10th Anniversary Edition of the World Biennial of Student Photography
NEWS
10th Anniversary Edition of the World Biennial of Student Photography
CONTEST
Since its beginnings in 2004, the World Biennial of Student Photography has grown into a significant platform for the exchange of ideas and cross-cultural dialogue. Today, it is recognized as the first event in the region to promote the achievements of national and international students in the field of photography. Through a public competition and a group exhibition, it brings together student work in one place and provides an overview of the pedagogical practices of diverse art institutions around the world.
In the past few months, Serbia has experienced a series of events triggered by the collapse of the railway station canopy roof in Novi Sad on 1st November 2024, which resulted in the deaths of 16 people and left one person with life-changing injuries. This tragedy led to student protests across the country and student blockades of all five state universities—in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, Niš and Novi Pazar—with common demands: justice for the victims and government accountability for the tragedy. In support to students’ demands, a large number of citizens have joined the street protests which have spread nationwide. Hundreds of thousands of people have been voicing their concerns about long-standing systematic issues, including corruption, lack of institutional autonomy and media freedom.
Due to the specific socio – political circumstances in our country, the organizational board of the World Biennial of Student Photography has decided to offer a broader framework for this year’s competition. In addition to the usual open theme, we are also encouraging students to submit work on a set theme.
HOW TO APPLY
PLEASE, CAREFULLY READ ENTRY GUIDELINES BEFORE SUBMITTING WORKS.
INCOMPLETE APPLICATIONS WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED.
NEW DEADLINE
The new submission deadline is November 3rd, 2025, at midnight (CET). All entries must be received by November 3rd, 2025.
Apply through the online entry form and submit all required entry materials:
The results of the competition will be published on the Student World Biennial website shortly after the deadline.
The photographs will be judged by an international JURY (Coming soon).
The Biennial opening and awards ceremony will be held in Novi Sad on December 22nd, 2025, at the Gallery of Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. For any additional information, contact us at email address akademijaumetnostinovisad@gmail.com
3rd PLACE: Sara Kecman, Bojana, 2021.
JURY
IRINA DUMITRAŞKU MĂGUREAN
Romania
Irina Dumitrașcu Măgurean (born in Cluj-Napoca) is an artist working in the field of photography and an Associate Professor at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. She holds a PhD in Visual Arts and runs Camera, an artist-run space dedicated to promoting emerging and experimental Romanian artists working with light-sensitive imagery. In 2022, she founded the magazine Grupaj, which focuses on the photography scene in Romania—a project supported by the Camera Association.
During her studies, Irina received grants to study at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Budapest) and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Prague). She has presented at both solo and group exhibitions, including: Everything to Form under the Sun (Doris Ghetta Gallery, 2022), A Matter of Light (Muzeul de Artă Cluj-Napoca, 2021), Blur (curated by Maria Rus-Bojan, Muzeul Brukenthal, Sibiu, 2020), Image Library (New Now art space, Frankfurt, 2018) and group shows such as: Gute Bekannte (Patrick Heide Contemporary, London, 2018), Jeune Création Européenne (The Belfry, Montrouge, 2017), and Almost Object (Vajda Museum, Szentendre, 2016).
IVANA BREZOVAC
Serbia
Ivana Brezovac was born in 1971 in Novi Sad. She holds a Master’s degree in Photography from the Academy of Film and Television (FAMU) in Prague. From 2001 to 2015, she worked as an editor in the magazine for the culture of photography—ReFoto (Belgrade).
She is currently a Full Professor of Photography at the Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad. In addition to teaching, she regularly organizes exhibitions, workshops, and art-education projects in collaboration with academic and other institutions.
Her photographic work is dedicated to subjective research through the fields of documentary photography and staging. She is particularly interested in the spatial installations of artistic works. She has held 14 solo exhibitions and participated in a dozen group shows, both in Serbia and internationally. In 2023, as part of an artist residency, she photographed the state circus in Budapest, where the journey through the magical world of the circus begins and is still going on.
ROB HORNSTRA
The Netherlands
Rob Hornstra (born in 1975) is a Dutch photographer who works on long-term documentary projects, both in the Netherlands and abroad. His work appears internationally in books, newspapers, magazines, and exhibitions, and is part of collections such as Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Huis Marseille Amsterdam, Maison Européenne de la Photographie Paris, Musée de la Photographie Charleroi, and Fondazione MAST in Bologna.
In addition to being a photographer, he has served for over five years as co-head of the Bachelor’s and Master’s Photography programs at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (KABK). He is also the driving force behind the live talk show FOTODOK Book Talks at TivoliVredenburg.
