Futures Talents 2019

Eleven institutions from eleven European countries cooperate as part of the European  Photography Platform’s Futures project in order to discover emerging talents and to introduce them on an international level, especially to the European art market. As a platform partner, the Capa Center selected five young authors during Budapest Portfolio Review (https://capacenter.hu/en/esemenyek/bpr-2019) who can join Unseen Amsterdam this September.

The Futures talents of Capa Center in 2019

Anna Ádám

Anna Ádám (b. in 1983) is a visual- and performance artist, costume designer, and makeup artist. She graduated at ENSAPC Art School in France in 2016, and also studied styling (2010) and makeup (2018). In 2014 in Berlin she co-founded Gray Box (www.grayboxprojects.com), which is both a collective and a platform at the intersection of visual arts, performance art, and fashion. Since 2017 in the frame of her personal practice (www.annaadam.net), Anna Ádám creates hybrid spaces where spectacle and exhibition merge: she “curates theater” and “choreographs exhibitions”. She conceptualizes and uses the exhibition space as a theatre and the theater as an exhibition space: the plinth as stage, the installation as setting, the visitor as spectator, and vice versa. Her multidisciplinary and always site-specific projects – including photography, drawing, installation, clothing, performances, and choreographed works – echo the broader socio-political context from a feminist and queer perspective, and challenge the body as both a historically disciplined, shaped archive and a living public/private site, where power is constantly contested and negotiated. As a photographer, by combining both personal and anonymous photos with different technics (collage, drawing, painting, sewing, embroidery…), she examines the ways vernacular photography influences, shapes, and challenges memory, individual and collective identities, personal and historical narratives, the social fabric, issues of authenticity, ownership, privacy and public life. Her embroidered photographs, photo-objects, and photo-based clothings explore the performative, choreographic, and sculptural potential of photography. Between 2013-2015 Anna Ádám worked as performance artist in commissioned works (Palais de Tokyo, Musée Georges Pompidou…). Since 2014 she regularly presents her projects in both exhibition spaces and theaters (Museum of Modern Art Yerevan,  National Museum of Immigration History Paris, Theater MU Budapest, Théâtre de la Maison d’Europe et d’Orient, Salon de Montrouge, Galérie YGREC, Dorothy’s Gallery), and holds workshops in universities and galleries across Europe (Sweden, Hungary, Serbia, France, Armenia).

Krystyna Bilak

Krystyna Bilak (1993)) was born in Munkachevo, currently, an artist living in Budapest. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Kaposvár with a bachelor degree in photography. She continues her studies at master level at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.

Can we consider photography as a tool for extended cognition? Krystyna examines this issue in her earlier work, which also explores the interaction between people and space, and provides insight into the different areas of perception with the tools of photography. While studying the human cognitive function, she takes steps to get to know herself. Krystyna sees photography as a reconnaissance tool. For getting acquainted with the unknown areas, she stretches the possibilities of the medium and experiments with frontier topics.

At first, through personal topics, she outlined herself with photography, and later on, the characteristics of the medium and its relation to human and reality began to interest her. She explores the subject of her current interest in details, in many different methods, experimenting with various media to understand the topic as a whole picture. At the moment, she is interested in the directed viewpoint created with images and the features of image reading.

During her earlier activities, she was represented at several Hungarian and international exhibitions. From 2016, she is a member of the Studio of Young Photographers. In 2017 she was awarded the Photography Scholarship by The Association of Hungarian Photographers. From 2018 she is a member of The Studio of Young Artists’ Association. In 2019 she won the Budapest Portfolio Review.

