The artists nominated by

With a background in engineering David Denil’s photographical interest started in 2014 by seeing Jacob Riis’s ‘How the Other Half Lives’. Fascinated by the excessive presence of light, the striking compositions and shadows encapsulating daily life in combination with the strategically use of the medium challenged David to explore contemporary subject matter. Within his first project Let Us Not Fall Asleep While Walking, David Denil started to translate the psychological dimensions of Ukraine as a collision between past, present and future.

Mentored by the Magnum photographer Carl De Keyzer, he chose not to show the war in the east, but to focus on the aspects of life presented to him in the capital Kiev. By his active presence his work functions as an extension on the early 20th century documentary approach and tends to reveal universal questions rather then to depict actual proof of fact.

While working on two new projects, David is finishing the dummy book of Let Us Not Fall Asleep with the input of British Ukrainian researcher and cultural manager Myroslava Hartmond. Within the book the images will be interconnected with referential sources, testimonies and reflections on the impact that both media and politics have on the hybrid war that is putting strains on the Ukrainian dream and experience of freedom. This book will be published at the end of 2018, exactly 5 years after the start of the hybrid war.

Nominated for Futures by FOMU, Etienne Courtois lives and works in Brussels. His work has been exhibited in countries like Belgium, France and the United Kingdom.

"Porosity is probably the concept that best characterises Etienne Courtois’s approach to his photographic work. One of the threads in his creative process is his distinctly plastic treatment of the medium through integrated and often barely noticeable interventions that are both sculptural and pictorial by nature. These interventions are evident in how he prepares his support as well as in the compositions themselves.

The interventions often originate from the confrontation between various random objects gathered by Courtois during his walks and rambles through the city or in nature, leading to surprising encounters that have a contemporary surrealistic quality, which is further accentuated by the treatment or plastic and pictorial transformations he applies. Courtois adds a subsequent layer of ambiguity to the reading of this process by creating sculptural forms - often in plaster, but also in wood -  that are integrated into the images or applied in relief on the prints.

Occasionally, the ambivalence of the treatment is emphasised by multiple exposure of the same photographic negative, which modifies the chromatic values as well as the shapes in the initial image, creating the effect of a shift or spectral motion.

The work of Etienne Courtois clearly surpasses the dichotomy between figurative and representational art. The ambiguity in interpreting and understanding these interventions leads to completely new and surprising formal encounters between everyday objects in a whimsical, alienating atmosphere. Courtois’s work is marked by a distinctly free, singular and often witty approach that evokes the pictorial work of Walter Swennen or the sculptures of Koenraad Dedobbeleer."

Text by Emmanuel Lambion

Florine Thiebaud (b. 1992, France) is a photographer based in Brussels, Belgium.

She has been working around the subject of exile in Greece since 2016. Travelling there regularly, she became close to different people waiting for their papers on the islands, they spent time together, stayed in touch and met on different occasions over the years.

In her projects, she wants to express the interruption of time they experience, exploring the stagnation and repetition, and how it builds up tension in the body and mind.

Recognizing the complexity of this subject, she is questioning the waiting. This in-between moment, on the edge, that mind and body can’t accept.

Katherine Longly graduated in photography, communications and anthropology.

Her personal work is often photographic, but this is not an exclusive relationship. On the basis of her projects, there is very often a question: How do the campers manage the nearness with their peers (Hidden Living)? Why do some Chinese prefer to live in a false Parisian avenue rather than in a traditional hutong (Abroad is too far)? What is the counterpart that urges a person to gulp down mass amounts of food enough to hurt their body (Rotten Potato)? Where is our relationship with food and our body rooted (To tell my real intentions, I want to eat only haze like a hermit)? Behind these questions lies a desire to understand a social phenomenon. And humor is not excluded.

She also pays very special attention to actively involve people she works with in the construction of the projects.

Her work has been awarded with various prizes, publications and exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. She also took part in artistic residencies (China, France, Japan).

Laure Cottin Stefanelli is a french visual artist and a filmmaker. Through her films, photographs and installations, she pursues a research around stories focused on characters inhabited by paradoxical tensions – life, death and erotic impulses – those resulting from the separation between mind and body.

Her work had been exhibited and screened at venues including États Généraux du Film Documentaire (Lussas, FR); KANAL – Centre Pompidou (Brussels, BE); Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (BR);  Kasseler Dok Festival (Kassel, DE); Moscow Biennal (RU); Art Brussels (BE); FIDMarseille (FR) among others. Her first medium-length film 'No blood in my body' received the short film prize at Écrans Documentaires d’Arceuil (FR). Laure Cottin Stefanelli studied literature and cinema at the University of Paris III and graduated in Photo-Video from École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris.

