The Goethe-Instituts in Budapest, Chennai, and Sofia, together with their local partners, are pleased to welcome the residency artists for the projectReframing Family: Feminist Perspectives Through the Lens— an international photo residency for female-identifying photographers.
The 2026 residency will take place simultaneously in three cities — Chennai (India), Budapest (Hungary), and Sofia (Bulgaria) — creating an interconnected international space for artistic exchange. Female-identifying photographers from Germany, India, Hungary, and Bulgaria will work in locally rooted hubs while remaining part of a shared, transnational programme.
Across these three locations, participants will engage with the themeReframing Family: Feminist Perspectives Through the Lens, working both within their local groups and across borders through coordinated activities and online encounters, fostering dialogue, collaboration, and mutual learning.
Betül Aydin is a visual artist working with conceptual and documentary photography. Her practice explores care, motherhood, memory, and belonging through domestic spaces, family archives, and everyday life, drawing on lived experience as a woman, immigrant, and mother to reflect on how identity is socially and politically shaped.
Gabriella Vincze-Bába is a media artist working at the intersection of time-based media, experimental film, and video art. Her practice centers on memory, female identity, and the poetic reworking of archival materials. In her current project, she explores addiction within family history, examining self-authenticity amid inherited roles and social expectations.
Agnes Bihari began her photography career in her late forties after work in radio and documentary. Now a freelance cultural journalist, video editor, and photographer, she explores human coping mechanisms in harsh, mainly urban environments. She has held five solo exhibitions in Mexico and Hungary and participated in numerous group shows.
Anabelle Moghadam is a Bulgarian based artist with half of her roots being Iranian. Her work is self-reflective and rooted to a great degree in a documentary manner. Childhood, cultural specificities, complex family bonds, and motherhood hold a special place in her artistic exploration.
Arthi Duraisamy is an emerging interdisciplinary artist, interested in themes related to synchronicity, time, reality, collective consciousness, western individualism, and feminism through photography, video art, installations, land art, and performance as a medium.
Helia Jafarzadeh: Rooted in photography, her practice spans archival research and design-based mixed media, from artist books to participatory installations. Through a feminist and decolonial lens, she examines memory, archives, and intergenerational transmission, questioning whose histories are preserved or erased. Environmental concerns are explored as part of broader injustices shaped by colonial and patriarchal systems.
Blagovesta Semkova is a Bulgarian photographer working with long-term photographic projects rooted in personal experience. Her work explores acceptance, difference and human connection, using photography as a way of understanding, acceptance and visibility.
Dhivya Ravishankar is an architect and emerging visual artist based in Chennai, India. Working across video, photography, and installation, her practice examines how rituals and cultural traditions inscribe expectations onto women’s bodies. Through symbolism and performance, her work questions inherited roles and reflects her yearning for freedom from them.
Sina Niemeyer is a Berlin-based photographer and artist. She is known for synthesizing photography, video, text, archival material, and ephemera into expansive installations and small, carefully curated books. Her projects mostly tackle stories of violence, loss and trauma, power structures and the unseen.
Local partners are:
Budapest: Hosted byaqb (art quarter Budapest)with introduction to the Hungarian art scene, dark room on demand and portfolio review.
Chennai: Hosted byChennai Photo Biennale, with access to a darkroom and professional facilities.
Sofia: Mentored byDeystvie(LGBTQI+ advocacy organisation in Bulgaria).
Each city’s residency hub will offer:
Thematic workshops and conversations led by local and international facilitators
Collaborative exercises connecting residents across the three cities
Community engagements and field visits to explore local interpretations of family and feminist thought
Studio time and peer feedback sessions supporting the development of individual and collaborative photographic works
Curated meetings with artists, activists, and cultural practitioners
Intercity digital exchanges, enabling participants to see and respond to each other’s evolving projects
The parallel structure enables photographers to root their work in local contexts while participating in a broader dialogue that spans cultures, generations, and feminist perspectives. Throughout the residency, artists will examine how family can be a site of identity, tension, empowerment, or reinvention — and how photography can reveal these shifting dynamics.
The works created during the residency will culminate in a joint exhibition in Sofia in June 2026, featuring contributions from all three residency cities.
The residency period is designed to foster deep artistic development, intercultural collaboration, and lasting international networks among emerging and established photographers.
The curator of the exhibition is Dr. Kallina Brailsford at Sofia from June to August 2026.
Feminist Perspectives Through the Lens
Budapest: Hosted byaqb (art quarter Budapest)with introduction to the Hungarian art scene, dark room on demand and portfolio review.
Chennai: Hosted byChennai Photo Biennale, with access to a darkroom and professional facilities.
Sofia: Mentored byDeystvie(LGBTQI+ advocacy organisation in Bulgaria).
Each city’s residency hub will offer:
Thematic workshops and conversations led by local and international facilitators
Collaborative exercises connecting residents across the three cities
Community engagements and field visits to explore local interpretations of family and feminist thought
Studio time and peer feedback sessions supporting the development of individual and collaborative photographic works
Curated meetings with artists, activists, and cultural practitioners
Intercity digital exchanges, enabling participants to see and respond to each other’s evolving projects
The parallel structure enables photographers to root their work in local contexts while participating in a broader dialogue that spans cultures, generations, and feminist perspectives. Throughout the residency, artists will examine how family can be a site of identity, tension, empowerment, or reinvention — and how photography can reveal these shifting dynamics.
The works created during the residency will culminate in a joint exhibition in Sofia in June 2026, featuring contributions from all three residency cities.
The residency period is designed to foster deep artistic development, intercultural collaboration, and lasting international networks among emerging and established photographers.
The curator of the exhibition is Dr. Kallina Brailsford at Sofia from June to August 2026.
