead of listening to each other.
I am grateful for every single conversation and the time I could spend with the women who became part of this work. I cannot express in words how much they taught me about life, about our society and finally about myself.
I did not believe how much we have in common. I found my soulmates in these women who are not only crucial for the existence of this body of work, but close friends that I don ‘t want to miss anymore.
With this work I share some personal insights that truly are my own observations and therefor fully subjective on this topic. It is a collection of images and notes from women I admire and who I met in Brussels, Athens, Paris and Accra.
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