ITALY: Elena Givone uses photography and storytelling to help young refugees imagine a better future – images to inspire hope in the child and compassion in the viewer.
Fantasy
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: A collaboration between identical twins drawing on the traditions of European folklore, Gothic Romance and Hollywood cinema, blending British whimsy with a darker psychological ambiguity that lends depth and complexity.
BELGIUM: Visual poetry, nature photography and digital design come together in Catherine Nelson’s transcendent landscapes to evoke the complexity of ecological equilibrium.
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
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.
AUSTRALIA: Photography, digital montage and embroidery combine in images that draw the viewer into the often-disquieting aesthetic of dreams.
INDIA: Described as “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”, Pushpamala N’s pioneering and influential feminist–conceptual photographic performance works seek to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse in India.
SWEDEN: A simple pinhole camera used to create images that evoke the primordial and the post-apocalyptic; a tension between humankind and the rest of nature.
UNITED KINGDOM: Whimsical, poignant, fantastical, dark… these family photos restage the complex nature of parenting and the domestic dynamic, from ageing and the shift in mutual dependence, to ultimate departure.
USA: Repurposing their household possession to create a mandala or build a spaceship, Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen use photography, video, performance and installation to explore the paradoxes of the American Dream.
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
