Here and elsewhere, home is physical – land and place – but also communal – shared and divided. We see this in Prut, Matei Bejenaru’s ongoing study of communities along the banks of the Prut river between Romania and Moldova that’s become a de facto border of the European Union. It’s there too in Moira Ricci’s folklore-inflected portrait of the Maremma region, where the artist’s roots run deep. And in self-taught antifascist photographer and factory worker Sisto Sisti’s 1935-50 documentation of daily life in a village housing employees of a chemical plant. 

Several exhibitions consider the construction of housing as an architectural endeavour – where this goes right and where this goes wrong. Alejandro Cartagena’s exhibition in Palazzo Vizzani is an iteration of his Deutsche Börse-nominated book, A Small Guide to Home Ownership, on the effects of urban sprawl in northern Mexico. Images are hung from the ceiling so that visitors almost collide with them as they move through the rooms to represent the ever shifting nature of life in Latin America, Cartenaga says. Rows of identikit candy coloured buildings alongside pictures of residents carpooling – the only way to get around since transport infrastructure has not been fully considered. The work is adapted smartly, TVs showing American real estate ads standing in for the witty book design, which echoes a handbook, both hinting at US influence. 

In images, a documentary and a display of snapshots from personal photo albums, Julia Gaisbacher introduces us to the opposite of this, a remarkable participatory social housing project from 1970s Austria led by architect Eilfreid Huth who worked with young families to co-design homes exactly meeting their unique needs. Many, now in old age, still live there, but funding for this approach ceased since it was so much more expensive than the usual one-size-all fits way so her work is a window onto utopia. Ursula Schultz-Dornburg’s show at the smart National Art Gallery of Bologna drives home the sheer variety of home constructions from Iraq to Russia, Georgia to Indonesia, each shaped by specific cultures and environments. 

There are many neat echoes like this, subtle links between projects that make the whole feel coherent and revelatory, encouraging you to see relationships over time and space. The doll house-like cut outs in Monica Ricci’s work and the popihuis, say. Mikael Olsen and Kelly O’Brien’s shows seem on the surface to converge. Olsen had the chance to photograph two now empty homes of architect Bruno Mathsson. He made himself at home in these now desolate, unkempt buildings and while the former inhabitants’ presence persists, the resulting images of abandon are a far cry from the glossy ‘at home with’ spreads you see in the design press but say something about what’s left, the just-visible residues that linger. 

O’Brien’s No Rest For the Wicked pays tribute to the artist’s mother and grandmother, both of whom worked as cleaners in domestic settings. Their work, unlike those of an architect, is not visible, not lauded. Within a relatively small space, clever curation by Raquel Villar-Perez differentiates distinct strands to the work – earlier imagery that is more conventionally documentary alongside recent, more conceptual, collaboratively staged developments that extend out from the frame through objects and props. A portrait of the artist’s mother, with a mop obscuring her face sits on a table laid candles, a tribute to Bologna’s patron saint of cleaners. 

Perhaps the least obviously related to home is LIVING, WORKING, SURVIVING by Jeff Wall, the main exhibition at Fondazione MAST, which continues until 8 March 2026. These are what Wall calls “near documentary.” He says: “I don’t have any ideas. I don’t start from ideas.” Instead, he notes a phenomenon – rural workers arriving at a city, suburban hunters, a volunteer mopping the floor – and then conjures this as he sees it. Wall invites viewers to dwell in his large-scale images. What he presents are not narratives. There is no beginning, no end, only a perpetual middle so that viewers must fill in the missing information as they see fit.

In outlining his vision, Artistic Director Francesco Zanot refers to two touchstone influences. The first a 1986 exhibition that took place in homes across a city and the second, I Like America and America Likes Me, a durational piece where German artist Joseph Beeuys lived for three days in a gallery with a coyote. Art can be somewhere we, however fleetingly, find a home. And home in turn can be a gallery, a stage, a popihuise, a place of play and possibility, risky, transformative, more layered than the everyday term would have us think. If Home is ever solid, it’s plastic, bending, in a continuous process of reconstruction, in the world and in the mind.

