The annual international open call of Fotograf Zone Festival creates space for new artistic voices. The four selected projects respond freely to this year’s festival theme, Wild Kin, exploring from different perspectives the relationships between humans, other living organisms, environments and technologies.

Installed in the busy vestibule of Můstek metro station, the exhibition brings contemporary photography directly into everyday public space, making it accessible to a broad audience beyond gallery institutions.

The open call is a competition format, but also a space for discovering new artistic approaches and establishing connections across the international photography scene. We would like to thank everyone who applied this year and shared their projects with us.

The four selected projects will be presented in the vestibule of Můstek metro station as part of Fotograf Zone Festival 2026: Wild Kin.

WINNING PROJECTS

DAVID BEN ALMA and Lior Harel

– All Beautiful and Wise Things

Alma Ben David and Lior Harel’s All Beautiful and Wise Things emerged from visits to dog shows across Israel. Rather than focusing on the competitions themselves, the artist turns his attention to what happens around them: encounters between dogs and their owners, gestures, clothing, trophies, and other details. The project captures a specific environment where pedigree dogs, their owners, competitive rituals, and everyday reality come together.

Alma Ben David (b. 2001) and Lior Harel (b. 1998) are an artist and photographer duo based in Tel aviv. Both are graduates of the Photography Department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and recipients of the Mussia Tolman Award for Academic Excellence. Our artistic collaboration emerged from a shared attraction to ideas, questions, and aesthetics, yet our practice continues to evolve through the differences and distinct backgrounds each of us brings. Through our ongoing dialogue, we have developed a practice in which we operate as “researchers” of visual space.

MARIA SIORBA

– BLANK VERSE

Blank Verse begins with the question of how we perceive another when their experience can never be fully accessible to us. Through bodies, objects and landscapes, the artist explores the distance between perception and understanding. Photography here is not a means of knowing, but a way of entering into a relationship that remains partial, intuitive, fluid and, above all, open-ended.

Maria Siorba is a visual artist and photographer based in Athens, Greece. Working through a medium that borrows from the mechanism of the eye she investigates the relativity of our relationship with ourselves and the external world reflecting on how reality is constructed, perceived and shared. Her photobook Blank Verse was resently published by Depart pour l’Ιmage, and her work has been exhibited and published internationally.

GRETA VALENTE

– IT TAKES ALL KINDS

It Takes All Kinds traces different forms of coexistence between humans and other animals in the Aosta Valley, where the artist photographs wild and farm animals, the people who care for them, as well as the landscape and local traditions. The project focuses on relationships of care, interdependence and the boundaries between human and more-than-human worlds.

Greta Valente is a freelance photographer based in Italy. Her personal research focuses on the relationship between the human being and the surrounding world, through natural, historical and cultural elements. Her work has been featured in several publications and shown in collective and solo exhibitions.

MARENS VAN LEUNEN

– RESPONDS QUICKLY, FRIENDLY

The project explores how everyday objects within the home carry memory, identity and meaning by following the artist’s father’s belongings as they are collected, sorted, photographed and sold through an online marketplace. It asks what our possessions reveal about us, how we determine their value and what happens to them when they leave our personal space. In doing so, it traces how our relationship with objects shifts between keeping them, seeking order and gradually letting them go.

Marens van Leunen is a visual artist and photographer. She explores the relationship between people, their domestic environments and their belongings, often starting from her own surroundings. Through observation and staging, she questions how everyday spaces and belongings reflect, shape, or extend our identities.