The artists nominated by

Kacper Szalecki is a cultural animator and visual artist focused on photography, installation, and performance. He studies New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Łódź.

He debuted as a photographer in 2016 at Krakow Photomonth with the “Olympia’s Diary” project. From 2017 to 2019, he was part of art collective Fashion House Limanka, whose works were presented as individual exhibitions in the Museum of Art in Łódź and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He currently works at the Museum of Art in Łódź, where he is curating the “Save as a draft” program of Instagram art residencies.

Bulgarian artist and director George Stamenov examines the immersive possibilities of story telling by challenging the dogmas of contemporary film making. His short films carry a unique aesthetic that is derived from Eastern Europe.

Raised in Sofia, Bulgaria and trained as a painter from an early age, his work arises from an early fascination with the Renaissance and Medieval eras. Stamenov utilizes computer graphic imagery as his primary medium, often to render the uncanny side of a simple event or a movement in a composition, exaggerating its insignificance in an extraordinary manner.

George Stamenov was born in 1988 and lives and works in London, United Kingdom. He completed undergraduate studies at Willem De Kooning Academie and postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art. His work was featured in The Bloomberg New Contemporaries for two consecutive years (2018, 2019); NOT A LIVE SHOW Bonington Gallery, Nottingham (2018); Working Projects - Inhabiting the Dome at Whiteleys Shopping Center (2018); Water Tower Festival Bulgaria (2012).

Andrii Dostliev (b. 1984) is an artist, curator, and photography researcher from Ukraine, currently based in Poland. Has degrees in IT (MA in 2006) and graphic design (BA in 2015). His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma, identity — both personal and collective, and limits of photography as a medium. His art practice works across photography, video, drawing, performance, and installation.

He has published several books with his photographic series.  His work is held in a number of private collections nationally and internationally. In 2019, Andrii Dostliev was awarded the 3rd prize at the II Ukrainian Biennale of Young Art for his project examining the mythologization of memories of a territory lost due to a military conflict.

Lia Dostlieva (b. 1984, Donetsk, Ukraine) is an artist, cultural anthropologist and essayist. Her primary areas of my research include the issues of trauma, postmemory, commemorative practices, and agency and visibility of vulnerable groups.

As an artist, she works across a wide range of media including photography, installations, textile sculptures, interventions into urban space, etc. since 2012.⁠

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Born in 1987 in Russia, Olga is a multimedia artist creating her projects in Uzbekistan, her mother’s homeland. She graduated from Moscow Industrial Art Institute in 2013. In her works Olga uses a variety of media - from subject art, installations, and performance to social research and cinema. She addresses the topic of her female genealogy: both her grandmother and mother came from Uzbekistan. Olga treats this country as a timeless space, a portal where she finds answers to questions.

In her first projects she started from classic art forms - subject art, performances and photographs, and applied mixed media method in her current project Mirage - installation, social research, movie technics. This is a social research project about the Aral Sea disaster and the people living in it‘s aftermath. The starting point was the idea to suggest the locals in the town of Muynak, a former seaport, sharing one ceramic plate and laying out a mirage on the bottom of the dried Aral Sea near the town. The results of which were expressed in an installation on the bottom of the extinct sea and a full-lengthy film Olga created while working on the project. Also working in this vein, by her own, she explores female artist possibilities in a contemporary traditional society.

“My work is a path from small forms to large ones, from serious mental practice to an intuitive and free play method. My life has become an indispensable part of this conscious philosophical method. Last project Mirage can serve as an illustration of this approach. Here I play a game in which the object turns into a tool to communicate with the whole country.”

Sasha Chaika (b. 1994) is an artist currently living in St. Petersburg. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Sciences at the State University in 2017 and today works as an art and fashion freelance photographer, art-director, film- and music-maker.

Sasha participated in the 5th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art in MMoMA, previous year took a part of “Somewheres & Anywheres: Young Photography from Eastern Europe” exhibition in Berlin gallery EEP and join BERLIN PHOTO WEEK.

His short film “Swallowed by the Routine” was selected for the Fashion Film Awards 2019 by SHOWstudio X HARRODS and was shown in London last October.

The main themes explored by Sasha now are the struggle with the language, because words controls us and reduces our worldview; queer theory, that means infinite pluralism of identities, meanings without hierarchy, ever-changing flexible self-definition; and criticism/decentration of the concept of truth.

This three ideas are really close to each other like the liberation from automatisms, habits and the aspiration to independent, affective perception and action.