Foto/Industria, Bologna is on at Fondazione Mast until 14 December, 2025

@fotoindustria

“I try to find pictures that convey the same emotion I get when I walk in to my aunt’s living room”

The opening image of Living Rooms – the publishing house’s latest book, made up of 41 photographers – is a woman peeking out of a window in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “I love the patterns of it,” Baddar comments. “That’s why I put it as the first photo. Everything blends so well.” The photographer’s name is missing from the page, but turn to the end and you’ll find a glossary of names beside each image. This one is by a British photographer, Olivia Arthur. 

Baddar acknowledges the complexity of curating and sourcing visuals for each publication, noting that her concern isn’t necessarily who shot an image, but rather what the image depicts. In an attempt to assert that beauty still exists and that it’s not “just one big miserable shit hole,” as mainstream media might have it, she combines archival imagery with contemporary visuals – the latter captured mostly by independent photographers within the MENA region and its diaspora. 

Born in Amsterdam, Baddar has never lived in Morocco, but refers to it as home through frequent family visits. “We always go to my aunt’s and the entire family sits in her living room,” she recalls. “I try to find pictures that convey the same emotion I get when I walk in. We just sit there and it’s so funny because some of them don’t want to go home, so we sit on the floor and they sleep on the couch. A few hours pass and we’re having dinner, and then a few more hours pass and it’s the call for prayer, so then we pray.” 

Flipping through the book, she shows me a double-page spread of a woman dancing amongst a group of people in Fez, 1984, captured by the late Morocco-born French photographer, Bruno Barbey. “This is seriously how it would look if all my aunties and cousins had dinner,” she smiles. “It doesn’t have to be a wedding or anything, but it will turn into this. I like it because it’s so close to home.” 

Familiar experiences and the presence of loved ones are reflected throughout multiple images in Living Rooms, such as the work of Ali Al Shehabi and the late, renowned photographer Abbas. Bahrain-born Al Shehabi draws on nostalgia, storytelling and soft humour as inspiration for his practice. The book features a prominent image of his, where a man sits on the floor chewing a toothpick while a woman, presumed to be his mother, braids his hair – an image we don’t often see. Shot on the morning of Eid, it serves as a heartwarming reminder of the gestures of love that take place within the comfort of one’s home. 

Abbas’ images also display gestures of love and simple moments of joy – a family sharing a meal together, a group of men celebrating. These images provide a contrasting narrative to the usual documentation of wars, revolutions and religion that he was so well known for. 

Baddar points out some photos by Miriam Stanke, a German documentary photographer whose work follows themes of identity, post-war trauma, religion, and the way history affects generations. One of her images shows a Kurdish mother, Fatma Timus, sitting in her living room in 2015 beneath a framed photo of her daughter. Traces of existence are a common thread amongst these images, often displayed with pride. Similar themes are found throughout the work of the Netherlands-based Palestinian photographer and director Sarkir Khader, also featured in the book. Much of Khader’s images are a raw documentation of the quotidian life experienced across the Middle East, particularly in Palestine. 

The book closes with a double-page spread of a sofa against a window, overlooking a vast landscape. The image was captured in 2020 by Rita Kabalan, taken while looking at restored furniture from Arc En Ciel in Damour, Lebanon. The October 2019 wildfires had taken place a year prior to the photo being taken, giving rise to the revolution just days later.

Although Living Rooms invites us to consider an alternative notion to the typical death and destruction associated with the region, it recognises the complex reality of those that call it home. Some experience grief while others may not. Some may remain still in the aftermath of grief while others find warmth and joy. The photos in Living Rooms exist as an archive of history and memories that lie within the walls – walls that aren’t dictated by a set of rules.

middleastarchive.com

“By positioning objects in a certain way you can create tension or give things a sense of falling or floating”

Despite similarities between Lam’s previous projects and Still Living, working with historic objects presented him with a unique challenge, he reveals: “I’ve been playing with the arrangement and composition of objects for so long that the technicalities of making a still life feel quite natural and simple to me. I think the more challenging aspect of the commission was the emotional side because these weren’t my stories, these aren’t rooms I’ve lived in or spent time in.” 

Lam first came to the still life after five years working as a fashion photographer. While living in Hong Kong during the pandemic he began making still lifes of his grandmother’s home and quickly found an affinity with the form: “There’s something very romantic about them. I love how you’re so in control. By positioning objects in a certain way you can create tension or give things a sense of falling or floating. Somehow, even though my images are always staged, it felt more honest than doing fashion photography.” The tension and dynamism that Lam describes is a unique quality of his work; despite the potential rigidity of his chosen form his photographs feel lived-in and vital. 

