Criticae

Max Pinckers ( ̊Brussels, 1988) grew up in Indonesia, India, Australia, and Singapore. In 2007 he returned to his native country Belgium to study photography at the School of Arts /KASK in Ghent, where he attained a BA, MA, and is currently doing a PhD in the arts. His work explores the critical, technological, and ideological structures that surround the production and consumption of documentary images. For Pinckers, documentary involves more than the representation of external reality: it’s a speculative process that approaches reality and truth as plural, malleable notions open to articulation in different ways. His installations and books are exhibited internationally, having received the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, amongst others. Pinckers is co-founder of the independent publishing house Lyre Press and The School of Speculative Documentary. He is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp, Tristan Lund in London, and Claxton Projects in New York.

Mathieu Asselin (FR/VEN, 1973) lives in Arles, France. He began his career working on film productions in Caracas, Venezuela, but shaped his photography practice in the United States. His work mainly consists out of long-term investigative documentary projects, such as his latest book ‘Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation, which received international acclaim, winning the Kassel FotoBook Festival Dummy Award in 2016, the Aperture Foundation First Book Award in 2017, and has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2018. Les Rencontre d'Arles in France, Photographer’s Gallery in London, Fotomuseum Antwerp in Belgium, and the European Parliament in Strasbourg are amongst recent venues where his work has been exhibited.

Laia Abril is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, text, video and sound. After a degree in journalism, she moved to New York where she decided to focus on telling intimate stories that raise uneasy and hidden realities related to sexuality, eating disorders and gender equality.

Abril’s work has been shown wildly and published internationally and is held in private collections and museums, such as Centre Pompidou and FRAC in France, Musée de l’Elysée and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, MoCP in Chicago, and MNAC and FotoColectania in Barcelona.

She has published several books - On Abortion (2018), Lobismuller (2016), The Epilogue (2014) Tediousphilia (2014), Thinspiration Fanzine (2012) - and over the years, her work has been acknowledged with grants and award nominations at Magnum Foundation, ICP-Infinity awards Foam Paul Huf, CatchLight, Plat(f)orm Fotomuseum Winterthur, as well as, she has been a finalist of the prestigious Deutsche Börse in 2019.

Jan Hoek (1984) is artist and writer. In his work, he is always attracted to the beauty of outsiders worldwide and always keen to collaborate intensively with people that normally are overlooked and create together a new image. He photographed movie stars like Nairobi-based motor taxi riders, an Amsterdam-based ex-heroin addicted who always dreamed of being a supermodel, created psychedelic zines about the sex tourist capital of the world Pattaya, and made a series about the Maasai who do not identify with the jumping stereotype image. In the universe of Hoek, the ‘normal’ people are the strangers and the outsiders are the funky rulers of this planet. Hoek‘s work is shown at places such as Foam (Amsterdam), Unseen Festival (Amsterdam), Photoville (New York), Fomu (Antwerp), and Lagos Photo (Lagos).

Chao Tayiana Maina is a Kenyan digital heritage specialist and digital humanities scholar working at the intersection of culture and technology. Her work primarily focuses on the application of technology within African heritage. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage, a co-founder of the Museum of British Colonialism, and a co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa project. All of which are online initiatives seeking to encourage a more critical, holistic, and knowledge-based approach to the design and implementation of digital solutions within African cultural heritage. She holds an MSc International Heritage Visualisation (distinction) and a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science. Her research work explored the possibilities of embedding intangible histories in 3D digital environments. She is a recipient of the Google Anita Borg Scholarship for women in technology.

Since 2009, the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin has salvaged discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, negatives that were destined for destruction. His Beijing Silvermine archive, one of the largest archival projects in China, now encompasses over 850000 anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005, thus allowing the reconstruction of a large part of the history of popular analog photography in the country. This unceasingly evolving archive provides a visual platform for cross-cultural interactions while impacting our collective memory of the recent past. Thomas Sauvin won the prize for the Exhibition of the year at Lianzhou Photo Festival in 2013. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Chicago, the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art, and the Guangdong Museum of Art. Over the last seven years, Thomas has published 10 photo books with the Archive of Modern Conflict (UK), Jiazazhi (CH), Skinnerboox (IT), The M Editions (FR), VOID (GREECE) as well as self-published artist books. His publications have entered the collections of TATE, the V&A, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and the Pompidou Museum.