Annete Behrens' works emerge from her fascination for the "Other" and for what deviates from the norm. The outsider is an important concept within her works. Through photography and video she looks at various, stereotypical groups and searches for groups with whom she can show our complicated, judgmental relationship towards the "Other".

What do we see, how do we want to been seen and what do we hide on the inside?
Can an image actually show the "Other"? Can a picture reach beyond a cliched representation? We arrange and categorize the world and the people around us in order to understand our chaotic surroundings.

Due to Behrens' upbringing in Germany and the history of my country she's been conscious about where this in- and exclusion can lead for all her life.

website

Nisrine Boukhari is a visual artist based in Vienna and one from the co-founder for AllArtNow the first contemporary art space in Syria. Boukhari’s artistic practice is marked by a nomadic complexity, both in terms of the factual situation of her native Syria and in terms of its own interests and implications. While working in Damascus, Boukhari investigated the «psychogeography» of the city, and after having to leave in 2012, her work has circled around questions of nomadism and belonging, and of how to deal with the loss of a city when the city seems to have lost itself.

website

Mohamed Bourouissa (1978, Blida) lives and works in Paris. He is renowned for his dynamic, impactful colour photographs of youth, immigrants and everyday life in the Paris suburbs. After graduating from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Mohamed Bourouissa attracted the attention of the international art world with his series Périphérique, in which the artist registered the tensions and turbulence on the streets of Paris suburbs.

website

Daya Cahen (NL/ USA) was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where she studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2002-2006). She makes photographs, videos, video and audio installations and since recently small paintings. The mainthemes of her work are propaganda, indoctrination and the manipulation of mass media.

Having two parents who survived WOII as jewish children, Daya Cahen grew up with the notion that the world can change on you in a day and you never know at which end of the line you will end up. A society can turn against any group of people. Investigating how these developments of indoctrination, radicalization and fear of otherness can arise within society as well as the mass psychology that goes with it, form the starting point for all of Cahen’s work. The role of the individual within the masses plays an important part in her work.

website

Yvon Chabrowski lives in Berlin and Leipzig. She separates media images that seem known and at the same time unfamiliar from their context and re-enact them. She takes characters and scenes from the internet, newspapers or television and deconstructs them. After this process of analysis, she re-enacts them in a reduced form.

The question in all of Chabrowski's work is: How much context needs a picture? How far can you take it out of context and yet still assign its origin? And how can it be experienced in a whole new and different way as something alien in the familiar?

website

Ad van Denderen (1943, The Netherlands) has worked as a photographer for Vrij Nederland, Stern, NRC Handelsblad, GEO and The Independent magazine, among others. He has received a number of prestigious prizes for his work, including the Visa d’Or at the international photo festival Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan in 2001 and The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts’ (Fonds BKVB) oeuvre prize in 2007/2008. Go No Go, his book on migration in Europe, based on 13 years of work, was published by Actes Sud, Mets & Schilt, Lunwerg Editores, Edition Braus and Paradox in 2003. For the 2008 SteidlMack/Paradox publication So Blue So Blue, Van Denderen photographed the 17 countries around the Mediterranean Sea. Earlier publications include Peace in The Holy Land, a book about Palestine (1997) andWelkom in Suid-Afrika, about apartheid (1991). Ad van Denderen is a member of VU agency, Paris.

website

LinkedIn

Rineke Dijkstra is a leading contemporary Dutch photographer. Known for her stark, engaging portraits, she often focuses on particular communities of people with an emphasis on capturing the awkwardness and self-consciousness of adolescence. “With young people everything is much more on the surface—all the emotions,” the artist observed. “When you get older you know how to hide things.”

Born on June 2, 1959 in Sittard, the Netherlands, she studied at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her early work, Beach Portraits (1992–1994), is a seminal series of full-color, life-sized photographs of young teenagers in bathing suits taken on both American and European beaches. The project was shown in 1997 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, bringing the artist widespread attention and critical acclaim.

Dijkstra has also worked in video, such as her filmed portraits of dancing teenagers in her work The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL (1996–1997). She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, notably including “Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” shown at both the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2012. She was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2012.

Monica Nouwens (1964) completed a postgraduate fellowship at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam and ultimately attended the California Institute of the Arts exchange programme for film and photography, where she developed a fascination with California's urban landscapes. Nouwens' work can be found in various collections worldwide. Amongst them are Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Levi's in London and Prada U.S.A. Corp in New York. Nouwens is a lecturer at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.