Lam’s work photographing his grandmother’s home culminated in his project Always Returning to You where he photographed scenes from her home in the immediate aftermath of her death. The images, which depict everyday moments of their lives together thrown into disarray, capture the surreal and consuming experience of grief in a way which is visceral and charged with emotion. 

In his work for the Museum of the Home Lam infuses in his images the same emotional truth and honesty as his personal work but relies on his imagination and the museum’s descriptions of each room to construct a portrait of their inhabitants. “I tried to approach this with the same kind of structure as my personal work but the emotion I put in was entirely made up in my own head,” he tells me. “Looking at the rooms I got information about the objects from the museum but also thought about who might live there, what their story is, what type of person they are. When I met up with the curators who talked me through the stories around the objects and rooms I think they thought the questions I asked were a bit weird; ‘Are these people in a rush?’ ‘What is their relationship like?’ ‘Do they love each other?’ ‘Are they late?’ A lot of who they were was left to my own interpretation”.

This careful consideration of his subjects is easily identifiable in Lam’s images. In ‘A Terraced House in 2024’ Lam revels in the quotidian beauty of the rituals of cooking and cleaning in the Nguyễn family kitchen, “showing the intimacy of our relationships with these very everyday objects felt special.” Torn pages of a calendar hang mid-air and fall onto the countertop beside a colour-coordinated light pink teapot, curtain and strainer, a lime and pink scouring pad and a rice cooker embellished with ornate flowers. 

Similarly Lam quickly found an emotional connection to ‘A High-Rise Flat in 2005’, “I related most to the 2000s flat because that’s my generation and it just had so much stuff in it. I immediately saw the Greggs sausage roll in bed and thought, ‘okay, she is depressed, why is there all this stuff on the floor? Does it belong to her ex or something?” Lam’s depiction of the chaotic lives and rocky relationship of a queer couple in the early 2000s also reveals his subtle attention to representing the historic time of each room in his approach to photographing them. The crowded, bright, evenly lit and almost glossy appearance of 2005 contrasts with the chiaroscuro of ‘A Townhouse in 1878’ which is reminiscent of the Dutch still lifes Lam cites as an early influence on his own use of the form.

Of all the Rooms Through Time there is one in which Lam’s skill in crafting narratives in his images is  most evident. In ‘A Terraced House in 1978’ Lam draws our attention to the challenges of raising children amid the racism of the 1970s for black families. Against a red backdrop rests a red tray with a black doll propped up inside, next to it are some dominoes, an afro comb with a handle made to resemble a raised fist and three toy cars. Placed above this arrangement, there is a newspaper with the headline ‘BLACK POWER or bloodbath’ and a small toy police car. 

The room had an immediate effect on Lam: “seeing the television and newspaper headline and then children’s toys on the floor conjured a very strong image for me of being a kid playing with your toys while your parents watch the news on TV, and being affected by it despite not really being able to understand what’s happening. I wanted to show the relationship between this strong imagery; this aggressive red, which represents blood but also power, rage and all these complex adult emotions and this newspaper headline, with children’s toys; a pack of cigarettes, a doll, a police car, an ambulance”.

It is perhaps in this image that Still Living most reflects the potency of historic objects in understanding the present day. In his careful representations of the complex relationship between identity and the home Lam reveals too the palpable resonance of the past in the present. As the Museum of the Home continues its project to decolonise its collections, and decides what to do with the statue of Robert Geffrye that remains on the museum’s grounds, Lam’s work raises valuable questions about the afterlives of objects and the stories they tell.

Still Living is on at Museum of the Home until 29 June 

@kennethlam____

“Everything was new, different, and foreign. But at some point, discovering the unknown became my new passion.”

“I landed in North Carolina with one piece of luggage, poor English, and no expectations,” writes Tomanova in the new book, in which she centres on the shifting notion of home as told from the perspective of an expat. “Never had I felt so lonely and isolated,” she says. “Everything was new, different, and foreign. But at some point, discovering the unknown became my new passion.”

