The artists nominated by
The 10th edition of .tiff reflects a diversity of voices, positions, and subject matter. It is a passionate group of artists and photographers, who each try to give personal answers to today’s questions. Gülsah Ayla Bayrak and Rami Hara take their personal histories of migration and stereotypes as a starting point to explore identification, mythification, and the idea of belonging. Lived experience also guides the work of Seppe Van Craywinkel and his celebration of freedom, friendship, and spontaneity. Where Arian Christiaens explores her family’s archive, searching for her own position as photographer, daughter, mother, lover, and woman, Lars Duchateau invites viewers to link possible narratives with cryptic large format photographs, each one inspired by newspaper articles.
Elsewhere, Barbara Debeuckelaere treads a thin line between fiction and reality, delving into the Romanian fanbase of the American television series Dallas; Ligia Poplawska considers emotions, solastalgia, and climate anxiety in a changing world; and Alice Pallot shines her light on the Lommel Sahara in Belgium, rendering it alien without any post-production.
These artists work across a variety of media, encompassing books, video and installations. Their stories are as diverse as their approach: documentary, analytical, poetic, conceptual, humorous, intimate and most of all fresh and thought-provoking.
Over the years, .tiff has succeeded in building a Belgian photography community that allows for an exchange of ideas and insights between artists, curators, critics, and researchers. The current selection shows that this community is ever growing - and that Belgian photography will continue to reinvent itself for many years to come.
The 10th edition of .tiff reflects a diversity of voices, positions, and subject matter. It is a passionate group of artists and photographers, who each try to give personal answers to today’s questions. Gülsah Ayla Bayrak and Rami Hara take their personal histories of migration and stereotypes as a starting point to explore identification, mythification, and the idea of belonging. Lived experience also guides the work of Seppe Van Craywinkel and his celebration of freedom, friendship, and spontaneity. Where Arian Christiaens explores her family’s archive, searching for her own position as photographer, daughter, mother, lover, and woman, Lars Duchateau invites viewers to link possible narratives with cryptic large format photographs, each one inspired by newspaper articles.
Elsewhere, Barbara Debeuckelaere treads a thin line between fiction and reality, delving into the Romanian fanbase of the American television series Dallas; Ligia Poplawska considers emotions, solastalgia, and climate anxiety in a changing world; and Alice Pallot shines her light on the Lommel Sahara in Belgium, rendering it alien without any post-production.
These artists work across a variety of media, encompassing books, video and installations. Their stories are as diverse as their approach: documentary, analytical, poetic, conceptual, humorous, intimate and most of all fresh and thought-provoking.
Over the years, .tiff has succeeded in building a Belgian photography community that allows for an exchange of ideas and insights between artists, curators, critics, and researchers. The current selection shows that this community is ever growing - and that Belgian photography will continue to reinvent itself for many years to come.
Alice Pallot is a French photographer who lives and works in Brussels. She graduated with honors from the photography section of ENSAV La Cambre (BA and MA) In July 2018 and participated in the Erasmus program at Ecal in Switzerland. In the same year, she won the Roger de Conynck prize for her series L’Ile Himero, also exhibited at The Voies Off Festival in the context of Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.
In 2019, Alice Pallot self-edited a book untitled Land which was included in Belgian Photobook at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, Le Bal in Paris and at the Wiels Art Book Fair in Brussels. Her photographic series Oasis was included in the 4th edition of the PhotoBrussels Festival 2019 at Hangar Art Center. This body of work was also shown in collaboration with the Satellite Gallery at En Piste ! in Liège and in Dans quel monde rêvons-nous ? curated by the collectif Xeno at Bozar in Brussels. Alice Pallot’s work was included in several places in Brussels, such as Le Botanique, Gallery Été 78, Adaventura, Vertigo Gallery, La Réserve and La Vallée. She also exhibited in France; in Paris, at Immix Gallery, N’Oblige Gallery and in Dieppe at the Diep-Haven Festival.
In 2020, she presented with the Gallery Satellite a new display of L’Île Himero - accompanied with a book edited by Page Works - at the Biennale de L’Image Possible in Liège. Laureate of the PhotoBrussels Festival 05, Alice Pallot presented a new series; Suillus, part of the exhibition «The World Within» at Hangar Art Center in 2021.
In September 2021, she presented her Suillus series at the Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam, with Hangar Gallery. In january 2022, Suillus was presented in La Caserne and at Immix Galerie in Paris. Alice Pallot has been published in Libération, La Libre, Fisheye Magazine, Vice and others.
Arian Christiaens (°1981) has been working as a photographer, artist and photography teacher since graduating as a Master at KASK (Ghent, Belgium) in 2004 and participated in masterclasses with Max Pinckers, Paul Kooiker, Laura El Tentawy and Vincent Delbrouck from 2017 onwards.
Her work is centered around investigations of her family relations and the constructed nature of their identities.
In 2019 Christiaens published her first artist book ‘Xenia’ through APE (Art Paper Editions) in which portraits of her sister, who used to be her brother, float between documentary and fiction. The publication was shortlisted for the Arles Photobook Award.
Her most recent work ‘In Camera’, is the result of Christiaens comparing her own relationship, her own person and her own intimate photographical archive with the one of her mother. She questions the relation between man and woman, photographer and model, over time and within her own family history.
