Dutch Talent Photographers

We are delighted to announce the winners of the Rotterdam Photo 2026 Amarte Dutch Talent Project Grants:  Sveta Kaverina, Malek Bigum, Roger Anis, Andrea Bonderup and Maryam Touzan. 

These four talented artists will each receive a €3,000 stipend to develop their ongoing projects into “work in progress” exhibitions. They will collaborate with curator Mira Matic to create a unique group exhibition, which will be showcased during the Rotterdam Photo 2026 edition (March 25 – 29). Throughout the process, winners will benefit from coaching, technical support, and assistance in organizing their final presentations.

We look forward to seeing their innovative photographic projects come to life at Rotterdam Photo 2026, exploring the theme ‘Echoes of Silence – War in the Artists’s Soul.

To find more information about each photographer, please refer to the Jury report, which provides detailed insights into their work and the selection process.

 

Jury report

Sveta Kaverina

The Three of US

Russia | Mockumentary | Identity | Archive work & new work

 

 

We are proud to select Sveta Kaverina’s ‘The Three of Us’ for Rotterdam Photo 2026 for its inventive and deeply resonant exploration of history’s quiet aftermaths. Through a poetic mockumentary rooted in her own biography, Sveta traces the invisible reverberations of societal collapse, migration, and the repeated reconstruction of identity.

By imagining three cloned girls abandoned after the fall of the USSR, the project reflects on the silent inheritance of collective trauma: the fragments, repetitions, and dislocations carried forward long after events themselves have faded. In alignment with Echoes of Silence, the work does not dramatize upheaval with spectacle, but instead inhabits the interior landscapes shaped by it—displacement, loss, and the subtle persistence of what survives. Through meticulous staging, visual layering, and a blend of fact and fiction, Sveta transforms history into an intimate meditation on survival, memory, and the enduring echoes that history inscribes on personal and collective consciousness.

‘The Three of Us’ illuminates how systems collapse not only in public life but within the private and psychological spheres, offering a quietly powerful reflection on resilience, inherited trauma, and the complex textures of identity across time and space.

Instagram: @svetakaverina.photography

 

 

Malek Bigum

Even the Rain is Warm

Tunisia | Amazigh | Diaspora | New Work | Black/White Photography

 

 

We are proud to select Malek Bigum’s ‘Even the Rain is Warm’ for Rotterdam Photo 2026 for its moving and introspective exploration of identity, belonging, and the quiet reverberations of cultural displacement. In this deeply personal project, Malek navigates the subtle yet persistent echoes carried by diaspora—an inheritance shaped not by direct experience of conflict, but by the fragmentation, silence, and distance that follow in its wake. Through a poetic interplay of text, collage, memory fragments, and symbolic material interventions such as using Henna, ‘Even the Rain is Warm’ becomes a tender excavation of a heritage both intimately his and partially out of reach.

The work embodies the spirit of Echoes of Silence by showing how displacement can imprint itself not only on land and history, but on the emotional terrain of those born between cultures, carrying stories they did not witness yet cannot escape, whilst living in the diaspora.

By tracing the tension between estrangement and longing, Malek offers a nuanced portrayal of the invisible psychological landscapes shaped by migration, postcolonial memory, and intergenerational absence. His project is not only an attempt to connect with the land “he was born to belong to”, it stands as a compelling reminder that the inner struggle to reconcile origin and identity is itself a quiet aftermath of larger historical forces—and that medium of photography can become a means where these echoes gather, resonate, and transform.

Instagram: @malekbigum

 

Roger Anis

A Blessed Marriage

Egypt | Marriage & Divorce | Autobiographical | Colour Photography

 

 

We are honored to include Roger Anis’s ‘A Blessed Marriage’ in Rotterdam Photo 2026 for its courageous and intimate examination of how social, religious, and political systems inscribe themselves onto the most private dimensions of life, namely in the love. In navigating the emotional and psychological terrain of engagement, marriage, separation, and eventual divorce under Egypt’s restrictive legal and religious frameworks, Roger’s autobiographic project embodies the essence of Echoes of Silence: the inner reverberations of conflict that unfold not only on battlefields, but within the human heart.

Through a sensitive blend of photographs, diaries, collages, and collaborative writing, Roger transforms a personal narrative, his former marriage, into a broader reflection on how individuals carry the weight of inherited norms, and institutional control. The work reveals how external pressures—social expectation, conservative morality, and legal constraint—create quiet yet profound fractures within identity, relationships, and emotional freedom.

‘A Blessed Marriage’ offers a deeply resonant counterpoint to conventional visual narratives of Egypt’s most recent turbulent year’s (2011-2014) . In its vulnerability, complexity, and unflinching honesty, the project illuminates the silent struggles endured by countless couples navigating love in restrictive contexts, and stands as a powerful testament to the evolving forms connection and resistance can take.

Instagram: @rogeranis

 

Andrea Bonderup

‘Generational Gratitude – On Humanitarian Aftermath of War’

Denmark | Ukraine | Family History | Archive work & new work

 

 

We are delighted to select Andrea Bonderup’s ‘Generational Gratitude – On Humanitarian Aftermaths of War’ for Rotterdam Photo 2026 for its profound and refreshing reframing of how conflict reverberates across families, geographies, and generations. While many narratives dwell on trauma and rupture, Andrea turns her lens toward the quieter, often overlooked echoes of compassion, reciprocity, and intergenerational care that emerge in the wake of war.

By tracing two deeply personal histories – her Danish great- grandparents’ wartime care for a Dutch child in 1946 and her family’s recent sheltering of a Ukrainian mother and infant—she reveals how humanitarian gestures can ripple across time, creating enduring bonds that challenge the prevailing narratives of despair. Through archival materials, associative diaristic photography, and tender portraiture, the project embodies the spirit of Echoes of Silence by showing how conflict imprints itself not only through loss but through the fragile continuities of kindness and connection. Andrea’s work expands the discourse on war’s psychological aftermath by illuminating a rarely acknowledged emotional terrain: the gratitude, mutual care, and quietly transformative relationships that arise in moments of crisis.

In its subtlety, historical depth, and human warmth, this project stands as a vital counterpoint to sensationalist depictions of conflict, reminding us that even in times of devastation, empathy can echo just as powerfully as trauma.

Instagram: @andrea_ullala

Maryam Touzani
How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Marocco | Tamazicht  | Colour Photography | Symbols | Text | Collage

 

We are honored to select Maryam Touzani’s project How to Tame a Wild Tongue for Rotterdam Photo 2026 for its profound and deeply introspective engagement with this year’s theme, Echoes of Silence – ‘War in the artist’s soul’.

How to Tame a Wild Tongue probes at themes of absence and loss, though here it expand further outwards: in Morocco, the broader decline of Tamazight, beyond the artist’s domestic sphere, can be read as a direct result of colonial erasure, which forced an entire culture into the periphery.

Displaced in time by French and Arabic, Tamazight was banned in Moroccan schools under colonial rule, marginalised in the decades after independence, and only recognised as an official language in the 2011 constitution after a period of seismic civil unrest. Intertwining the experience of personal loss with the wider implications of systemic repression, How to Tame a Wild Tongue asks: how to picture a language, a lost language, or its absence? But rather than restoring that which has been lost, the project becomes a counter-archive of survival, staging incompleteness as resistance, and insisting that what remains – however fractured and fragile – is still worth carrying forward.