Invited young collective: WdKA – Willem de Kooning Academy 

We are a collective of passionate artists, studying photography at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Featuring Milo van Riet, Pip Maarschalk, Elin van den Putte, David Kulev, Luchandro Franca, Malou Moy, Jeff Chang, and Rijk Willem.

We invite you to delve into the narratives we’ve woven within our three containers. Within each container you’ll discover a different visual world on the subjects of:

Firstly, contemporary love: where intimacy, exes, and digital affection are visualized. Secondly, home(lessness): here you’ll look at ways physical and emotional homes are captured.
And thirdly, memories: where you step into a captivating space where textures and images create a tapestry of beautiful moments.

As the new generation of Rotterdam artists, we wholeheartedly invite you to join us on this visual journey.

 Jeff Chang and Rijk Willem

Our immersive exhibition explores the connection between memory and sensory experiences. Step into a captivating space where textures and images create a tapestry of beautiful moments.

Let curated textures guide you through your own history—from the soft touch of silk to the weathered embrace of wood. Carefully selected images act as windows to the past, freezing fleeting moments.

Celebrate sensory nostalgia with us. Lose yourself in the interplay of textures and images, effortlessly transported back to cherished moments. Join us on this powerful journey into the heart of your own memories.

Find out more:

Website: wdka.nl

Instagram: @milo_vr, @davidakulev, @pipmaarschalk, @rijkwillem, @luchandofranca, @jeffsfilm, @floorvdven

Invited young collective: WdKA – Willem de Kooning Academy 

We are a collective of passionate artists, studying photography at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Featuring Milo van Riet, Pip Maarschalk, Elin van den Putte, David Kulev, Luchandro Franca, Malou Moy, Jeff Chang, and Rijk Willem.

We invite you to delve into the narratives we’ve woven within our three containers. Within each container you’ll discover a different visual world on the subjects of:

Firstly, contemporary love: where intimacy, exes, and digital affection are visualized. Secondly, home(lessness): here you’ll look at ways physical and emotional homes are captured.
And thirdly, memories: where you step into a captivating space where textures and images create a tapestry of beautiful moments.

As the new generation of Rotterdam artists, we wholeheartedly invite you to join us on this visual journey.

Milo van Riet, Pip Maarschalk, Elin van den Putte

In this container, three young artists put love in a contemporary light.

Looking to relight life’s candle, Pip Maarschalk’s work vividly captures the journey toward intimacy, safety, and self-love. Fragments of her struggle are paired with compelling pictures, visualizing how she’s fighting her insecurities on the road to finding the light within herself.

Elin van den Putte has a somewhat different approach to reigniting some of her life’s dimmed candles. With her work, she hopes to find clarity by literally reenacting Marital scenes with her exes. Is it them, dating apps, or is she personally responsible for her romantic misfortunes?

Luckily, life offers not just a few candles to light. In fact, with the rise of the internet, thousands are on offer. In “love_5773”, Milo van Riet offers a glimpse into the world of online affection, in which chats and nudes are so quantitively consumable they almost surpass their physical forms. Have these digital echoes of physical intimacies become equivalent to love?

Find out more:

Website: wdka.nl

Instagram: @milo_vr, @davidakulev, @pipmaarschalk, @rijkwillem, @luchandofranca, @jeffsfilm, @floorvdven

 

Invited young collective: WdKA – Willem de Kooning Academy  

We are a collective of passionate artists, studying photography at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Featuring Milo van Riet, Pip Maarschalk, Elin van den Putte, David Kulev, Luchandro Franca, Malou Moy, Jeff Chang, and Rijk Willem.

We invite you to delve into the narratives we’ve woven within our three containers. Within each container you’ll discover a different visual world on the subjects of:

Firstly, contemporary love: where intimacy, exes, and digital affection are visualized. Secondly, home(lessness): here you’ll look at ways physical and emotional homes are captured.
And thirdly, memories: where you step into a captivating space where textures and images create a tapestry of beautiful moments.

As the new generation of Rotterdam artists, we wholeheartedly invite you to join us on this visual journey.

Luchandro Franca, David Kulev and Malou Moy

Aren’t we all looking for the feeling of home?
A place so free, that you can completely be, without any strings attached. Where you are being accepted and cared for, seen and looked after. The road to this feeling of home, may it be physical or emotional can be bumpy. Full of friction and self-destruction but motivated by a future of freedom and sanity. 

Luchandro Franca focuses on the physical forms of home. He does this by visualizing his safe spaces. He works with different art forms including fabrics and handwritten text. Luchandro purposely removes himself in his images, making space for you, the viewer to position yourself in his position.

David Kulev and Malou Moy investigate the emotional aspects of the home. David visualizes the need to free up the deep and often oppressed emotions we as humans experience. Going there and acknowledging those brings him to the core of his being. Making it possible for new air to flow and transformation to take place.

Malou takes you on her search for a home and the constant self-communication that comes with it. She visualized her inner dance that, at times, can feel like a battle against and with herself. She self-portraited the longing and anxiety for this feeling of home, this feeling of peace. Malou works with moving materials since this dance is in constant movement.

