Reading between the Lines

C/O Berlin and EEP Berlin are hosting a panel discussion with C/O Berlin Talent Award 2022 winner Karolina Wojtas (PL) as part of the program accompanying the exhibition Abzgram. Hosted by Maya Hristova (EEP Berlin), a group of female artists, largely based in Germany but all native to Poland, will discuss their photobooks, the challenges and joys of developing a project for publication. The photobook will serve as a point of departure for an investigation into the photographers' artistic practice, with the panelists discussing their perspectives on identity, community, migration, and inequality, problematizing the feminine as a framed identity within a context of unequal power relations. What emerges is the relevance of new ways of thinking through the medium of photography that disrupt the powerlessness discourse that so often frames narratives of Eastern European art.

Katarzyna Mazur (b.1987, PL) is a Polish photographer from Koło, Poland, living in Berlin. After having studied photography at the Ostkreuzschule she is both working on personal and commissioned projects. Her book „ANNA KONDA“ was nominated for the Aperture PhotoBook Award at the Paris Photo 2015. In 2017 the Paris-based Photo Boite selected Katarzyna's work for an exhibition representing thirty young women photographers from around the world.

Monika Orpik (b. 1997, PL) visual artist based in Hamburg. Orpik’s work focuses on unnamed things, moments undepicted in images and the collapse of meaning caused by the use of inadequate language. She’s interested in stories often omitted from mainstream historical records and the misuse of classification processes that impacts the narrative gaps within the subject of war, violence and trauma. She works with photography, book making, text and sound.

Agnieszka Sejud (b. 1991, PL) is a visual artist, activist and member of the artistic duo KWAS together with Karolina Wojtas. She graduated from the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava (CZ). Sejud uses various media to explore the idea of individual freedom, and systems of oppression constraining people’s independence. Sejud often employs deformations and deconstruction of imagery to illustrate her purposes and ideas.

Karolina Wojtas (b. 1996, PL) draws from the imagination of children and transforms this material into room-sized installations. She is part of the artistic duo KWAS, studied at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava (CZ), and the Film School in Łódź (PL). She was nominated for the reGeneration Prize (Musée d’Elysée) and Plat(t)form (Fotomuseum Winterthur), and was awarded the ING Unseen Talent Award 2019 in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown at Fotofestiwal in Łódź (2021), the Kraków Photomonth (2020), and the Noorderlicht International Photo Festival (2020). She won the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2022 – Artist with her project Abzgram which is currently on view at C/O Berlin.

Magdalena Wysocka (b.1987, Poland), is an artist from Jaworzno, Poland, who works in the fields of artists’ books, research and archives. Her work revolves around collecting found books and photography, deconstructing and transforming images to create new visual narratives. Originally from Upper Silesia, where she received her MA Degree in Printmaking (2012), she currently works and lives in Berlin, Germany. Since 2016, she publishes and distributes her work through her studio and imprint Outer Space Press, which she founded with an artist and publisher Claudio Pogo.

Maya Hristova (b. 1987, BG) is a researcher of Eastern European photography and the founder of EEP Berlin. She finished her studies at the Ostkreuzschule for Photography in 2014 and has since worked as an independent curator and researcher. Since 2018 she has showcased the work of more than thirty photographers and visual artists from the region of Eastern Europe as part of EEP’s exhibitions, events and printed publications. Hristova is also the Editor-In-Chief of the EEP Magazine.