SEEN AND UNSEEN
contemporary photography exhibition
featuring
a word from the curator
In dramaturgy, there is a concept of the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable. The idea that any compelling dialogue contains not only what is said, but also what lies between the lines, and what perhaps cannot be articulated at all.
This exhibition brings together 27 remarkable artists, each with a unique style and voice. Here, you will see every kind of photographic expression — the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable.
We hope that you will not only enjoy the beauty of these works, but also sense a dialogue emerging among them.
What is this dialogue about — contemporary photography, the sensual side of seeing, or perhaps something beyond photography itself? That is for you to decide.
We simply invite you to immerse yourself in this exhibition and experience how the reality of space is transformed through the reality of the camera.
How to Experience This Exhibition at Its Best
For the best experience, we recommend viewing this exhibition on a desktop device. While we understand the convenience of smartphones, the works reveal themselves more fully in their intended scale and layout when seen on a larger screen.
In this exhibition, you will find both strong single images and thoughtful long-term projects.
Each project is accompanied by an artist’s statement or a short description. We encourage you to open and read the descriptions. They often serve as small keys, helping you enter the artist’s world and see their ideas more clearly.
Take your time. Let the images and words unfold together.
Christer Björkman
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When I started seeing small intimate landscapes in my immediate vicinity, I was very happy. I found them in the snow outside our house, in my bed and in my shaving cream. After several months of immobility due to a leg injury, photographing these tiny landscapes became a treat for the soul. I learned something that seems to be an eternal truth: if you just take the time, there is often something beautiful and interesting to discover right where you happen to be.
Renfang Ke
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“Through Them” is a portrait project of Asian gay men.
I meet each person without a script—only the intention to see them clearly, and to let the photograph hold whatever surfaces: hesitation, warmth, desire, or silence.Each portrait is a quiet attempt at intimacy, shaped by the moment we share. Some encounters are soft, some open quickly, some remain at the edges.
Through them, I begin to understand more of myself—what I recognize, what I fear, and what I love.
Annemarie Deckers
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This project, with the working title ‘The Stranger am I’ explores the imprecise and shifting nature of categories and boundaries. It tries to capture uncertain, in-between states and shifting identities; where is the boundary between ourselves and the outside world, our body and its environment, sanity and insanity? How do identities shift over time? How do our memories get altered over time? And how can we even depict what is unstable, constantly changing, unclear? These images are born out of feelings of alienation that have always been present in my life but have been exacerbated by a recent move abroad. To deal with the conflicting feelings this evokes in me I want to explore the dual nature of more fluid states, both as a possibility for openness and transformation as well as leading to abjection and dissociation. The domestic space plays an important role, because of its ambivalent nature (supposedly the place of warmth and safety) but also as a reflection of a state of mind.
Henri Blommers
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Salting The Earth explores the invisible consequences of seemingly harmless garden practices—the quiet erosion caused by salt and vinegar applications that gradually degrade the soil beneath our feet. This series moves between the macro and the micro, investigating both personal behavior and the broader climate crisis through a lens of poetic activism.
Working with analogue photography, I've layered physical materials onto images and incorporated plants themselves, creating visual interpretations that make the hidden visible. What accumulates unseen over time—the slow poisoning of earth, the overlooked damage of our daily choices—becomes tangible through these material interventions.
The work asks viewers to consider what lies beneath the surface: the noticed and the unnoticed, the immediate and the long-term, the small acts that compound into irreversible change. Salting The Earth is both documentation and interpretation—a meditation on the invisible impacts we leave behind.
Emma Grecu
the sound of peace
Olena Lemberska
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Action by verb meaning: to break, to fracture, to be broken.
Result of such action: a place where destruction occurred or what formed as a result of damage to an object, violation of its integrity due to impact, strong pressure, and the like.
In a figurative sense: internal discord, violation of unity, wholeness (in a person's consciousness, in a certain environment, etc.). Also - divergence in views, opinions.
In childhood, the world seemed friendly and safe. The future awaited ahead, gradually unfolding like a roll of wallpaper—a linear story where everything happens logically, each event is a consequence of the previous action, and life follows its own course, fairly and calmly.
