The artists nominated by

Aurélie Bayad was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1994. The artist currently lives and works between Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels.

The addictive force of the internet is real, and no one knows this better than Aurélie Bayad. In a post-internet world, where IRL increasingly merges with URL, new possibilities of being are creeping into our daily lives. In her versatile art practice, Bayad uses video, photography and performance to confront us with the messy, dirty thoughts and desires of our hyperreal (what is real?), cultivated identities, as we try to live up to the new rules and standards set by the digital sphere of fake likes and dark web eroticism. Bayad uses her camera, her own and other bodies, and texts she wrote to create a fresh aesthetic language for the new desires of contemporary culture. In slimy and gooey, ugly and disgusting, cheap and glittery settings, we watch her unfold the personae of her filmed and photographed subjects. She hides her models behind the soft, nostalgic hues of the kitschy eighties and nineties; includes erratic and ecstatic sequences in her films, with heart-pounding soundtracks; and fearlessly looks back into the lens, as if asking us: ‘What is your real personality? What is real beauty? What is your true desire, your fetish? Who do you want me to see?’ With her otherworldly beauty standards, her visceral and vomitous but lively encounters with food and other quotidian objects, and her frank interrogations of intimacy, giving and receiving, love and abuse — so pertinent that they can make you tremble with self-doubt — Aurélie Bayad shares with us her search for personal grounding in this confusing, networked world.‍

- Text by Zeynep Kubat (.tiff)

Trained as a speech therapist and a self-taught photographer, Aurélie Scouarnec (1990) has recently exhibited her series Anaon as part of Itinéraires des photographes voyageurs, Espace Saint-Rémi, Bordeaux (2018), at the Rencontres photographiques du Xe arrondissement de Paris (2017), and the Nuits photographiques de Pierrevert (2017).

Aurélie Scouarnec created her series, Anaon, in the monts d’Arrée, in the Finistère region of Brittany. It is a delicate exploration on what she calls “the margins of the visible” in this legendary land. Inspired by the texts of Anatole Le Braz and François-Marie Luzel, she undertook a photographic investigation, in search of the rites and ancient tales amongst this rocky mountain range. Gateway to hell, according to some beliefs, here she crosses the phantom presence of several animals, called psychopomps, in charge of escorting souls in the kingdom of the dead. In other places, she plays with the syncretism particular to this hilly land and combines in a single stroke veiled female silhouettes – immediately associated with Christianity – and monumental woodland silhouettes, places of pagan worship. The abyssal green of moss and the deep black of the night are at times awoken by the cry of the moon and the animals perhaps surprised by the movement of these heavy fabrics. Stories read, heard, relics of ancient rites and forms of contemporary druidism, all are invited here to take their place in this phantasmagoric narrative which Aurélie Scouarnec constructs, photograph after photograph.

Csilla Klenyànszki (1986) is a graduate of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. Her work has recently been exhibited as part of Art Rotterdam (2018), at the Trapez Gallery, Budapest, (2018) and at the Polana Institute, Warsaw (2017).

Time at work, this time which rushes, always too short, it is this which Csilla Klenyànszki addresses in her performative and photographic games. Of course, this artistic approach is accepted, being defined by a sum of constraints which might be resumed here as follows: the daily siesta of a child, the domestic setting imposed by this siesta, or thirty minutes for creation. Pillars of Home is a series of variations upon a single theme that is as dizzying as it is absurd. In thirty minutes flat, within this confined frame and with no more than plants, plastic beakers, a vacuum cleaner, table, chair, teapot and other utensils (with the inclusion of her own body, an object which she does not hesitate to contribute and contort), this artist provides ninety-six answers held in a fragile balance between the floor and the ceiling of her apartment. We are amused by one, stunned by another. Yet none of them impose a superiority as, more than just the form, it is the process and the accumulation of experiences which the photographer wishes to highlight: not the beauty of the sculpture nor the skill of its assembly, but the action of an artist who wishes to oppose time with a mischievous and vital fantasy. Ephemeral, yes, but certainly not trivial.

Following a degree in photography at CalArts, in California and then Yale, Eva O’Leary (1989) has had three solo exhibitions in 2017: Happy Valley, Meyohas, New York; Concealer, Vontobel, Zurich and Spitting Image, Crush Curatorial, New York.