Kata Geibl

Kata Geibl (1989) studied photography in Budapest at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) and at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. Her work is mainly focused on humanity, collective memory and the ambiguities of the photographic medium.  In the last 3 years, she has exhibited in group shows in Budapest and became a member of the Young Artists’ and Photographers’ Association. She presented her most recent series, Sisyphus, at the Unseen Amsterdam festival in September which was followed by her first solo show in Budapest. In 2018 she received the Photography Scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers, was a finalist at Breda Photo Talent Program and won the emerging talent Paris Photo Carte Blanche Students Award. This year she received the Pécsi József Photography Scholarship and is shortlisted for PALM Photo Prize. In September she is starting her studies at KABK’s Photography and Society Master Program.

Kocsi Olga

Kocsi Olga (1987) attended Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design between 2008 and 2016, where she obtained Media Design BA, ~MA and Visual Culture and Design Teacher degrees. She’s currently also partaking in the university’s Media Arts doctorate program. In 2011 she won an Erasmus scholarship in Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Between 2017-2019 got the Derkovits fineart scholarship. Most influential foundation of her works is the “Little House” where she grew up, and her personal stories lived inside it. In her installations which provides multisensorial experiences, she works with topics which lies in the cross section of various scientific fields, such as: the relation between reality and virtual reality and it’s potential evolution in the future; pushing and mapping the borders between private and public spheres; or time travelling. It’s incredibly important for her to actively involve the spectator via creating unorthodox situations for them. She works and lives in Budapest.

Koleszár Adél

Adél Koleszár (1986) is originally from Hungary, where she graduated with a Masters in Fine Art Photography at the MOME University, after receiving a BA degree in Social Sciences in Budapest. In 2013 she arrived to Mexico thanks to the SRE Artist Residency Program 2013 where she was mainly working in the past years. In 2014 her project on contemporary religions in Mexico was selected as finalist by Magnum Photos& Ideastap Award, in 2015 she was the winner of the Budapest Portfolio Prize, in 2016-17 receiver of the Pécsi József Photography Award which supports the work of young Hungarian photographers. She was the solo exhibitor of the Discovery Show section of the Fotofestiwal Lodz, her book „New Routes of Faith” was shortlisted on the Unseen Photography Dummy Award. Was exhibited and published widely in her country and internationally, amongst in Berlin, Mexico City, New York, Arles, Vienna, and featured on Foam Spotlight, Vice Mexico, Fotografia Magazine, Der Grief. In 2018 she was part of the British Journal of Photography Ones to Watch selection, nominated for Joop Swart Masterclass and been fellow of The Robert Capa Grand Prize, in 2019 nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award.

Evaluation of Angel Luis Gonzalez (CEO, PhotoIreland Foundation)

Anna Ádám has a rich practice, merging her various interests into an aesthetically driven installation, somewhere between the kitsch and the contemporary. I believe the jury was attracted to her unique performative practice and its potential beyond the photographic.

Set in the studio, the work of Krystyna Bilak is carefully constructed, its presence controlled, the location measured; she builds stories where only selected elements are added as contributors to the narration. Everything is precise, and the results are astonishing. I was particularly glad to discover her practice, that I hope to present in Ireland soon.

Kata Geibl‘s practice exudes visual sophistication, with well-researched and carefully constructed bodies of work such as Sisyphus. Here, a pseudo-scientific vocabulary makes the images intriguing, while the project itself questions our almost religious admiration for Science. It would not be hard to see this work exhibited widely.

Olga Kocsi‘s practice based research is hyper-playful, demonstrating the modus operandi of an artist whose everyday is questioned oftentimes with amusing results. I enjoyed her video works specifically, with her witty humour and conceptual approach.

Adél Koleszár has focused her practice on bringing us closer into Mexican crime-related violence and their religious views, in New Routes of Faith. Closer, not to see the fresh wounds bleeding, but the human side; to see the misery and the sublime in the everyday life, with a personal approach that evidences what she is capable of. It would be interesting to see where she puts her ambition next, she is certainly one to follow.

The project partners are: British Journal of Photography, Photo España, Fondazione Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, FoMu, Photo Romania, Photo Ireland, Festival d’Hyéres, Triennale der Photographie Hamburg
http://www.futures-photography.com