Find out more:

Website: wdka.nl

Instagram: @milo_vr, @davidakulev, @pipmaarschalk, @rijkwillem, @luchandofranca, @jeffsfilm, @floorvdven

MADADAM • Reflections of Amsterdam

Creating a distorted trippy reality, just beyond recognition. For me, this project was a new approach to photography.

Using the canals as my instant art machine I found a pleasant way to play with composition, light, shapes, and color. I hope you like the selection I’m presenting on Rotterdam Photo.

I’ve asked ChatGPT to write a few inviting words, it’s a bit pompous don’t you think?

With a touch of abstract expressionism, MADADAM transforms the familiar into the extraordinary, inviting you to explore the hidden beauty beneath the surface. But the magic doesn’t stop there—MADADAM extends its enchantment to scarves, turning them into wearable masterpieces. Wrap yourself in the mesmerizing dance of abstraction and reality, carrying the essence of Amsterdam’s canals with you wherever you go. Embrace the allure of MADADAM, where art transcends boundaries, and each image tells a unique story of a city reflected in the shimmering waters.

Find out more:

Website: madadam.nl

Instagram: @madadam.nl

Brussels-Paris

Julia Marina Free (Netherlands, 1991) is a photographer and filmmaker active in both Belgium and the Netherlands. An overview of her body of work titled “Brussels-Paris” making its debut at the Rotterdam Photo Festival 2024. In her work, she captures scenes of current affairs, exploring underrepresented voices in various layers of society. Weaving a tapestry of stories that offer ambiguous narrative suggestions and blurred lines between fiction and reality.

Her work extends to various social justice issues, capturing social and political movements, conflicts, and human rights issues. Key themes such as identity, diversity, community, and social change resonate prominently, taking centre stage in her narrative and becoming a visual commentary on the complexities of the human experience. 

Her work stands out due to her unique approach to everyday scenes and her ability to integrate abstraction into ordinary situations, exuding a sense of restraint and subtlety.

Find out more: 

Website: juliamfree.com

Instagram: @juliam.free

 

Through the dense fog, the dawn river flows,

And I immerse my slender hands in its waters.

Within the river flows another, deeper river,

And within my heart, I too, collide and flow within myself.

 

Find out more:
Instagram:@seohyun3171

Still Lifes

Brenda’s still lifes are an ode to the beautiful and essential things in life, such as nature, art, and cultural diversity. They depict a universe full of color, beauty, and harmony, delivering a message to cherish these elements. Brenda draws inspiration from the splendid use of light and color in 17th-century paintings and the theme of the vanitas still life. Many of her artworks not only showcase beauty and strength but also reflect the passage of time and vulnerability.

In the project “Manhattan Aan De Maas”, Brenda, along with Dennis Duinker, questions Rotterdam’s nickname and explores its similarities with New York City. Thirty photo pairs from both cities are compiled in the third revised edition of the book that emerged from this project. “Manhattan Aan De Maas” delves into the aesthetics of a metropolis and the dream and ambition of being like its big brother, New York.

Find out more:

Website: vanbrenda.nl
Instagram: brendavonknoordegraaf

In 2012 I made a trip to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (North Korea) out of pure fascination and now, 10 years on, it feels appropriate to create a body of work that represents my experiences from the trip in a meaningful way.

The body of work uses different techniques to adhere a fragile print to various pieces of marble. The images themselves have a very ordinary feel to them that offers the ordinariness of day-to-day life in a very extraordinary place. Not ridiculing their regular life, nor tokenizing customs or costumes, I want to present the humans who live there.

Find out more:

Website: jameshensby.com
Instagram:@jh.jpg

Raw pictures

My way of doing things is perpetual improvisation like a jazz musician.

“I was born in the south of France in 1954. I’ve been an artist since 1978, when I met the people who made movida known, in Barcelona, Spain. I was an experimental musician. From this time, I have been a photographer and a periodist, and at last, I worked on communication for business and politics. During these years, I continued my artistic career, producing exhibitions and artistic residencies in France, Spain, Germany, and Morocco.

After a lot of experiences and subjects, I work today with my photographs on the computer, then I print them on fine art papers, before painting some parts with ink, acrylic, pastel, Stabilo… So, all my pictures are original and unique in each size. I don’t work on a theme, it’s my way of working which is my conductive line. “

Find out more: 

Instagram: @corbierclaude

 

Imaginary Mediterranean: A Journey Beyond Borders

My project transfers me to the Mediterranean dream, recreated through unique settings inspired by my travels through the countries around the Mediterranean. Through carefully designed settings based on models and a unique specular process, I bring fictional seascapes to life. The staging à la Meliès is a manual work similar to the work of the painter who thinks about the tool, the color, the materiality, and the composition.

The use of the mirror in my creative process is not trivial. Its reflection evokes the ephemeral nature of human existence and the world “here below”. There is an effect of reality in the artificial paradises that I create from scratch in an artisanal way in a world where digital artifacts dominate. I tinker in my garden workshop, in natural light, with a “magical” device that brings a miniature scenography into dialogue with a piece of blue sky “taken from life” and offers us the possibility of embarking, like Ulysses, on adventures imaginaries that I hold out to us.

Find out more: 

Website: gasparddegouges.com

Instagram: @gaspard.degouges