The perfect skin and the smooth image which accompanies it, Eva O’Leary knows all too well the different ingredients and recipes of commercial photography. She too, as a teen, ate this cake which now, as an artist, she presents to us on a plateau. In a refrigerator rests a sponge cake, accompanied with printed icing: a saccharine young woman with perfect blow-dried hair watches us. Since it is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, this is the fate which the photographer reserves for the young blonde haired woman with the Colgate smile and her diktat. She grew up in the United States of America in a campus town whose name is almost an order – Happy Valley – and remembers her years spent masking her Irish head in the hood of a must have Abercrombie sweatshirt. The series, Happy Valley, is rooted in her town and her adolescent memories, describing an environment which is intrusive and worrying, modelling individuals whose self identity has been traded for a generic body. With the more recent Spitting Image, it is the years before, the adolescent vulnerability which are exposed. Young girls, around fifteen years old, present themselves to us, tightly framed on a vibrant blue backdrop which permits neither an escape for the gaze, nor breathing room for the model. Eva O’Leary accompanies these photographs with videos: perched upon a stool, we watch them searching for the person they hoped to find in the mirror. In this interval the photographer reopens the field of representations and with it, the freedom to be complex, different, uncertain, unique, human.

Graduate in photography from the school of Art, Architecture and Design at Aalto university in Helsinki, Jaakko Kahilaniemi (1989) has exhibited his series 100 Hectares of Understanding at the Finnish museum of photography, Helsinki. Amongst the group exhibitions in which he has participated, of note are those which took place at the Tampere Art Museum, at the Kunst Haus in Vienna, and at the Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen.

Over twenty years ago, Jaakko Kahilaniemi, who was barely eight at that time, inherited 100 hectares of forest. The abstraction which this represents for a child, is followed by an indifference which it evokes for an adolescent. After all, this is hardly very exotic for a Finn: forest covers more than 70% of the country, totalling 26 million hectares. Fairly recently, this photographer decided to return to this heritage in order to explore its twists and turns. This series, called 100 Hectares of Understanding  retraces his journey towards an appropriation of this land which is too big for a single – young – man. Photography thus becomes the location where the experience of the landscape can be filtered as it is travelled through, physically, mentally, and sentimentally. These explorations blend physical crossings and digital incursions, photographed panoramas and painted landscapes. The photographer combines these vast misty lands with a still life of a small wooden log resting upon a scale, or simple twigs upon a black background: from the infinitely big to the infinitesimal, each photograph constitutes a piece of an important memory game whose perimeter, one might imagine, increases as the photographer walks and the man grows up.

Laetitia Bica (1981) studied at the École supérieure d’art de Saint-Luc, in Belgium. Amongst her recent exhibitions are Art Brussels (2018), at the Musée de la Boverie, Liège during the Biennale de l’image possible (2018) and as part of Design Week at the Palazzo Litta in Milan (2017).

Just as much a physical experience which disturbs the tranquil surface of the photograph as a workshop narrative with a documentary character, Laetitia Bica’s series Cream, cannot be confined to a single genre. Following two years of collaborations with the CREAHM workshop in Liège (Creativity and Mental handicap), she undertook two months of intense research with the workshop’s artists, the result of which is this corpus of disruptive and vibrant photographs. Collaboration, a creative process which is a daily part of this photographer’s life as she typically works on commission in the areas of fashion, music, and design, in these photographs is transmitted through the body. Gestures, colours and materials become elements of language during their creative exchanges. Thus unfolds a series of figures covered in paint with thick and bold features and accents that are at times wild, at times warlike. A few of the images, placed in a sequence, follow an artist’s movement, rendering the in progress nature of this experiment and indicating Laetitia Bica’s double position on what takes on the appearance of almost ritualistic practices: at the same time actor and master of ceremonies.

Pascale Arnaud (1994) is a graduate of the École de l’image des Gobelins. She received the Picto prize for her series Emerging Adulthood. She exhibits at the Fisheye Gallery, Paris (2018) and previously at the Hangzhou festival in China as well as the Promenades photographiques de Vendôme (2016).

At the heart of a grey spectre, from moonlight to basalt, from transparency to deep obscurity, bodies, all female, reveal their plasticity. Forget lascivious poses, postpone conventional attitudes or a complacent light: this is not her subject. Pascale Arnaud disturbs appearances, because in this age which she wishes to depict, defined implicitly between the ages of adolescence and adulthood, there is little room for clear lines and distinguishable outlines. She thus undertakes an exploration which is properly photographic, it is in the matter of the image itself that she sets about translating the reality of this age of becoming and emergence. No clue of the subject’s identity exudes from this grey envelope. The young girls are symbolic figures, caryatides of silver salts which brandish their desires. Tight compositions upon fragmented bodies, contorted poses and unmasked faces: this photographic manner brings to light, from these grey zones, the strength and the vulnerability at play, at a time when an individual enters alone into the world to find its foundation. A colossus with clay feet is seen from a low angle, reminding us of all of the ambivalence and uncertainty due at a time of great expectations.

