Born in 1993, in his series « On the lookout », Nanténé Traoré portrays a story of his own solitude, inspired by artists such as Valère Novarina, Depardon and Passoa. He re-thinks the ways we perceive disappearance, immobility, absence. His work is an iconography of the intimate, a story-telling of solitary life fragments. Traoré is represented by Gallery Sultana in Paris. His photographs have been published by Hachette editions, Points editions and George Bleu, in France.

How to experience and surpass the disasters, both personal and natural, that life throws at us, is the question behind the series Thin Air, by the Turkish photographer Cemil Batur Gökçeer. By using triple exposure, with every roll being re-used twice, the artist creates an element of doubt, complexity and randomness, all at the same time. The artist compares this process to the ritual of coffee ground reading to which he is familiar, in other words to a form of iinteraction which opens a new breach in the way of reading and interpreting essential issues.

With her series My Husband, Ushioda Tokuko reveals a story that remained private for almost 40 years, the story of Tokuko Ushioda, her husband Shinzo Shimao, and their daughter Maho. Through her objective, Tokuko managed to capture the solitude of the photographer within a patriarchal Japanese society where a woman’s main duty is the one of the mother and spouse. Born in Tokyo, Tokuko graduated from Kuwasawa Design School in 1963. In 2018 she won the Photographic Society of Japan’s Lifetime Achievement Award  for her series Bibliotheca. 

The photographer Rinko Kawauchi is best known for her lyrical images of elemental subjects. She captures ordinary life moments in an almost hallucinatory perspective. Born in 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, Kawauchi began pursuing photography while attending the Seian College of Art and Design in Osaka during the early 1990s. She has worked mainly in advertising and published several books including Illuminance (2011), Ametsuchi (2013) and Halo (2017).

In Hara Mikiko’s work, chance has always held a preponderant place,as she photographs her subjects without looking at the image through the viewfinder. From there, her photographic technique may seem illogical, she triggers her camera instinctively, accumulating “fragments of everyday life”, never framed, often blurred, her palette of pastel colors accentuating the impression of evanescence and lightness . Mikiko was born in 1967 in Toyama Prefecture. In 1994 she graduated from Tokyo College of Photography, and continued as a research student until 1996. Her works are part of the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SFMoMa) and others.

Suffering from a rare disease since childhood, Mari Katayama underwent  a partial imputation of her legs at the age of 9. This physical condition has become an artwork subject, where Katayama photographs herself as a living sculpture and depicts her personal struggles of isolation. Katayama believes that tracing herself helps connect with other people, and that her everyday life can also be connected with society. Her self-portraits are also a self-healing experience, where she openly visibilises her congenital tibial hemimelia condition by using embroidered objects and decorative prostheses. Katayama was born in 1987 in Gunma, Japan. Her work has been exhibited in the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2019

Kazuma Obara was born in Japan in 1985. Mainly focused on hidden victims in our society, Obara resigned from his job in the financial industry after the tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011, to start documenting the disaster area where his best friend’s house was located. He was also the first photographer to convey a story from inside a power plant, capturing images from inside Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Obara traveled to Ukraine from February 2015 to April 2016 and photographed the portraits of those directly impacted by the explosion and who saw their lives changed forever. Exposure presented his thirty portraits of men and women of Chernobyl, in a set of two books and a replica newspaper, in 2018.

Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz is best known for his iconic photographs of New York City during the 1980s. He is a documentary, fashion and street photographer, as well as the author of 12 monographs. Through analog film and digital photography, Shabazz’s work showcases the cultural vibrancy of New York’s black and brown communities. In 1980, as a committed photographer with a clear vision, he made it his mission to thoroughly document various aspects of life in New York, from youth culture to a wide range of social conditions. Because of their spontaneity and uniqueness, the streets and subways became the backdrop for many of his photographs.

Paribartana Mohanty, a multimedia artist working with new media, video, performance lectures and painting, was born in 1982 in Odisha. His recent works explore the « environmental disaster landscapes » emerging near the coast of the Bay of Bengal in Odisha, where he studies the deep impacts of recurring cyclones, tsunamis and land erosion on the life of marginal communities. In his work Mohanty is focused on how technologies of algorithmic networks, digitalization, data access and surveillance shape the public perception about ‘natural’ disasters. He is a member of the artistic collective WALA, a Delhi-based collective formed in 2009.

Born in 1954 in Rajkot, India, and living in Mumbai, Rajesh Vora has been photographing for over 30 years, including 15 years spent as a photographer for COLORS magazine. His interest is primarily focused on the environment and disappearing habits, which is perfectly shown in his series Everyday Baroque, exhibited for the first time in 2016 at PHOTOINK (New Delhi), and later on reconceived as Everyday Moments in 2022 for Surrey Art Gallery in Canada. The series showcases the unique Punjabi tradition of adorning homes with sculptural water tanks, airplanes and soccer players. These images of playful, idiosyncratic sculptures characterize the landscapes across hundreds of Punjabi villages.

Born in 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, Randa Mirza is a visual artist who works with photography, video, installation, and performance. Rooted in a feminist and decolonial discourse, her artistic practice questions hegemonic systems of thought and standardized representations. By making current symbolic, social, and political constructions visible, her work questions the point of view of the gaze, and the contexts in which images are produced and received, bringing to light what is forgotten or intentionally hidden. As a space for reflection, reparation, and resistance in the face of violence, her work falls somewhere between documentary, personal expression, and artistic writing. Her series BEIRUTOPIA is long-lasting projects of 10 years, follows the story of the history of Beirut, through the Lebanese civil war and going towards the construction boom of the last 30 years and recent economic collapse, the pandemic and the explosion of the port of Beirut. The series is, as the author explained, built on construction and deconstruction, a history of violence surrounding the city that is visible behind the beautiful facade of her images.

Krajnak’s photograph from the series Négatifs contact is part of the 18-large-format photos produced in a performance at as-is gallery in Los Angeles. Using a temporary darkroom, multiple projections, large format cameras, and re-photography, the artist imaginatively returned her body to Lima, Peru in 1979, the year of her adoption from the orphanage. In this sense, Krajnak invents new, visible ways in showing how violent or traumatic histories can be held in our bodies. Her work explores the multi-temporality of the photographic medium, and the potential of the darkroom itself, as a site of performance or spectro-poetics. Krajnak is currently based in Los Angeles, working as an associate professor of Art at UCLA university. She is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne/Paris.

Martha Rosler is an American photographer and videographer born in 1943 in Brooklyn. With works composed of photomontages, films and installations, her aim is to shade light on « underground » questions, like the way we live our lives, or the way US politics manages affairs on our behalf. A former political activist, she studied at the University of California in San Diego, where she met artists such as Allan Kaprow and Miriam Shapiro, and the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who will have a lasting impact on her thinking. Rosler is best known for expressing virulent and critical positions against the war in Vietnam and on feminist questions. 

Born in Tibet in 1958, Mo Yi is a former professional football player turned artist. He is one of the most important artists of Chinese contemporary photography that emerged from the 1980s. Mo Yi captures the alienation and oppression in the urban Chinese society, often with his proper image appearing on the photograph. His works are part of collections of the Cinese Image and Video Archive (Canada), Guangdong Museum of Art (China), Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (USA) and the Walter Collection (USA)