All the events of recent years (pandemic, wars) have erased this illusion, destroyed our perception of the world as something predictable. The dense fabric of reality seems to have cracked, and through this fresh rift, I see a confusion of unstructured phenomena, the chaos of existence that takes away any hope for order and peace. This is the rift, a breach in what I considered a solid and stable life.
The civilization that humanity so diligently built has proven fragile. And instead of the dreamed-of technological paradise, where all the bad things (wars, diseases, hard labor) are left behind, we find ourselves in a reality filled with red light, tangled, and dangerous. And here there is neither certainty nor guarantees, only chaos and anxiety.
Rift is like a dream on the very edge of consciousness, when you're not yet asleep but already dreaming between two worlds. And gradually waking up, I see how something grows on the edge of this rift: an inversion, something that has no place in our world.
P.S. All photos were taken on special Duna RedScale type 135 film. No additional processing, just lab development. Any changes or artifacts are purely coincidental.
Sebastiano Casella
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Photography is the medium through which I seek to document another dimension, underlying commonly perceived reality.
My photographs recount a suspended state, a condition of immobile tension whose outcome or causes are not immediately knowable. The action is already concluded or on the verge of being completed.
Reality hides behind appearances, blending with them in a limbo of multiple possibilities.
Catherine Lee-Smith
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Post-eye surgeries. Complications. Can’t drive. Sitting in passenger seat. Waiting for daughter. Torrential rain. Sudden, intense drama. Rhythmic, pounding downpour on the roof. Water cascades down the windscreen; morphing and mutating the street view. Stunning, aesthetic scene unfolds - mirroring my blurred, fuzzy reality.
Jingyun Guan
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Hair, as an ambiguous presence on the body, is like s stray organism living upon the skin. It exists on the threshold between the inside and the outside: both an extension of the flesh and something that seems to escape it. “Above Skin” therefore carries a double meaning - it refers at once to the surface of the body and to the fragile boundary between the physical shell and the immaterial world of consciousness.
The series originates from my attention to the overlooked details of daily life, where the sudden appearance of hair in unexpected places evokes strikingly different psychological responses. Hair is not inert matter; it is alive, endowed with its own agency. It grows, falls, decays, changes colour, reviews. In this sense, hair becomes a movement - an intimate clock that silently records the passage of time within our private world. Through it, traces of our identities are revealed.
By photographing body hair in various situations and juxtaposing it with organic and inorganic materials, I explore how hair reflects stories of the body and gender. The work situates hair within domestic and public contexts, inviting viewers to confront their own emotions, discomfort, or desires when encountering hair in “incongruous” circumstances. These images cultivate an atmosphere of ambiguity - both alluring and unsettling - where hair becomes a site of projection and imagination.
Ultimately, the question emerges: if the flesh beneath the skin is the vessel of life, then could the hair upon it be the soul that hovers above?
Tim France
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This project is a psychogeographical
journey around the A406 London's North Circular Road. This is a road I grew up next to.
The project explores themes of brutalism and emotions instilled from the unseen, often unused or rarely trodden spaces under and around the road.
I hope to make the viewer explore feelings of curiosity or even unease in response to these urban landscapes
Sue eves
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Jars
I love the vivid splash of colour reflected on the wall. An ephemeral reminder of the very essence of the red jars. The fragile quality of the glass captured for a brief moment.
Ephemeral
I spent a month as Artist in Residence at Portsmouth Cathedral. During that time I developed a special relationship with this amazing space. It began to speak to me of devotion, history and the cyclical nature of things. This vivid shadow cast by the stained glass window appeared briefly every sunny day and does so long after I have left.
ALEXANDROS ZAFEIRIDIS
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The photographic series under the title So Much Love explores love, attraction and fluidity through the evolution of the triangle “photographer-subject-viewer” and the concepts of individuality and conformity.
The human body is considered a site of sexual and artistic expression. The state of being or presence in a mutual relationship of trust.
Collecting pictures mostly of friends and family I attempt to answer questions such as: Am I what I present of myself? How am I being perceived? The Other as a Mirror?
Through a consistent practice, with the use music and soft textures and bold colors, I try to create a shared space and rhythm forming a relationship of trust. An attempt to discover how people of all ages place their body and present themselves to the photographic medium, how their choices are mediated through the photographic medium, as well as as well as the relationship between the self and their sexual depiction.