Because of complications with her immigration status, the painter-turned-photographer could not visit the Czech Republic for eight years. In that time, Tomanova relocated to New York City and established herself as one of the most exciting voices on the emerging photography scene. Nearly a decade after she first set foot in the US, freedom arrived in an envelope delivered to her East Village flat in the autumn of 2018 – it contained her Green Card. 

A few months later in December, Tomanova finally made it back home to Mikulov. Her life was not the only one to have changed. “My nephews and nieces had grown up, my grandma had passed away,” says Tomanova. “Not even my dog was there anymore.” Though these were all things she had been informed about, the reminder of not being there to witness them was heartbreaking. 

Tomanova’s new monograph – possibly her most personal, revealing book yet – emerged from that first trip home, a 20-day-long stay with her family. “I was taking pictures in an old quarry where I used to walk with my dog and swim with friends in the summer,” she says of the moment when the book’s title “popped” into her head. “I was overwhelmed by the fact that, for so long, this little corner of the world was my entire universe. It was all that mattered.” 

Shot with her loyal analogue Contax camera, the series chronicles the photographer’s attempt to reconcile with the deeply contrasting emotions that the long-awaited homecoming evoked in her. It takes Tomanova’s vivid observation into a new context, where the rural landscapes of her family’s farm are shown alongside self-portraits in which she appropriate clothes, paintings, living spaces, and outdoor locations of her fading memories. It Was Once My Universe offers a portrait of the artist that is as endearing as it is haunting. She has outgrown the wooden-floored rooms of her family home, and feels, once again, unrooted. “I shot everything that sparked feelings, memories or confusion,” she says. “I felt like a collector of sorts, trying to assemble and capture everything that defined my home and myself.” 

The opening photograph of the book, for example, shows Tomanova standing in a field behind her house, wearing an oversized, pine green jumper and a pair of worn-out jeans. Titled In Dad’s Sweater (All That Is Left), the image is a moving dedication to her father, who died two days before her 16th birthday. 

The photographs that follow [in the book] continue the artist’s search for grounding among emotional turmoil. Three years on from that trip in 2019, the existential dilemma – “where is home?” – eventually saw Tomanova regain a strong sense of self, grounded in the enriching complexity of her Mikulov and New York City experiences. “Today I know that Mikulov will always be home,” she says. “That’s where my family and closest friends are. Nothing can change it.”

marietomanova.com

It Was Once My Universe by Marie Tomanova is published by Super Labo. The book launches at the New York Art Book fair in NYC on 15 October 2022, and at Fotograf Gallery in Prague on 14 November 2022.

“Without school to distract us, everything fell into place,” says Gat. “There was definitely a sensation of freedom, that you were able to build your own curriculum, and actually choose what you want to do with your time… With this comes a great deal of responsibility.” Rather than following a prescribed route, “you really decide,” she continues, “you realise to what extent your life is in your own hands”.

Born in 1997 in Israel, and now based between Marseille and Rotterdam, Gat’s work has received recognition from numerous international awards, and has been exhibited in Europe and the US. She is currently exhibiting Khamsa Khamsa Khamsa as part of the official programme of Les Rencontres d’Arles, but also as a solo show at Galerie Huit Arles. Last week, she launched her debut photo book with French publisher Actes Sude, to coincide with the opening of the festival. 

As time goes on, Gat is “more and more grateful” for the childhood her parents chose for her. In engaging with her work, Gat hopes viewers will recognise that there are alternative routes to traditional educational structures, which don’t always serve every individual. “It’s like asking an elephant, a fish and a monkey to climb a tree. They don’t all have the same skills,” she says. “[Homeschooling] is not a system. You let the plant grow, and you see what it becomes.” 

Documenting moments of joy, intimacy, and play, Khamsa Khamsa Khamsa is an invitation to reimagine what we define as learning. But it is also an autobiography, an intimate document of Gat’s unique childhood, as well as her development as a photographer. In the words of her mother: “Your archive keeps that world we lived in as a real place, which otherwise could be easily mistaken for a dream.”

Julia Gat is exhibiting at Galerie Huit Arles and Les Rencontres D’Arles until 25 September 2022.

OpenWalls Arles is a global photography award that exhibits both emerging and established photographers alongside Les Rencontres D’Arles. OpenWalls 2022 opens for entries on 6th October. Pre Register now.