"A strange pleasure emanates from Laure Cottin Stefanelli’s images, a pleasure that stems from the interruption of systems, the suspension of discipline. The characters she portrays often engage in the strictures of self-imposed rigour – marriage, high-level sports, addiction, erotic role play – and her camera emboldens them in their carefully planned choreographies. Not that these choreographies become, as a result, deconstructed or “unmasked”; rather she balances the individuals between desire and ritualised gesture, arresting them in seemingly affective fulfilment. Cottin Stefanelli leaves unsaid what lies outside the frame, where conventions and rules govern the protagonists’ behaviours (...). What remains in the frame, cropped out of context, ends up looking solitary, but also confident – one dares say beautiful. (...)" Antony Hudek on Centauresse

www.laurecottinstefanelli.com

Pierre Vanneste is a photo reporter and director based in Brussels, specialising in long-term projects. He studied photography at INRACI (Brussels) and joins the Hans Lucas studio at the end of 2017. He questions the relationships that man maintains with his environment as well as the social issues resulting from it.

His work has been published in media such as Médiapart, Libération, Courrier international (web), Equal-Times or Alter Echo. In 2018, he is co-directing "Bargny, ici commence l'émergence", a transmedia documentary (photos and videos) on a Senegalese fishing commune, located 30km from Dakar, which is facing an industrial transformation of its territory as well as the consequences of climate change. His project "Dremmwel" is, to date, the most ambitious and most accomplished, it will be released at the end of 2020 in the form of a book and an exhibition connected by augmented video content. In 2019, he was awarded the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation Photography Grant, to support his new project in progress.

“ [These images] (…) have lots of black in them. We understand black as the abscence of light: it denotes an unfathomable emptiness, something ‘missing’ (black nothingness). However, in photography, this blackening is precisely the consequence of a (too) large amount of light, of (too) much presence. (...) The abdundance of light that is required to turn the negative into a positive image. The black in the photograpic positive is created in the darkroom, where the light of the enlarger exposes the light sensitive paper to the barrage of light. This ‘blackening’ is so crucial in the photograpic process, that the German photographer Raoul Hausmann preferred to talk about melangography instead of photography. Photography then no longer means writing with light, but becomes the art of darkening.” - Steven Humblet on Noctuary

Renée Lorie lives and works in Brussel. She graduated in art history, filmstudies and photography.

Renée captures the light, she show her experience of the world around her. It’s a world full of contrasts. Her images show disharmony, memories in nowadays. Vulnerability, white against deep black backgrounds, day and night, emptiness and fullness. Coolness and heat, burning ice. The present and the absent. She’s looking for attachment, but displacement too. Themes are the mystery, the uncanny, abjection and the enigmatic. Creaking discomfort in down, a sensory touch in a flat image. She shows a glimpse, an error, disturbance, the lyrical. She’s showing distance, yet close framing. She uses the dark room, groping for light. Light traversing trees and water, that lives on the tide during spring tide. Everything is strange, yet daily and known. Trees, water, horse and dew, rustle, a man in a suit, sand mountains and a statue. She’s look around, capturing an image and imagining immediately another image, a walking écriture automatique, a photo novel, a same story. She likes to see the past in the present.

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Wiktoria Synak (b. 1994, Gdynia, Poland) studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, ESADMM in Marseille and ArBA-EsA in Brussels. She is currently based in Brussels, Belgium.

It’s been seven years since I left Poland, my native country. The departure created the need to question my homeland. It swings constantly back in my mind and in my works. What I try to understand is why Poland resonates in me. Why do I constantly look for it abroad whereas all I wanted was to escape from it? Finally, how can I free myself from it? Answers never come; only more questions appear. Somewhere between past and present stories, speculations; an opportunity for me to wander through different identities.

My practice mixes photography, physical presence, text, installation and sound. Our My work in progress, Dom* [EN house, home], lies between performance and theatre play, not suiting plainly to either of them. It engages two performers and me, a setting that is being constructed during the show and numerous stories that come along with it. What I explore is the visual mean in which a story, a memory, or an image is transmitted throughout a performative act.

* Dom is written by Wiktoria Synak, directed by Wiktoria Synak and Erwan Augoyard and performed by Wiktoria Synak, Anouk Boyer-Mazal and Olga Wyszkowska.

I'm Sebastian Steveniers, 37-year-old Belgian documentary photographer, who works for the Belgian newspaper De Standaard as a photojournalist, making portraits and stories on a daily base. I also work on different long-term documentary projects.

I started off with photography on a late age, because I have a history of pro-basketball player. I decided to go back and study after I quit basketball. After a stop at RITS Drama school in Brussels I started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent where I got my bachelor in Photography.

I have an undeniable curiosity and hunger for both small and large, well-known and less well-known stories. I use my camera as a key to enter a world or to make any contact. It gives me a fly on the wall feeling, with which I can experience a tranche de vie for a while. I always try to approach my subject as objectively as possible and let my eye do the work.

Photography helps me to understand certain facets of life in a better way.

I've always been attracted to uncommon subjects and stories, which aren't mainstream and easy to approach.

Sebastian Koudijzer (b. 1993) studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. Growing up as a child of different races – and surrounded by a large extended family on his Javanese side –  he is interested in how identities are created. Using various techniques, he creates intimate stories that address themes of family, faith, identity, and their representations. Collaboration plays an important role in his projects; Koudijzer likes to give those he photographs space for their own voice. His work is an attempt to bring disappearing traditions, values and spirituality back into his own reality, with the camera becoming an exploratory tool.