The Tamesis
The group explores how images shape meaning, memory and authority, and how visual power is constructed, circulated and contested. The artists, who work across documentary, portraiture, conceptual practice, archival research and fashion image-making, approach photography as a cultural system rather than a neutral medium.
Museums, archives, domestic spaces, technology, myths and bodies become sites where power operates and can be questioned from within. Some projects engage directly with institutional histories, while others operate through speculation, hybridity, and embodied self-representation. Together, these practices claim who defines history, visibility, and authorship through images.
About Chimeka Ofer
Chiemeka Offor is a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist based in New York City whose work spans experimental film, editorial photography, and painting. Her art celebrates black women, exploring their experiences, resilience, and the impact of Western beauty standards.
About Gloria Oyazábal
Bachelor of Fine Arts, her professional activities involve photography, film and teaching; working mainly on the African continent. Lived in Mali for three years, researching the construction of ideas of Africa and the Other, colonial/decolonial processes, new strategies of colonialism and African feminist heterogeneity. Her work has been exhibited, published and won awards internationally
About Manyat Samoa Mani Hotel
Manyatsa Monyamane, originally from Mamelodi, South Africa, is a visual storyteller who explores memory, identity and history, highlighting overlooked cultural narratives. Through evocative portraits, interiors and exteriors, her work reflects resilience, authenticity and pride while challenging stereotypes of contemporary African photography. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts, has exhibited globally and appears in major collections. As an educator and mentor, she empowers young creatives, emphasizing storytelling, identity, and technical mastery, while contributing to the study of photography and cultural memory.
About Nalantsegcuyaga
Narantsetseg Khuyagaa grew up in a female-led household between Ulaanbaatar and Naleh, where her family ran a slaughterhouse. Her work speaks of resilience, sacrifice and hidden strength, exploring identity, femininity and the changing image of womanhood. Previously focusing on adolescence, nostalgia and legacy, she now studies female sexuality and power. Photography is both construction and transformation, creating spaces where softness and cruelty, mystery and beauty meet.
About Wang Jingru
Based on the Internet and New York, she explores how images intervene in reality and create connections between people and spaces, questioning how care is formed through photographs. She studied at the International Center of Photography at Bard College and received an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in New York. She is a 2024 LensCulture Emerging Artist Award Jury’s Choice winner, a Silver Eye Center F25 Fellow, and a 2023 Creator Lab Photography Fund Award recipient from Aperture and Google. Her work has been published in Aperture, British Journal of Photography, Dazed, iD, PhotoVOGUE and more, and has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.
Moderator
About Chiara Agradi
Chiara Agradi is a curator and writer based in Paris. As of 2021, she serves as curator of the Fondation Cartier d’Art Contemporain, focusing on international exhibitions. As part of a collaboration between the Fondation Cartier and the Triennale di Milano, she curated: Raymond Deparden. modern life (2021), Siamo Foresta (2022), Ron Mueck (2023) and Il nostro tempo. Fondation Cartier Cinema (2025). She also curated the Cartier Foundation Raymond Deparden. modern life (2022) at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, the French photographer’s first solo exhibition in China, and Ron Mueck (2025) at the MMCA in Seoul, the artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in South Korea.
Since 2024, she has been a member of the Polaroid Foundation’s Curatorial Committee and has played an important role in the development of the Foundation’s art programs, working closely with contemporary artists around the world.
She was recently appointed exhibition curator Luigi Gigli Polaroid, 1979–1983 Held at Centro Pecci in Prato – this is the first institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to the Polaroid photographs of Luigi Ghirri.
An expert on photography, her doctoral research focused on Polaroid photography, specifically the relationship between Polaroid’s previous commercial strategies and artistic production, with a particular focus on Italian photography from the 1970s to the present day.
Previously, she contributed to the artistic programming of the Giuseppe Loy Photography Archive in Rome and curated his first institutional retrospective at the National Museum of Art in Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2022). She has been appointed Curator of Photography at Artgenève (2021). Her work has been published in academic and artistic publications, and she has participated and served on juries at international academic conferences.
