NETHERLANDS: Knighted by the Dutch Government, Erwin Olaf has earned a world-wide reputation for his immaculately choreographed tableaux that subtly suggest the ultimate uncertainty of being.
Constructed
AUSTRALIA: With a subtle insistence, Marian Drew’s still-life and light-painting images question how we might inhabit and share the natural world in a sustainable and equitable way.
ITALY/USA: From the imposing to the delicate, images assembled from thousands of nudes weaving across a panoramic field of view.
GUATEMALA: Luis González Palma grew up during thirty years of civil war, but while his images evoke sadness, they neither sentimentalise nor do they counsel despair. Rather they affirm the transcendent nature of the human spirit.
FINLAND: One of the country’s most celebrated photographers discusses his deep connection with the northern landscape and the Sámi people who live there.
POLAND / AUSTRALIA: Blending the chemistries of photography and vegetative decay to create hauntingly beautiful images exploring themes around memory, time, habitat, health, and inner contemplation.
LATVIA: Personal evocations of the impact of social and ideological change while living through the turbulent post-war and post-Soviet eras.
PERU: Lyrical images that find a melancholy beauty in dilapidation and enfold maternal wisdom in pictorial fables.
USA: Disrupting the sedimentation of artifice through a bold juxtaposition of the vegetative with the simulation, the object with its image.
SOUTH AFRICA: a remarkable synthesis of structure, texture, and authenticity exploring the triangular relationship between history, memory, and community storytelling.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Land art seeking a fresh perspective on Nature freed from notions of territory and property.
AFRICA / AMERICAS: poignant imagery on a grand scale evoking the existential threat of human exploitation to both animals and people.
MEXICO: Harnessing artificial intelligence to create photo-based images that may well come closer to the true nature human visual perception than will ever be possible with a camera.
RUSSIA / SPAIN: Alisa Sibirskaya creates photographic tableaux echoing themes from the Dutch Baroque and Siberian folktales that capture the luminous glow of a bygone age.
SAUDI ARABIA: Fascinated by harmony and dissonance, and the cycles of return, Saleh AlDaghari’s picture-making sits on the cusp between surrealism and allegory.
CANADA: Delicate still-life images that capture a sense of tranquillity while celebrating the small and fleeting things in life.
AUSTRALIA: Luminous yet elusive images that navigate the gulf between the world of the senses and the interior realm of the self.
ARGENTINA: La sensibilidad de la pintura y las técnicas de la fotografía se conjugan para crear un realismo mágico irónico pero extrañamente familiar.
ARGENTINA: The sensibilities of painting and the techniques of photography blend to create an ironic but strangely familiar magic realism.
CANADA / USA: Temporary sculptures created by balancing stones with nothing more than gravity to hold them together.
USA: With an emphasis on the dignity of all living things, these lo-fi collage works seek to emphasise harmony and our shared human nature, free from judgement.
FINLAND: Landscapes, ice, and flea-market clothing and fabrics come together in an unusual aesthetic and conceptual marriage – part myth, part speculation.
AUSTRALIA: Figures from history and legend elegantly reconceived with the technology and sensibility of the present.
AUSTRALIA: Fantastical photographs suggesting a domestic magic brought into being by longing, obsession or childlike exuberance.
NEW ZEALAND / AUSTRALIA: A visual storyteller exploring the interior world of the mind through the shared imagination of the community.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Creating a fluid and ambiguous aesthetic space between painting, sculpture and photography, Hyunmi Yoo challenges our understanding of the relationship between visual representation, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’.
MALAYSIA / SINGAPORE: Apparently whimsical images that critique community erasure in Malaysia and the re-wilding of a hyperreal city-state in lockdown.
GERMANY: Reworking the traditional contact sheet on a grand scale, Thomas Kellner makes architecture dance.
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
COLOMBIA: An artist using clay figures to tell the stories of real people – stories of homelessness and social invisibility.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Constructing from the catalogue of British oil painting ironic self-portraits that situate the alienated Asian man in the midst of Britain’s aristocratic past.
AUSTRALIA: Photographic tableaux that bring new life to the artefacts of historical and natural-history museums nationally and internationally.
SOUTH AFRICA: With a unique visual signature, Roger Ballen’s existential psychodramas have maintained their uncompromising independence, vividly capturing the imagination of generations over five decades.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.
AUSTRALIA: a remarkable synthesis of timeless Aboriginal wisdom and radically innovative printmaking that creates pictures of intense poetic beauty.
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
BRAZIL: Spectacular images that extend the concepts of time, space and perspective to explore the complex and multifarious nature of our contemporary world.
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.
UNITED KINGDOM: A forensic examination of plants, zoological specimens, snail trails or nylon stockings that finds poetry in precision and unexpected grandeur in the mundane.
UNITED KINGDOM: Throwing the paradoxes of the domestic environment into sharp relief, Sian Bonnell uses absurdity to critique the socially constructed role of women in the home.
SWITZERLAND: Playing with the nature of visual perception, Dominique Teufen discovers the creative possibilities of the photocopier, photoflash, glossy photographic paper and grey paint.
AUSTRALIA: Rather than illustrating an idea, Christophe Canato’s images propose a paradox that animates questions around gender, sexuality and the transition from child to adult.
AUSTRALIA: Pat Brassington exploits the legacies of Surrealism while subtly subverting those (primarily masculine) traditions with a clearly feminine and feminist inflection.
CANADA: Combining humour with cultural critique; history with psychology, Diana Thorneycroft constructs visual stories of the anxiety and contradiction embedded in the dark subsoil of Canadian national mythology.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture and installation.
URUGUAY: An artist, chemist, craftsman, essayist, poet, and teacher, who imbues photography with a newfound physical and philosophical dimension.
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.