Currently on show at Galerie Huit Arles, the winning series of OpenWalls Arles 2020 presents a succession of derelict human structures juxtaposed against the majestic terrain of California’s Eastern Sierra

In his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Ansel Adams recounts the production history of his 1944 image “Winter Sunrise,” depicting darkened hills beneath the vast, craggy peaks of Mount Whitney, Sierra Nevada. Lone Pine High School graduates had climbed the rocky slopes of the Alabama Hills to whitewash an imposing “L P” against the stone, which the famed American landscape photographer later ruthlessly removed in his negative: “I have been criticised by some for doing this,” he writes, “but I am not enough of a purist to perpetuate the scar and thereby destroy — for me, at least — the extraordinary beauty and perfection of the scene.”

Where Adams epitomised idealised landscape photography, which elevated the natural and the elemental in deliberate omission of human interference, some decades later the “New Topographic” era would materialise in partial response. Through the 1970s, the likes of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Catherine Wagner employed landscape photography to visualise man-made America in all its rigorous banality: monochrome warehouses, industrial sites, parking lots.

It is between these two extremes that the work of Osceola Refetoff, series winner of the OpenWalls Arles 2020 ‘Daily Life’ category, is realised. The work is on show at Galerie Huit Arles until 06 August 2022,  and then by appointment until 26 September. Refetoff’s winning body of work, It’s a Mess Without You, presents a succession of derelict human structures juxtaposed against the majestic terrain of California’s Eastern Sierra. The series exists as part of a wider set of projects surveying man’s presence in the deserts of the American West.

“I’m interested in creating photos that are beautiful,” the photographer tells British Journal of Photography, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “I’m less interested in creating a world that’s perfect.”

Crucially, to Refetoff, the Eastern Sierra is beautiful despite its earmarks of human development: roads, transmission lines, garbage dumps. “There are no more ‘virgin landscapes’ anywhere on Earth,” he remarks, “and the idea is problematic on so many levels — but particularly in terms of discouraging environmental thoughtfulness.” Characterising his practice as “defiantly old-school” (It’s a Mess Without You is made up solely of single exposures, not composites), the photographer is particularly wary of the dangers of Photoshop in presenting illusory depictions of the natural world. “We expose people to these idealistic images,” he says, “then when we look out and see what’s actually there, they think, ‘that’s not even worth preserving. It’s already ruined.’ We have to get on board with preserving areas that have already been impacted.”

At once dreamlike and hyper-realistic, fragile and formidable, It’s a Mess Without You sees crisp blue skies engulf abandoned alfalfa farms. Jagged mountain tops peek through long-decayed window frames as bright orange sunlight pours over remnants of lives left behind. Partially inspired by Edward Hopper, the project finds new meaning in the age of isolation, when the window has been rendered our foremost way of experiencing the world — a shared symbol of a global crisis. Here, the window is employed not only as an architectural subject, but a narrative device to frame the stories of millennia-old lands, and the tenuous marks we inflict upon them in our wake.

“I’m contrasting the very mortal lives of the people that built and inhabited these structures against a truly timeless backdrop of the Eastern Sierra mountains,” Refetoff explains. “The harsh desert sun is a powerful spotlight to shine on hubris versus mortality — or the grand ambitions of all of us little ant people.”

Shot over ten years, the project dissects the tragedy of abandoned dreams against the vast cultural legacy of California’s deserts — a mythical land, charged with human hope and promised opportunity. Needless to say, for many immigrants and settlers, the West has symbolised a chance to “make it”: picture the opening scene of Clint Eastwood’s classic musical western Paint Your Wagon (1969), showing a succession of caravans bustling across the bountiful landscape in search of fortune and a new life.

The idea was originally propagated through images and text produced and commissioned by the American government to entice citizens and immigrants to settle there; in those pictures, the West exuded promise, natural resources and open land for the taking — a boundless Eden where dreams could be made. While a pantheon of American painters, photographers and filmmakers have fuelled this mythology for over a century, the reality that exists today is a loose patchwork of struggling communities, military-industrial compounds and failed mining projects. In the near future, immense wind and solar projects will likely dominate many areas, transforming the landscape in ways that are complex and irreversible.