The series aims to illuminate the hidden narratives of identity, how people identify themselves, a game where the photographer and the photographed subject communicate.
Daniele Maldarizzi
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Sunburst Foraminifera project is inspired by a 2015 discovery by "NOAA" in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean near Puerto Rico, the work evokes a bioluminescent organism (probable foraminifer, a unicellular protist) which, floating in the dark waters of the Atlantic abyss, resembles a small shining sun. The images were created with an entirely analogue process based on three elements that represent this form of life:a drop of water for the habitat in which it lives, a sound source that generated its movement, similar to that of the foraminifer and a light source (laser) that refers to its bioluminescence. To make these three aspects interact with each other, the phenomenon of cymatics was exploited, to make sound waves visible, and refractography to manipulate light.
Tom Groves
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The 4 works are from an ongoing series Shallow Water Blackout 2025 which engages with everyday experiences that appear at once familiar and otherworldly. Through fragmentary views of bodies and objects, the photographs seek to unsettle straightforward interpretation, opening instead a space where desire and its complexity circulates freely. By inviting a slower encounter with the image, the work aims to cultivate a sense of pleasure within the strange and the resistant, moments that are at once disquieting and affirming of life’s excess.
James Dalton
Maria - Teodora Tăbăcaru
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This project is an exploration of the blurred line between memory and dream — the way our past rewrites itself in fragments, how our subconscious rearrange truth into fiction.
Some memories are sharp like film stills, while others dissolve. By embracing what’s typically discarded, we rediscover how humans dream: not with precision, but with emotion.
Yannis Tzenos
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For the exhibition “Seen and Unseen,” this series reflects my search for what lies beyond visibility, where perception meets transformation.
I enjoy working in nature and working with nature. For this body of work, my inspiration came from the sea’s transformative shifts.
Through my lens, I discovered an unseen world and sought to capture fleeting shapes and colors of the fluidity and energy of nature.
Light, water, and wind, together with reflections from the surroundings, paint ephemeral imageson the canvas of the sea.
Thomas Keis
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At the edge of a refugee camp, a deserted car stands wrapped in layers of cardboard — traces of a forgotten gesture, slowly dissolving under time and weather.
Covered wants to observe how everyday objects become silent witnesses of displacement and neglect. The cardboard, originally intended for protection, now reveals the fragility of any attempt to preserve the impermanent.Stripped of color, the gaze focuses on texture, stillness, and the slow process of decay.
Covered reflects the tension between permanence and dissolution, presence and disappearance — a quiet meditation on what remains when both people and things are left behind.
Stuart Royse
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These are 4 images from a larger project exploring the build up ice crystals and fractals formed over an extended cold period in January 2025. These were all found in the most unlikely place at the edge of fields in the North Yorkshire countryside, all very close to footpaths. Several people must have walked paced these delicate natural sculptures of ice without even a glance. These are formed through a succession of five hard frosts, one after the other with only a slight thawing between each one. They are not macro shots as such but simple close up studies. Devoid of any scale they seemed to appear to be similar to electron microscope imagery with an 'other worldly' quality. Unseen and un-noticed by most people.
Lola daley
LOOSE
Yori van Kesteren
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Where flowers normally symbolize life and beauty, this project is all about the characteristic state of decay.
The black bloom is an analogue photography project about the decay of various plants and blooms. Through research and observations, I saw where the attention of the visitors went, to the beautiful blooming flowers and plants. On the contrary of that, I noticed all the dead plants, the ones with character, which would end up in the bin in a few days.
With that in mind I photographed the dying plants, I isolated them totally so all the attention would for once, go back to that plant. The technique I used is a 4 by 5 camera, which works very slowly, so I could stand still by the death of the plant and give it as much attention as it deserves from me.
This project contains, at this moment, 25 photographs but will be expanded to 125 analogue photographs.
Neil Mason
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The city of Oxford is usually shown in bright, postcard-perfect images of beautiful buildings, blue skies and open quads. But for much of the year, it lives in darkness. When the crowds leave and the streets empty, another Oxford appears: quieter, more restrained, and full of small moments that usually go unseen.
This series was made at night by walking with my camera through streets I thought I knew. Lamplight picks out wet cobbles, a doorway, a passing figure. Beyond the light, everything fades into a hint or suggestion of what might be there.