Sanna Lehto (1990) is a photographer graduate of School of Art, Architecture and Design at Aalto university, Helsinki. She recently exhibited her series Morphologies at Gallery Kosminen, Helsinki (2017).

Something flows, slowly, perhaps a syrup, yet nothing saccharin arises out of Sanna Lehto’s image, but rather a bittersweet background which rests tranquilly. At the heart of this muffled world, beneath a dome, a small flower has traded its innocence in order to come and pass away on the surface of faces, the fluid has abandoned its lightness and its movement in order to gain in weight. Air is rare in Sanna Lehto’s photographic world. The image sometimes blushes, at other times it pales: the chromatic palette varies from crimson red to pink, as if these faces encapsulated between the glass lens and the sensor were breathing gently. A sort of photographic herbarium, that is what she seems to evoke through these portraits and still lifes. The creative process is not that dissimilar: during her summertime walks she gathers and picks, flowers gleaned from the Finnish countryside; sometimes she buys them, guided by a vision of a coloured harmony rather than through any symbolism. Often, she dries them and awaits for a suitable visual frame in order to place them in the photographic field. We may imagine her, back in her studio, patiently pinning these specimens one by one, according to the fortunes of encounters and visual stimuli.

Sarah Mei Herman (1980) studied at the Hague Royal Academy of Fine Arts and then at the Royal College of Arts in London. She has exhibited as part of  Jimei x Arles: East West Encounters at Xiamen International festival, in China (2017); at the Nuit des Images at the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne.

A few chance encounters, passing through the Xiamen campus, in China, where Sarah Mei Herman was in residence, simultaneously constituted the starting point for a friendship and a photographic narrative. In the manner of her other current series, where she explores the relationship between her father and her brother over fifteen years, this Dutch photographer’s vision is long-term. She initially visited Xiamen for a four month residency, but has returned several times, driven by the series which she initiated and the bonds that she has made. She returns to find some of the young girls she photographed and together they weave a thread consisting of daily and intimate moments. A frantic and noisy China has given way to an environment that is pared down and silent, made of delicate gestures, which allow for these moments of sorority to unfold in the frame created by the image. Sarah Mei Herman’s soft and luminous palette proceeds out of this same delicate treatment, reinforcing the feeling of empathy which exists between these young girls as well as that which is patiently nourished between them and the photographer.

Sarah Mei Herman’s work has been shown internationally, among others at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Le Chateau d’Eau in Toulouse, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne and the Benaki Museum in Athens. Her work has been included in several art collections such as Rabobank Art Collection and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Herman was a finalist for Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography 2018 where she received the American Vintage Photography Prize 2018. That same year she also won the Rabobank Dutch National Portrait Prize. Last year her project “Germano” was exhibited at the Jewish History Museum in Amsterdam. Recently Herman completed the photography for a new commissioned photo book “Solace” about the Chinese LGBTQ community. She received an honorable mention by the Gomma Photography Grant for this project.

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Teresa Eng (1977) is a graduate of Emily Carr university in Vancouver and the London College of Communication. Amongst her recent exhibitions are Snapshot to WeChat: A Migration of Identity, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2018); You and Me, Landskrona foto festival (2017) and Roads Less Traveled, TIFF festival, Varsovie (2016).

The daughter of Chinese emigrants living in Canada, Teresa Eng had an imaginary and fantastical vision of China, until she decided to visit the country. The degree of difference between the Chinese dream that she had constructed and the reality of a country undergoing a frantic development, might have resulted in a documentary which would not have spared us the excessive nature of contemporary China. On the contrary, Teresa Eng, chose to avoid the obviousness of a documentary and the stylistic clarity this entails. Her China seems to evolve beneath a hazy veil. The here and now are erased, the signs of urban frenzy – abundantly illustrated in contemporary photography – are eluded, potentially treated as asides. An infinite head of hair confronts audaciously the curves of a modern architecture: Teresa Eng treads softly, turning her back on the injunctions of a modern China. Which, out of a rock standing in its ceramic pot, or a concrete pillar erected in the water, merits our attention? Teresa Eng’s China seems to navigate between the riverbanks of a capitalist progressionism (China Dream, the title of the series, is also a popular slogan for president Xi Jiping, which in turn refers to the American Dream) and that of an orientalist romantic nostalgia.