Digital art matters. Here’s some you should explore
There’s something about seeing art in its physical form that unlocks understanding in our brains. Many of us spend so much time interacting virtually, via remote work or social media, that connecting In Real Life has a spark of contrast. Part of the conversation around NFTs and digital art surrounds the frequent question: what do I do with it? We’re here to show that you can display and interact with digital art in a variety of ways–both familiar and new.
As part of our mission to bring digital art to everyone, we’re part of the incredible PhotoVogue Festival, taking place in Milan from November 17–20. We are the first to display NFTs at this gathering, which showcases work from some of the world’s most talented creatives.
Our exhibition is no different. Be sure to follow us on social media (Instagram & Twitter) to see live coverage. Then get to know the collections from the Voice x PhotoVogue NFT Residency that dropped recently. We promise they’re worth collecting and displaying — both virtually and IRL.
Karan Kumar Sachdev is a photographer based in Mumbai, India. Driven by a desire to step outside his world and into someone else’s, he photographs people and their environment. He is guided by the philosophy that, at times, the absence of something can reveal more than its presence. He is captivated by the pursuit of newness — cars, neon lights, fast paced movement — and how it sometimes stands in stark contrast to the deep and ancient history of a place reflected in architecture.
Carmine Romano is an Italian photographer living between Napoli and Milano. His fascination with photography began at the age of 9 when his mother gifted him a camera. Carmine’s photographic practice is driven by a desire to understand the psychology of his subjects and the personal stories that shape them. He loves to capture the strongest expressions of the people he meets. To Carmine, photography is a medium to tell stories, to allow people to see into the secrets that are not well known.
Sharmaarke Ali Adan is a Somali photographer, born in the Netherlands, and currently based in London. His photographs are captured guerrilla style and juxtapose mundane everyday activities and objects in Somalia with hyper-stylized portraits referencing the community’s young creatives. Sharmaarke uses this technique to challenge the viewer’s perception of Somalis and to invite Somalis to see how the next generation is drawing from its heritage.
Tirtha Lawati was born in Nepal and raised in Britain. His professional career is marked by high fashion editorials but his artistic portfolio documents the tentative experience of first-generation Asian youth in the UK, suspended between the worldview of their parents and the accommodation of British values.
Hajar Benjida is a Moroccan-Dutch photographer and visual artist. In her personal work, Benjida has a documentary and intimate approach, from photographing some of today’s biggest names in hip-hop to capturing the strip club scene in Atlanta and its impact on the music industry.
Julia Kafizova is a Ukrainian photographer and artist. Over the past five years, she has been working with self-portrait, exploring ideas of the body and self-identity. She sees the body as a language in itself, telling the world who we are in this moment. Her photographic projects arise from a desire to see her own body from the position of the observer. Our bodies are the place from which we view the world and ourselves but our view of ourselves is limited. Her photographs explore this paradox — we are unable to fully view the thing that is closest to us, our own bodies. We can only consider it in parts.
Xavier Scott Marshall is a first-generation Trinidadian-American artist born and based in New York. Xavier’s photography reflects upon the colonial history of image-making and draws parallels between history and the contemporary black condition. While taking cues from modern black life and using Pan-African religiosity as a vehicle, Xavier traces the lines of the past to create a new perspective devoid of the post-colonial reality we occupy.
Lucie Khahoutian is an Armenian visual artist from Yerevan. Her practice blends collage, photography, textile, and installation. Lucie’s body of work aspires to create enriching encounters between western contemporary visual culture and strong traditional Armenian references. Her art approaches a wide-range of topics including cultural heritage, religion, memory, and spirituality. Lucie’s practice weaves together her background and elements of her current life, creating a visual tapestry in which occident and orient coexist smoothly.
Shuwei Liu is a Berlin-based photographer who has exhibited in various museums and institutions around the world. His professional work as a fashion photographer is well balanced by a more experimental and abstract artistic practice. In recent years, Shuwei has begun using photography to explore concepts of the self and the space in which the self exists. His photographs are inspired by a sensation he has recently often experienced of not knowing where he is. He sees himself as a swimmer in a dark cave with barriers and borders being built all around him. His NFT collection, Where are we?, explores this phenomenon.
Sackitey Tesa is a self-taught photographer and stylist based in Accra, Ghana. He started photography in 2017 and has been practicing ever since. His work explores the relationship we have with the environment. Sackitey’s photographs have a raw and natural feel to them as he draws inspiration from a documentary approach. With his photography, Sackitey urges the viewer to not only see but to observe and explore everyday items and places in a different light.
Devashish Gaur lives and works in Delhi, India. He has an interdisciplinary practice that involves photographic archives, topics of domesticity, distance, intimacy, found objects, ideas of home, and identity. His portfolio of India’s lush natural environments, stark concrete architecture, and domestic life paints one of the world’s most crowded cities as a place of quiet solitude.
Adeolu Osibodu is a Photographer/Photo-Artist from Lagos, Nigeria. From a young age, Adeolu was constantly caught up in dreams and ideas. At age eighteen, he began to use photography as his tool for self expression portraying moods and thoughts that are often left unsaid. Inspired by life and his experiences, Adeolu captures moments in time that convey a sense of multi-reality, hallucination, and a feeling of lost memory. Underscoring his works is a peculiar notion of the fleetingness of time with an underlying regard for sentiment.
Haneem Christian is a Visual Poet born and raised in Grassy Park, Cape Town. Christian forged their way as a formidable Creative Director and Visual Poet, with a particular focus on representation within the Black and Brown LGBTQIA+community. Their works explore Queerness as an embodiment of Divine Abundance. It centers and celebrates the unbound imagination of self through gentle and honest storytelling. Christian’s work aims to reflect an unburdened truth of the self to whoever is seeking it.
Diego Moreno hails from San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. A place of confluence and contrast for pre-Hispanic and contemporary cultures and traditions, where communities intertwine and are in constant states of transformation. Diego uses photography as a tool for self-knowledge. He mixes other disciplines such as illustration, painting, and drawing to reflect on themes of identity, family, body, affection, religion, violence, and the unconscious.
Leonard Suryajaya uses photography to test the boundaries of intimacy, community, and family. His works show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings, and potential. Many of Leonard’s investigations are rooted in the particularity of his upbringing as an Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, as a Buddhist educated in Christian schools in a Muslim-majority country, and as someone who departed from his family and his culture’s definitions of love and family. His works perform the ways in which life is soaked not just with one’s own emotional connections but larger, external histories of exile, religion, citizenship, duty, and belonging.
Fabiola Cedillo is an Ecuadorian photographer and educator. Her work focuses on the destigmatization of bodies and lives that are marginalized for being non-normative. She engages with these topics by introducing speculative news, elements of fiction, performance, and other visual resources in her artwork.
Etinosa Yvonne is a self-taught documentary photographer and visual artist born and raised in Nigeria. She is based in Abuja, Nigeria and works with various art forms including photos and videos. The primary focus of her work is the exploration of themes related to the human condition and social injustice.
Delali Ayivi is a Togolese and German photographer based in New York. After finding her great great grandfather’s work, one of the first Togolese photographers Alex A. Acolatse, Delali dedicated herself to creating diversified images of black communities, with a focus on Togo. Instead of perpetuating the idea of a singular story, Delali seeks to create work that empowers Togo’s youth, speaks to the power of collective imagination and the progress that comes with valuing individualism.
