Drawing on the influence of Catholic tradition in her native Bolivia, Marisol Mendez presents young women as either sinners or saints in her series “Madre”. Her expressive portraits play with this religiously influenced, stereotypical image of femininity, which is commonly associated with fragility and piety, contrasting it with forms of rebellion and sexually connotated motifs. Social expectations regarding the interplay between gender and identity are also at the centre of Ricardo Nagaoka’s series “Autobiographies”, depicting intimate black-and-white young male nudes – some posing, some in supposedly unobserved moments. Through the interplay of intimacy and distance, staging and vulnerability, Nagaoka explores the ambivalence of male physicality and the possibilities for self-expression beyond traditional masculine stereotypes. With the long-term project “The Longing of the Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken”, documentary photographer Rehab Eldalil traces her own family history. Over a period of more than ten years, she closely collaborated with a Bedouin community in the south of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt whose nomadic lifestyle is shaped by nature, ancient customs and spiritual beliefs. Her photographs, complemented by traditional embroidery and poetry, portray the people as part of the surrounding landscape and thereby express the community’s deep connection to their environment. Thero Makepe’s project “We Didn’t Choose to be Born Here” weaves together his family history with that of South Africa and thus its Apartheid regime. The artist combines personal historical documents from his family’s archive with documentary photographs of South African and Botswanan landmarks and re-enacted portraits of his relatives. In an impressively personal way, the project reveals the effects of racism, land dispossession and displacement on individuals and communities. For his series “POST”, Sander Coers uses artificial intelligence to analyse old family photos of his grandfather and generate new, fictitious images in a similar style, thereby creating a completely imaginary family album with a nostalgic look and blurring the line between fiction and reality. The project “American Glitch”’ by Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein is inspired by “glitches” - optical illusions or errors that occur in real life, collected on the internet and discussed in online forums. The duo embarked on a journey across the United States in search of sites that reminded them of such optical phenomena. The resulting series shows calm yet enigmatic scenes that spark the question of what might be real and what might be fake.
