Bára Prášilová (*1979) creates surreal worlds in her photographs, balancing on the border between beauty and strangeness, between realism and fictional scenarios, achieving a heightened degree of authenticity through her precise execution. In the resulting worlds, she explores strong female images and questions social role distributions, with the poetic staging also referencing the tradition of Eastern European modernism and transforming it into a contemporary approach.

The award-winning German photographer Michael Wolf (*1954–†2019) documented urban life in the world’s largest cities such as Hong Kong, Chicago, Tokyo, and Paris using large-format topographical series, which can be read as a metaphor for the question of our lives in densely populated metropolises. Michael Wolf’s "MFT (My Favorite Things)" series showcases a variety of creative and informal solutions that Hong Kong residents have developed to cope with the density of their urban life. From improvised seating to drying gloves, coat hangers, plastic bags, and even lost laundry, each image reveals the ingenuity of the people living in the megacity’s often overlooked "back alleys." Wolf was deeply impressed by people’s ability to find use and purpose in these seemingly functionally empty spaces and to creatively utilize them.

Thomas Gust (*1972) explores themes such as memory, history, and urban life through a distinctive blend of photography and painting. This process transforms his images while simultaneously preserving their photographic essence and expanding the boundaries of the medium. During his stay in Japan in 2025, the idea for a series was born that juxtaposes iconic Japanese pictorial elements, such as the cherry blossom, with portraits of the late 19th century and alters the prints through manual intervention using painting techniques. In the series Costumes, staged studio portraits of geisha models are reworked using painting, thus transferring them into the present and a new artistic context.