MALAYSIA / SINGAPORE: Apparently whimsical images that critique community erasure in Malaysia and the re-wilding of a hyperreal city-state in lockdown.
Constructed
COLOMBIA: An artist using clay figures to tell the stories of real people – stories of homelessness and social invisibility.
GERMANY: Reworking the traditional contact sheet on a grand scale, Thomas Kellner makes architecture dance.
AUSTRALIA: Pat Brassington exploits the legacies of Surrealism while subtly subverting those (primarily masculine) traditions with a clearly feminine and feminist inflection.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture, and installation.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Constructing from the catalogue of British oil painting ironic self-portraits that situate the alienated Asian man in the midst of Britain’s aristocratic past.
UNITED KINGDOM: Throwing the paradoxes of domesticity into sharp relief, Sian Bonnell uses absurdity to critique the socially constructed role of women in the home.
RUSSIA / ESTONIA: An artist who uses ritual and imagination to rediscover her untamed inner self and resist the growing tides of unfreedom.
AUSTRALIA: Rather than illustrating an idea, Christophe Canato’s images propose a paradox that animates questions around gender, sexuality and the transition from child to adult.
USA: With her unconventional mode of creation, Anne Skoogfors’ intimate botanical portraits capture the beauty and the mystery of flowers.
BRAZIL: Spectacular images that extend the concepts of time, space and perspective to explore the complex and multifarious nature of our contemporary world.
AUSTRALIA: a remarkable synthesis of timeless Aboriginal wisdom and radically innovative printmaking that creates pictures of intense poetic beauty and philosophical depth.
AUSTRALIA: Photographic tableaux that bring new life to the artefacts of historical and natural-history museums nationally and internationally.
SOUTH AFRICA: With a unique visual signature, Roger Ballen’s existential psychodramas have maintained their uncompromising independence, vividly capturing the imagination of generations over five decades.
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.
UNITED KINGDOM: Both visceral and vulnerable, Antony Crossfield’s visual language of the body engages with and challenges notions of (im)perfection, masculinity, patriarchy, and sovereignty of the self.
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
CANADA: Combining humour with cultural critique; history with psychology, Diana Thorneycroft constructs visual stories of the anxiety and contradiction embedded in the dark subsoil of Canadian national psyche.
USA: An artist whose creative practice is as feisty as it is experimental, transforming her external appearance into visual metaphors of inner dissent.
RUSSIA/GERMANY: personal reflections on the competing connection and constraint of family life, and the untenable expectations enshrined in contemporary iconography of perfect motherhood.
CHINA: Without recourse to AI, Zhang Wei pieces together photographic fragments to create images that suggest the way in which ideological revisionism and Newspeak are deployed to encourage collective amnesia while making conformity seem inevitable.
CUBA/USA: Landscapes aesthetically reconceived as near and far, vista and texture marry in the moment.
AUSTRALIA: A look back at the career of one of Australia’s best known photographic artists whose prolific practice has spanned five decades.
SWITZERLAND: Playing with the nature of visual perception, Dominique Teufen discovers the creative possibilities of the photocopier, photoflash, glossy photographic paper and grey paint.
NORWAY / FINLAND: Poetic pictures of older people that seek to dissolve the border between human and nature.
SWITZERLAND: Phantom iconographies that trace a collective tourist consciousness bestriding the real and the virtual.
USA: Meticulously crafted miniature worlds that speculate on a future without human beings.
UNITED KINGDOM: A forensic examination of plants, zoological specimens, snail trails, and nylon stockings that finds poetry in precision and unexpected grandeur in the mundane.
AUSTRALIA: A satirical exploration the artist’s complicit, often uncertain, relationship with the social conventions of being a man.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Visually seductive allegories depicting a personal sensibility through the recombination of photographic fragments garnered from everyday life.
URUGUAY: An artist, chemist, craftsman, essayist, poet, and teacher, who imbues photography with a newfound physical and philosophical dimension.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Colourful, painstakingly created installations that envision the artist’s innermost thoughts and feelings through metaphor and fable.
NORWAY: Images that seek to envision personal psychology and shared trauma suggesting an abstract and affective sense of what lies beyond that which can be seen but must be felt.
NETHERLANDS: Knighted by the Dutch Government, Erwin Olaf has earned a world-wide reputation for his immaculately choreographed tableaux that subtly suggest the ultimate uncertainty of being.
AUSTRALIA: With a subtle insistence, Marian Drew’s still-life and light-painting images question how we might inhabit and share the natural world in a sustainable and equitable way.
ITALY/USA: From the imposing to the delicate, images assembled from thousands of nudes weaving across a panoramic field of view.
GUATEMALA: Luis González Palma grew up during thirty years of civil war, but while his images evoke sadness, they neither sentimentalise nor do they counsel despair. Rather they affirm the transcendent nature of the human spirit.
FINLAND: One of the country’s most celebrated photographers discusses his deep connection with the northern landscape and the Sámi people who live there.
POLAND / AUSTRALIA: Blending the chemistries of photography and vegetative decay to create hauntingly beautiful images exploring themes around memory, time, habitat, health, and inner contemplation.
LATVIA: Personal evocations of the impact of social and ideological change while living through the turbulent post-war and post-Soviet eras.
PERU: Lyrical images that find a melancholy beauty in dilapidation and enfold maternal wisdom in pictorial fables.
USA: Disrupting the sedimentation of artifice through a bold juxtaposition of the vegetative with the simulation, the object with its image.
SOUTH AFRICA: a remarkable synthesis of structure, texture, and authenticity exploring the triangular relationship between history, memory, and community storytelling.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Land art seeking a fresh perspective on Nature freed from notions of territory and property.
AFRICA / AMERICAS: poignant imagery on a grand scale evoking the existential threat of human exploitation to both animals and people.
MEXICO: Harnessing artificial intelligence to create photo-based images that may well come closer to the true nature human visual perception than will ever be possible with a camera.
RUSSIA / SPAIN: Alisa Sibirskaya creates photographic tableaux echoing themes from the Dutch Baroque and Siberian folktales that capture the luminous glow of a bygone age.
SAUDI ARABIA: Fascinated by harmony and dissonance, and the cycles of return, Saleh AlDaghari’s picture-making sits on the cusp between surrealism and allegory.
CANADA: Delicate still-life images that capture a sense of tranquillity while celebrating the small and fleeting things in life.
AUSTRALIA: Luminous yet elusive images that navigate the gulf between the world of the senses and the interior realm of the self.
ARGENTINA: La sensibilidad de la pintura y las técnicas de la fotografía se conjugan para crear un realismo mágico irónico pero extrañamente familiar.
ARGENTINA: The sensibilities of painting and the techniques of photography blend to create an ironic but strangely familiar magic realism.
CANADA / USA: Temporary sculptures created by balancing stones with nothing more than gravity to hold them together.
USA: With an emphasis on the dignity of all living things, these lo-fi collage works seek to emphasise harmony and our shared human nature, free from judgement.
FINLAND: Landscapes, ice, and flea-market clothing and fabrics come together in an unusual aesthetic and conceptual marriage – part myth, part speculation.
AUSTRALIA: Figures from history and legend elegantly reconceived with the technology and sensibility of the present.
AUSTRALIA: Fantastical photographs suggesting a domestic magic brought into being by longing, obsession or childlike exuberance.
NEW ZEALAND / AUSTRALIA: A visual storyteller exploring the interior world of the mind through the shared imagination of the community.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Creating a fluid and ambiguous aesthetic space between painting, sculpture and photography, Hyunmi Yoo challenges our understanding of the relationship between visual representation, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.