Indeed, as Refetoff points out, the myth of the West has always been just that. A myth. Aside from the active displacement and slaughter of large First Nations populations in order to make room for such “dreams”, forging them into realities in such a barren environment was never an easy undertaking. “To this day, a lot of people make a go of it and then abandon their homes,” Refetoff explains — aptly summarising what It’s a Mess Without You is really about: the people who are absent from the frames. “When shooting, so often I’d stand by these windows and think, ‘someone stood here and did dishes and looked at this view for hundreds of hours. Then at some point, they packed up all their stuff and walked out of their home forever.’”

Ultimately, Refetoff considers his wider artistic purpose as engaging Californian people with environmentalism in a different way. Not just in urban centres like Los Angeles, where thinking is already substantially liberal, but crucially within the rural, distinctly conservative desert communities themselves. While the two adjacent populations tread a complex relationship (Refetoff cites the California water wars, a series of political conflicts throughout the 19th century over water rights between LA and farmers and ranchers in the Owens Valley), he uses visual storytelling as a way of appealing to those on both sides of the ideological fault line.

“We live in a sharply partisan country, and words like ‘environmentalism’ are fighting words in a lot of these small desert communities. But we all have to inhabit this planet — so we have to reflect more deeply about how we exploit these resources. We have to act as a society.”

OpenWalls 2022 opens for entries on 6th October. Pre Register now.

During his studies in the Egyptian capital, Basheer taught himself photography. He had been fascinated by the medium since looking at his uncle’s old photographs, and began taking photos on his phone. After he graduated, he studied photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism, finishing in 2021.

“At the start of my photography career, most of my work was street photography,” he recalls. “At some point, I felt a need to express myself more through the medium and that is when I started my first long-term project, Sweet Taste of Sugarcane [2017–ongoing]. It explores my memory of brotherhood and the time I spent studying in the Quranic school when I was a kid.”

In 2018, Basheer started his series The Home Seekers. The work reflects on discrimination in Cairo, and tells the story of ‘Ali’ and ‘Essam’ – two Sudanese men who emigrated to Egypt, fleeing persecution in their home country for a better life only to be faced with hardships once again.

The photographer Tasneem Alsultan, who nominated Basheer, says: “During the protests in Sudan, Salih went back to his home country [in 2019] and covered the capital city of Khartoum differently to the other photographers. His images were evocative, without the need of a headline.” Alsultan describes the work as “poignant, serene, quiet and, at times, uncomfortable”. “Salih wants us viewers to feel the awkwardness and discomfort of the spaces he’s in. He quietly moves in and out of spaces that are moody and heavy with emotion.” 

The Home Seekers is ongoing, and Basheer is working on a new chapter, Is This Home, following Essam’s story to Sweden. Essam’s grandmother offered him safety and security in her Sudanese home when he was rejected from society for being gay, but after her death, he was expelled from his family. “He thought he would find a tolerant society in Cairo but that was not the case. He thought of returning to Sudan, but finally his request to resettle in Sweden was accepted,” says Basheer. 

The photographer is also working on two new projects: 22 Days In Between and Blue: Children of January. The former ruminates on memory and loss, and won Basheer the W Eugene Smith Student Grant in 2021. “I wanted to make a body of work that would allow me to learn more about my family and serve as a way to heal from the trauma of losing parents,” he says. Blue: Children of January is about the ongoing Sudan revolution that began in December 2018, with a focus on the youth. It questions the country’s history with military coups and how they affect Sudan today and in the future. 

salihbasheer.com

Abundant in warm light and a near-hypnotising serenity, the 28-year-old’s portfolio sees delicate portraits of Black and brown subjects interlaced with still lifes and landscapes: an afro comb placed on a table; palm trees enveloped by a fading sky. Rather than chronicling reality in the typical documentary sense, the artist’s objective is to “get the feel of a place; of the people you can encounter there, and how this builds a universe”.

Scheidig’s ongoing project, Insular, captures the formation of a growing African community in Malta as a result of modern migration on the central Mediterranean route. A Life In-Between explores the 200,000-strong West Indian population living in mainland France. Central to Scheidig’s work is an interrogation of dual heritage, and the experience of being caught between worlds. But also, crucially, a rebuttal of the white colonial gaze.

“I don’t want my pictures to document [Black] struggle because people know it’s there,” says Scheidig. Rather, through a soft and loving gaze, “what I am trying to do is normalise [the diaspora’s] presence… Root them through pictures.”