Shot in black and white and influenced by classic street and night photography, particularly the work of Brassaï, the series looks to distil Oxford to its essential contrasts: light and shadow, stillness and flux, the seen and the unseen.
Rik roos
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What is it about?
An unexpected, broken friendship forms the starting point of this photo . We see an intimate, quiet image that reveal the pain of letting go, as well as the search for forgiveness and connection.
Why now?
In a time where everything seems to move faster, louder, and more individualistic, we’re losing something essential: genuine attention for one another. From a personal experience, I question how we deal with rupture—not only in relationships, but also within society. This image is part of a series as my response to a world that is becoming increasingly polarized.How?
Using a poetic and at times confrontational visual language, I aim to make the viewer pause. I use naked, domestic scenes that strike a direct emotional chord while also raising questions. By visually alienating everyday contexts, I invite a different way of seeing. Water, directly or indirectly as a recurring element, serves as a metaphor for cleansing and renewal.Broader context
This project is rooted in my own grief, but it also touches on something larger. How do we relate to one another in a time of growing distrust and mental unrest? By opening up a personal experience, I create space for recognition and reflection. It’s an invitation to reconnect—with each other, and with ourselves.
phyte
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Just like the phenomenon of a Phantom Limb, this work evokes an unsettling eeriness of something that either is or is not there, something that once was but now remains a shadow and a memory that is about to fade but gets reignited by the Phantom Limb.
Bevil Templeton-Smith
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The photographs in this set are from my current photographic exploration which joins my love for amateur science, experimentation, photography, and art. The photographs - entirely real, and depicting entirely real subjects, are of crystals of a sugar alternative sweetener mixed with other substances. These are melted on a microscope slide, and allowed to cool and crystallise. The crystals on the slides are then placed on my 1970 Leitz Orthoplan polarising microscope, and photographed with a very finely controlled orientation of the polarising filters, along with a wave plate - experimentally made from sheets of mica / cellophane / plastic, etc.. Attaching my modern digital camera to my very old polarising microscope was a very difficult task in itself, and required building an adapter / eyepiece for the camera out of parts from an old Leitz (Leica) microscope camera, tubes of metal, glue, and various adapters to eventually have the right eyepiece / lens connector for a Sony digital camera. The work to build the perfect camera adapter for the microscope is a part of my ongoing quest.
These photographs are representative of my photographic / and artistic practice. They are simple visual adventures which portray nothing other than a colourful flow of curves and shapes. While they look computer generated or perhaps painted, they are entirely photographs produced entirely manually, with nothing generated or added. They appear as they are seen in the microscope.
This photographic project, started in 2021 has had many successes including winning non professional Fine Art Photographer of the Year in the IPA 2023, as well as a successful joint exhibition - Polychromo at Alveston Fine Art in March 2023.
Julian Claxton
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pryddywyrd is an ongoing project by Julian Claxton started in 2023. Firmly based in its particular locale on the Mendip Plateau, the work moves between representation of objects, animals and events to the making of objects, working within tropes of folk, gothic and folk horror. The work is mainly seen through monochrome photographs posted on the pryddywyrd Instagram account. These exist in the grey zone, approaching dusk with mist and fog ever present.
Eliana Sangay-Tucto
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In this series, I invite you to cross an invisible boundary between what is seen and what is unseen. My starting point is the intimate memory that was woven into an everyday space, my parents' craft. There, among medicinal herbs, healing hands, and ancestral remedies, a silent knowledge was developing, inherited but rendered invisible by external stigmas.
Using photographs from the family archive that have been altered, reinterpreted and converted into objects, I propose to deconstruct the imposed interpretations and restore their symbolic value.
Where they are usually called ‘Los emolienteros’, I proudly call them ‘Healers’.
The images are transformed into visual offerings, layers of time and matter that redefine my family history as an act of dignity and resistance.
This series is an act of reparation where I collect what the social imagination ignores and show it for what it is: ancestral knowledge, an ancient craft, and a lineage that heals both body and soul.
curated by viktor barkhatov
Share your thoughts
We hope you enjoyed this exhibition as much as we did!
At the end of your visit, it would mean a lot if you could leave a few words of feedback below.
Every artist values being seen and heard and a few heartfelt lines are worth far more than a dozen emoji reactions.