This panel explores how images shape meaning, memory, and authority, and how visual power is constructed, circulated, and contested. Working across documentary, portraiture, conceptual practice, archival research, and fashion-informed image-making, the artists approach photography not as a neutral medium, but as a cultural system.
Museums, archives, domestic spaces, technology, myth, and the body become sites where power operates and can be questioned from within. Some projects engage directly with institutional histories, while others work through speculation, hybridity, and embodied self-representation. Together, these practices ask who gets to define history, visibility, and authorship through images.
Chiemeka Offor is a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist based in New York City, working across experimental film, editorial photography, and painting. Her art celebrates Black women, exploring their experiences, resilience, and the impact of Western beauty standards.
Bachelor of Fine Arts, diversifies her professional activity between photography,cinema and teaching;mainly working in the African continent.Lived 3 years in Mali researching in the construction of the Idea of Africa and Otherness,processes of colonization/decolonization,new strategies of colonialism and African feminisms heterogeneity.Her work has been shown, published and awarded internationally
Narantsetseg Khuyagaa grew up in a women-led household between Ulaanbaatar and Nalaikh, where her family ran a slaughter farm. Shaped by narratives of resilience, sacrifice, and hidden strength, her work explores identity, femininity, and the evolving representation of women. Previously focused on adolescence, nostalgia, and heritage, she now investigates female sexuality and power. Photography is both construction and reclamation, creating spaces where softness meets brutality and the uncanny meets beauty.
Debora's work is driven by the question of what is beautiful today, and how ideals arise. Body as an overarching theme, she explores ways to break stereotypes. Inspired by classicism her images are notable for strong, confident, and sensual compositions bringing a modern attitude in. Born with a physical disability, her work is ever-evolving for inclusivity and redefining the idea of perfection.
Jade O’Belle is a British interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates identity, queerness, and sexuality through art direction, film, image-making, costume design, sound, and performance. She has collaborated with photographers including Nick Knight, Tim Walker, Solve Sundsbo, Carlijn Jacobs, and Harley Weir, and has served as muse to designers and artists such as Di Petsa, Sinead O’Dwyer, and Michaela Stark.
O’Belle’s practice is rooted in her multicultural heritage, drawing on Nigerian Yoruba, Indian, and Tibetan ancestral connections. Through intuitive ritual practices, she creates objects, costumes, and performances that serve as vessels for ancestral memory and diasporic expression. The body becomes a site of reclamation and exploration, enabling her to inhabit alternative realities and possibilities. Each character functions as a form of escapism and empowerment, navigating diasporic identity while connecting past, present, and imagined futures.
Her work fuses ritual, intuition, and imagination, producing immersive experiences that interrogate heritage, memory, and the transformative power of storytelling.
Based between the internet and New York, she explores how images intervene in reality and create connections between people and space, questioning how care is formed through photographs. She studied at the International Center of Photography–Bard College and earned an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute, New York. She is a recipient of the 2024 LensCulture Emerging Artist Awards Jury’s Picks, a Silver Eye Center F25 Fellow, and a 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund awardee by Aperture and Google. Her work has been featured in Aperture, British Journal of Photography, Dazed, i-D, PhotoVOGUE, and exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.
Moderated by
Chiara Agradi is a curator and author based in Paris. Since 2021, she has been a curator at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, with a focus on international exhibitions. As part of the partnership between Fondation Cartier and Triennale Milano, she curated : Raymond Depardon. La vita moderna (2021), Siamo Foresta (2022), Ron Mueck (2023), and Il nostro tempo. Ciné Fondation Cartier (2025).For the Fondation Cartier, she also curated Raymond Depardon. La vie moderne (2022) at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai — the French photographer’s first exhibition in China — and Ron Mueck (2025) at the MMCA Seoul, the artist’s first comprehensive solo show in South Korea.
Since 2024, she has been a member of the curatorial board of the Polaroid Foundation, playing an instrumental role in the development of the foundation’s artistic program, working closely with contemporary artists worldwide.
She was recently appointed curator of the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. Polaroid, 1979–1983 at Centro Pecci in Prato — the first institutional exhibition dedicated to Luigi Ghirri’s Polaroids in Italy.
A specialist in photography, her doctoral research focuses on Polaroid photography, particularly the relationship between Polaroid’s former commercial strategies and artistic production, with a special emphasis on Italian photography from the 1970s to the present.
Previously she contributed to the artistic programming of the Giuseppe Loy photographic archive in Rome, and curated his first institutional retrospective at Museo Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini in Rome (2022). She was appointed curator of the photographic section of Artgenève (2021). Her writings have appeared in both academic and art publications, and she has participated in international academic conferences and served on juries.
