Nominated by Kathrin Schönegg

Farah Al Qasimi was born in the United Arab Emirates, after the Gulf War, and before the oil boom. She was originally conceived as quintuplets but was the only one to make it through the pregnancy. When she came into the world, her mother had hoarded bottles of water and canned food in our attic because of the widespread fear of the violence encroaching on their small corner of the Gulf peninsula. Al Qasimi's arrival to the world was shrouded in an anxious urgency that informs her life and work.

There wasn’t much to do in her adolescence. She played soccer on the street, went to the McDonald’s attached to the gas station, and reenacted music videos in friends’ basements. It is this spirit of desperate imagination that she now understands as central to her drive as an artist: the need to alchemize her environment into something greater than the sum of its parts; to understand how the world works through its structures and surfaces. Al Qasimi has played in punk bands since her youth. She learned to play the guitar under her bed sheets so her parents wouldn’t hear the grotesque lyrics of the songs she was trying to play and won a scholarship to study music at Yale University but was drawn to photography after happening upon a darkroom class. Photography is the only language that comes clearly to Al Qasimi: it is at once an obsession, a compulsion, an organizing tool, and a harness for chaos. It is the only way she can form memories of the places around her that are at risk of disappearance or renewal.

Nominated by Kateryna Radchenko

Lisa Bukreyeva (1993) is a photographer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. She got into photography in 2019. Member of Burn My Eye Collective.

Awards: Italian Street Photography festival, finalist 2021 BIAŁYSTOK INTERPHOTO FESTIVAL | winner in street art photo category 2021 PEP New Talents | shortlisted 2022 Baku Street Photography festival | 3rd place in series category (Dead Water) Group exhibitions: 2022 Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland 2022 Noorderlicht, Groningen, Netherlands 2022 Deichtor Hallen Internationale Kunst Und Fotographie, Hamburg, Germany 2022 Nulid Gallery, Iceland 2022 PEP, Kommunale Galerie, Berlin, Germany 2021 BIAŁYSTOK INTERPHOTO FESTIVAL 2020 ICP Concerned, New York, USA 2019 Kyiv Photo Fair, Ukraine Publications: Metal Magazine The New York Magazine Damn magazine (#81 cover + publication) Spiegel Zeit Blind Zeitung magazin WOZ Booooooom! Fisheye Magazine Eyeshot magazine Bird In Flight Perimetro Untitled Reporters The Village Ukraine The Ukraїner.

Nominated by Barbara Gregov

Anna Ehrenstein (1993) works in artistic practice with a focus on research and mediation. Her work explores the relationship between human and object in the digital age. While her mother came to Germany on a working visa, her father left due to rejected asylum, and after a trans-European odyssey started anew in Tirana. This biographical peculiarity sparked her interest in the necropolitics of migration. Raised between the two societies' reflections on diaspora related hi and lo culture, the social life of things and the politics of intellectual property form the main foci of her work.

She studied photography and media arts at the University of Applied Arts in Dortmund and the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Additionally, she frequented curatorial classes in Valetta and Lagos and sees her work as an art educator as part of her artistic and activist practice. Working in various forms and shapes of collectivity is as central to her work as the questioning of power asymmetries within the colonial legacies of photographic practices. She works with a variety of groups together on collaborative artistic projects, e.g. amongst others for the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, within the intersectional, feminist collective N*A*I*L*S , the Critical Academy in Dublin or Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. She exhibited internationally and was awarded grants, residencies and research scholarships.

Nominated by Laura Lafon

Bérangère Fromont has lived and worked in Paris for twenty years now. She is a resident of the contemporary creation venue POUSH Manifesto. As a teenager, she was obsessed with the Spanish war, as her grandfather was a Republican worker who fought fascism. He was an anarchist and fled to France to join the Resistance. She studied film and literature at the Sorbonne in the 90s and has a master's degree and wrote her thesis on Salò by Pasolini. This was when she discovered the poetic and political metaphor of the fireflies. It has since become a recurring motif in her work. She then left filmmaking for the immediacy of photography and devoted herself to long-term personal projects.

Cosmos, her first series with teenagers in Arles, was published as a book in 2015. I Don't Want to Disappear Completely, a series with teenagers in Latvia, was published in 2017. Except the Clouds, a series about Athens, was published with the support of the French Institute in 2018. And her most recent work, L'amour seul brisera nos coeurs, was published with the support of the CNAP in Paris in 2022. All her books received good reviews from a number of critics – the two latter were mentioned on many best-books-of-the-year lists. In the last fifteen years, her work has been exhibited worldwide as well as featured in various web and paper publications. In addition to her personal work, she also enjoys collaborating with other artists, including painters, poets, and musicians.

Nominated by Emma Bowkett

Sasha Kurmaz was born in 1986 in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he currently lives and works. In 2008 he graduated from the Design Department at the National Academy of Culture and Arts in Kyiv, and the Communications Engineering Department at the Kyiv Electromechanical College in 2005.

Kurmaz's works have been highly praised and widely presented at many international exhibitions and festivals, including exhibitions at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, C/O Berlin, Latvian Museum of Photography, Künstlerhaus Vienna, Kaunas Photo Festival, Akademie der Künste (Berlin), NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Museum Folkwang, Athens Photo Festival, Skovde Art Museum, Zamek Ujazdowski, Format Photo Festival, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, and many others. His work has been published in a wide range of international magazines and newspapers, including Liberation, Foam Magazine, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Vice, Bloomberg Businessweek, Krytyka Polityczna, Fisheye, YET magazine, Rolling Stones, Fotograf, Adbusters magazine, Die ZEIT. In 2016 he received the C/O Berlin Talent Award (Germany), and Kazimir Malevich Artist Award in 2020 (Ukraine).

Nominated by Zied Ben Romdhane

Born in 1993, in the Southern town of Hassi R'Mel, Fethi Sahraoui is an Algerian documentary photographer, working on the social landscape, after studying foreign languages at the university of his town Mascara, he graduated in 2018 after preparing his final studies project about the contribution of Black American photographers during The Civil Rights Movement to become a full-time photographer. Fethi's work was shown in different institutions like The Arab World Institute and published on numerous platforms like the New York Times among others. He is a member of the 220Collective, a Magnum Foundation fellow, and a participant in the last edition of The Joop Swart Masterclass, Fethi is working on a movie project as well that started out from a photographic adventure.

Nominated by Kateryna Radchenko

Elena Subach (1980) is a Ukrainian visual artist and photographer. Born in Chervonohrad, Ukraine. Currently, the artist lives and works in Lviv. Elena studied economics and received her master's degree at the Lesia Ukrainka Eastern European National University, department of economics, before she turned to photography. In an auto-didactic way, she developed her own unique vision of Ukrainian visual culture. Elena has also been working in curatorial practice at the Lviv National Art Gallery since 2019 and teaches courses in art history and curatorial practice at the School of Visual Communications SCVOT in Kyiv.

She is a member of the Ukrainian Photographic Alternative Association. She has received awards such as the New East Photo Prize (2016), Future Talents 2019 nominee and the Gaude Polonia Scholarship (2019) while her photographs have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, including British Journal of Photography, Weltkunst, Vogue Poland, the Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and many others. Her work has been shown at international exhibitions, most recently at the Nordic House in Reykjavik, Photo Elysee Museum of Photography in Lausanne, Kunstforum Wien in Vienna, Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, Willy Brandt House in Berlin, the World Bank in Washington DC and the Tycho Brahe Museum in Ven, Sweden. Her book Hidden was released by British publisher Besides Press released in the autumn of 2022.