Scheidig graduated in 2021 with an MA from the French National School of Photography in Arles, where the development of her craft was inspired by the writings of Édouard Glissant, WEB Du Bois and other Black thinkers. Alongside several artist residencies in the past year, she won the 2021 Dior Prize for Photography and Visual Arts for Young Talents, and has worked on assignments for the likes of Nike and The New York Times. She will be exhibiting in various capacities in Paris, Malta and Switzerland throughout 2022 and 2023.

“Cédrine Scheidig embodies a discreet but strong new generation of young French photographers working within the realm of post-documentary,” says writer and curator Taous Dahmani, who nominated her for Ones to Watch. “She contains within herself the audacity to work with reality, and the intelligence necessary for this task. Her humanity informs her methodology and images.”

It is significant that most of Scheidig’s projects are ongoing. Her process is painstakingly slow: allowing ideas time to distil; returning to places and people over the course of several years. As for her message, this is more urgent. To subscribe to Glissant’s philosophy, if we are to achieve a world wherein Black diasporic people can truly live at peace, we must first be able to imagine it. The art of Cédrine Scheidig exists to help us do just that. 

@csheidig

The Castle explores the emotional significance of home and what happens when personal space is encroached upon. It all began in 2019, when Wojciechowski was helping his mum deal with some concerning family issues. “A colleague advised me that I could register to have my father officially ordered out of the apartment my mum lives in,” he explains. “At the time [my parents] had already been separated for 15 years and had lived apart for three of those. Yet he would still come over unannounced and a lot of his stuff remained all over the house.” Wojciechowski filed the papers and waited for a decision. At the same time, he entered a photography competition organised by the Arsenal Gallery in Poznan. Under the theme of ‘Places of Everydayness’, entrants had to look through records from the city’s Archives of Research on Daily Life and make pictures in response. “That’s how this idea came to me,” he says of his latest project. “I wanted to dive into the world of everyday objects, relate it to my parents, and turn everything upside down.”

The images in The Castle are a hodgepodge of comical scenes shot with an array of items found around the home. In some pictures, Wojciechowski has created makeshift sculptures, precariously balancing piles of plates or twisting wires into the shape of hearts. Elsewhere he directs his mum to perform absurd poses, balancing plates on her feet and a brick – the fundamental element of house-building – on her head. In one picture, a marriage certificate peeks out beneath a gaudy dessert of jelly and cut bananas. Wojciechowski’s favourite diptych from the series is one of his mother kneeling on the floor, using a footstool to make it look like she’s proposing. It is a lighthearted play on the subject of marriage, and the fact that his father had never asked for his mother’s hand. “I think it’s hilarious,” he says.

A sense of humour is at the heart of everything The Castle is about for Wojciechowski, and the project ultimately became a collaborative way for mother and son to process their circumstances. “I made those sculptures to explore the broken relationship of my parents, and it was even more powerful because all of the objects from that apartment brought back memories or emotions,” he says. “But me and my mum didn’t want to be dramatic about it. Turning drama into a joke was my approach from the beginning. And, actually, my mum and I improved our relationship with my dad by confronting it.” Now based in Kosovo, Wojciechowski continues his interest in the relationships between people and the places we carve out for ourselves. 

Dominikwojciechowski.com

The title, Hexamiles, refers to the term ‘hexameter’, a form of writing where a line of verse contains six ‘accents’ or ‘pulses’ as used in Homer’s Odyssey. In this way, Suter sequences images of disparate landscapes. Derelict wastelands and wild forests sit amongst epic mountains and seascapes, shifting between the romantic and the menacing. 

Suter also creates “impossible landscapes”, layering geological and biological environments to transport us to another realm. “I love to imitate the dream, and I was very curious what they could trigger. In German, we call it ‘fernweh’, an ache or pain to explore another land.”

While the project considers multiple entry points, Suter’s longing for the Swiss landscape, her home country, is what inspired her. “I miss the physicality of the place,” she explains. “I miss the rocks, the mountains, the sturdiness.” This emotional impulse, a primal response to the way land imprints on every facet of our consciousness, conjures a haunting presence throughout the project, revealing our precarious symbiotic coexistence with our planet.

batiasuter.org