The 2023 FUTURES talents invited by Copenhagen Photo Festival

FUTURES Photography talents 2023

Susanne Fagerlund – The Doppelgänger Series, 2022 - Ongoing

Susanne Fagerlund is a camera-based artist who explores photography’s extended complexities and boundaries. She graduated with an MFA in Fine Arts from the Valand Academy in Göteborg (SE) and is currently taking a post-master course at the Royal Institute of Art of Sweden about Materialities; Energies. She is based in Göteborg, Sweden.

Her project “THE DOPPELGÄNGER SERIES – Mourning mirrors for what is being lost” consists of photographs from nature reserves, collaborations with artificial intelligence (AI), holograms and videos. Fagerlund photographs in forests, collecting what is at risk of extinction and freezing it forever in images. Grief and the loss of biodiversity are an important part of this series, where the archive of her images undergoes photographic cryonics with the help of AI.

See the artist’s website here

FUTURES Photography talents 2023

Sofie Flinth - A Million Dollar View

Sofie Flinth is a Danish visual artist based in Copenhagen (DK). Flinth graduated from her BFA at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Flinth works primarily with portrait and staged photography touching upon themes such as vanity, manipulated imagery and nostalgia. She creates semi-docu scenarios with herself and females around her by combining a storytelling approach with everyday life. By doing this, she explores to what extent images portray reality.

“A Million Dollar View” explores identity through the medium of photography. Flinth explores and shows the portrait of a woman, Henny, afraid of getting older but who defines herself as a character. They slowly created this space that allows them to explore her as a character by styling her in her own old clothes as well as embracing the perception she has of herself. Together, they confront the perceived conformity and vulnerability of the older generation by capturing Henny as the brave woman she is.

See artist’s website here

Futures Photography talents 2023

Mikkel Hørlyck - Jørgen, a Mystery, 2021

Mikkel Hørlyck is an independent Danish photojournalist and visual artist based in Copenhagen (DK). He graduated with a BA in photojournalism from the Danish School of Media and Journalism in 2021. Hørlyck uses photojournalism to investigate the mechanisms of human survival. He captures moments which are often unseen to encourage the audience to see things in a new way and to open their hearts. His aim is to give a genuine and personal insight into the core of a human crisis.

In 2016 Mikkel Hørlyck met Jørgen in Aarhus when he was still at university. Through the years, the two men became friends and Hørlyck photographed him until his death in 2021. “Jørgen, a Mystery” is a testimony of a relationship between two friends, between a man and his addiction to drugs and between a man and his guardian angels. We can see how life is treating Jørgen through his bedroom, the heroin clinic or his mother’s house.

See artist’s website here

Futures Photography talents 2023

Giulia Mangione - The Fall

Giulia Mangione is a visual artist working with photography, film and writing. Her first book Halfway Mountain, published by Journal in 2018, launched at The Photographers Gallery in London. The book was selected for the Prix du Livre at Les Rencontres d’Arles and nominated for MACK First Book Award. She is currently part of the 6th round of the Norwegian Journal of Photography. She lives and works in Oslo (NO).

The photographic project “The Fall” takes inspiration from popular myths surrounding the apocalypse and less credible, associated theories. In this piece of work, Mangione investigates how potentially catastrophic events, environmentally triggered or otherwise, have an impact on society and how the latter is preparing for them.

See artist’s website here

Futures Photography talents 2023

Jonas Yang Tislevoll - Take care of yourself son, your mom loves you, 2022

Jonas Yang Tislevoll was born in South Korea. He studied photography in Oslo (NO) but does not see himself as a photographer, but rather as someone who uses this medium to tell the stories he believes should be told. When he was 4 months old, he was adopted in Fitjar, a small farming town in Norway. Because of his adoption, he always had the slight feeling of being an outsider in Norway but also in South Korea. In 2022, Jonas decided to move back to South Korea, hoping to find his biological mother. 

“Take care of yourself son, your mom loves you” is a very personal journey for Tislevoll, translated into his most trusted medium, photography. The series touches the topics of family relations, adoption, connections between the artist himself and as an adopted child and the search for his biological mother.

See the artist’s website here