‘In Camera’ will be on show in FOMU (Fotomuseum Anwerpen) this summer as part of the exhibition ‘TIFF Emerging Belgian Photography’ and will be published as an artist book in 2022.
Barbara Debeuckelaere (BE) is a visual artist and photographer. She is a master in Visual Arts, Photography (KASK Ghent, 2021), a master in International Politics and European Law (VUBrussel, 1992) and a master in Economy (KULeuven, 1991). She started her career in Dutch Guyana (Suriname) as a junior professor at the University of Paramaribo. After that she worked as a journalist, for newspapers De Standaard and De Morgen and from 2002 on she was recruited by the VRT-newsroom. First she worked for radio (Voor de Dag, Radionieuws) and from 2007 on for television (Terzake). For VRT she made reports and traveled regularly to countries like Iran and to the Middle- East. In 2014 she quit the VRT and decided to turn away from the news industry to focus on a more poetically driven perspective on the world, through visual art and photography. In her work she is searching to explore power relations, systemic thinking, capitalism and climate change, trying to avoid the general craving for the exotic. Her life partner is Koen with whom she has 3 children: Ambroos, Jeanne and Cecile.
Gulsah Ayla Bayrak (born 1997), is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgium, working on the larger themes of identity and belonging, in a complex world of interactions between her the different fragments that she embodies: Her Turkish roots and her political identity as a citizen of modern Europe, juxtaposed for the ramifications of feminist theory when thinking about the body and the self and the cultural and political consequences of queerness in an era of increasing polarization, but also of multiple polarities. Taking the migration stories in her own family as a starting point, Bayrak draws on personal biographies, to re-narrate events in such a way as to reconstruct the experience of lived time, and not merely chronologies. In her practice, moving seamlessly between Asia and Europe, both physically and emotionally, the polarity of global north versus global south emerges sharply, around the political definition of “East”—a borderland of European modernity, wholly constructed by it. The idea of the fragment resurfaces in Bayrak’s projects as a partial narrative, constitutive of our shared, social experience, and which cannot be dovetailed or manipulated, so that it remains always alive, fresh, fragile, and unfinished. In this inconclusiveness the artist finds paradox, and within paradox, the complexities of modern identities fabricated from torn off bits of different, larger structures. In dealing with objects as markers of memory, and with memories as physical objects Gulsah Ayla Bayrak creates unfinishable threads of historicity, unfolding in simultaneity, searching for a lost, but ultimately unidentifiable, temporal index.
Duchateau is an artist who mainly works with photography. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies. His photos are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he makes work that generates diverse meanings, associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
His works are characterised by the use of everyday events in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role.
By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, he plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork confronted with the power of a transitory appearance, which is, by being restricted in time, much more intense. His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. He makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented.
Lars Duchateau currently lives and works in Hasselt and Ghent.
Ligia Popławska (b. 1994, Poland) is a visual artist currently based in Antwerp, Belgium. Her work explores themes of senses, emotional states and human impact on environment. With a deep interest in natural phenomena, art history and sciences, her researchbased, speculative work focuses of human and morethan- human in the changing conditions of the (Post) Anthropocene. She graduated with honours from the Photography department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (BA and MA), previously gaining a BA in Art History from the University of Gdańsk (2016). Her project ‘Fading Senses’ won Decade of Change Series Award (2022) by the British Journal of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at PhMuseum Days International Photography Festival in Bologna, Italy (2021) and Photography Prize funded by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (2020). Ligia Popławska is a laureate of .tiff 2022 (FOMU Antwerp) and a recipient of a scholarship for Emerging Talents from the Flemish Government. She exhibited at Bienal’23 Fotografia do Porto, FOMU Antwerp, De Brakke Grond, Helsinki Photo Festival, among others. Ligia Popławska works as a freelance photographer and editor.
Rami’s work is visually striking. The objects of his portraits are statuesque, almost sculptural and hold a quiet dignity, these aforementioned fabrics (the Veil, the Durag) are elevated from their utilitarian role into markers of adornment. A hijab becomes a royal veil, a durag transforms into the crown of a young, anonymous king, A portrait becomes a painting.
His use of colour elevate the text in a variety of ways. His work brings a dynamic element of emphasis, playing on the themes of alienation, anonymity and the question of belonging. the pops of vivid colours bring a sensation of playfulness, while some images use the richness of deep blues, purples and gold tones that bring forth a sense of mystery, a world where the viewer is not entirely welcomed but granted a glimpse of what the (un)veiling allows. He presents his family, his source of inspiration with deference, honouring them in portraits that beam with a sense of pride. The questions of stigmatisation and alienation starts in ‘Hooyo’, and re-occurs in his ongoing series « Durag », taking a step back in Indaha qurbaha, (In the eyes of the diaspora) by showing his subjects up close and personal as well as in their contextual spaces respectively.
Seppe Vancraywinkel (1998) grew up on the countryside in Hoegaarden, Belgium. He has always been surrounded by his close friends and they were always on the go, they still are. Since 2016 Vancraywinkel felt the need to capture these moments analog in black- and-white. Black and white is an important aspect in his work. It’s Seppes way of creating a filter that shields his dreamlike world from reality. He feels like colours are too close to reality, they can cause unnecessary distractions. Seppe Vancraywinkels work revolves around stories, shapes and scales.
vancraywinkel.seppe@gmail.com
@seppevancraywinkel
https://seppevancraywinkel.com/
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