ŠPELA PIPAN
Slovenia
Špela Pipan is a curator and project manager at Photon Gallery (Ljubljana and Vienna), specialising in modern and contemporary photography. She holds a Master’s degree in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins, London (2016), and has been active in the field of photography ever since.
She has curated numerous exhibitions and conducted research on the history of photography in Slovenia. In her curatorial practice, she frequently collaborates with young and emerging photographers from Slovenia and abroad, supporting them in developing their projects and presenting them in exhibition form. At Photon Gallery, she has also co-organised an educational program dedicated to introducing young photographers to the international art market. Beyond her curatorial work for the gallery, she has contributed texts to several photo monographs, worked independently as a curator, and produced exhibitions.
VJERAN HRPKA
Croatia
In addition to his cinematography, Hrpka is active in art photography, with a particular focus on researching alternative photographic processes.
This has been the central theme of his work both as an artist and as a professor at the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, where he has taught since 2011, and has held a position of associate professor since 2021. He lectures on photographic media, shooting techniques, alternative processes and experimental photography. He has mentored numerous student projects in Croatia and abroad.
Hrpka has received several awards at group photography exhibitions and film festivals, the most notable being the annual Nikola Tanhofer Award for Best Cinematography for the film Iza lica zrcala (A Two-Way Mirror).
FINALISTS 2025
Winners of the 10th World Biennial of student photography
1st PLACE
Sveta Kaverina, The Netherlands
Docdocdoc – School of modern photography, Russia
Project Name: The Three of Us
Description: This mockumentary project grows out of an often overlooked facet of Soviet history: the belief that death could be conquered. After the 1917 Revolution, some Bolsheviks imagined not only a new society, but a new humanity – free from illness, aging, and mortality. Scientific texts speculated about bringing the dead back, above all the leaders who were meant to embody the triumph of the system. The project imagines a secret experiment set up to serve that vision. It did not return Lenin; instead it produced three cloned girls. Unfit for propaganda and carrying no usable myth, they were kept out of sight. With the collapse of the USSR the program was shut down, monitoring ended, and state support withdrawn. The three were left to exist in a world they were never meant to inherit. The work draws on the artist’s biography – born in the USSR, coming of age during its collapse, shaped by migration. The three clones become a metaphor for fractured identity: for being split across ideologies and
geographies, never fully whole. They carry the unfinished legacy of a system that tried to cheat death – and never quite let go of the living.
2nd PLACE
Stefan Stefanovski, Serbia
Academy of Arts in Novi Sad
Project Name: Scars
Description: The project “Scars” explores the Banat landscape as a space of ecological and social scars. In places where water once existed and the meadows of my childhood thrived, roads are now being dug. As new infrastructure is built, nature slowly transforms into an industrial space. Banat is a region that has lacked clean drinking water for decades. Water, once the foundation of life, now symbolizes absence and contamination. Photography in this work serves as a testimony to matter that is disappearing, as well as to the persistence of the artistic gaze in finding meaning within that disappearance. Through a visual experiment with light, color, and texture, the artist constructs a narrative of a landscape that is simultaneously real and fictional. The photographs explore the presence of what is invisible and permanently lost. The landscape transforms into a symbolic space, almost like another planet, where water becomes a metaphor for disappearance. “Scars” bears witness to a person searching for water, but in reality searching for themselves within a vanishing space, reflecting the relationship between humans and the land they have poisoned. The project connects personal experience with the local landscape while simultaneously expanding the social and ecological context, highlighting the problem of water pollution and the loss of nature as a universal challenge. The work raises questions about our relationship with water and the natural environment, encouraging reflection on responsibility and the future of the world we inhabit.
3rd PLACE
Nađa Repman, Serbia
Academy of Arts in Novi Sad
Project Name: Zemlja (Earth)
Description: Zemlja (Earth) examines the relationship between identity, heritage, and historical memory in the Sombor plain. The work originates from hotographs in a family archive, which are reinterpreted and intervened upon to create a dialogue between past and present. It investigates how traces of human life remain embedded in the landscape through visual and material layers. Each image functions as a witness, like the land itself, observing what occurs upon and within it, recording the continuity of human presence and the passage of time. Zemlja considers how space shapes human experience and how history is inscribed within it.
Honorable Mentions
Žaneta Čuteková, Slovakia
Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Department of Photography and New Media
Project Name: Blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery)
Description: The series was created as a personal study of transformation following the blepharoplasty of a close person. Through mixed media, I explore the physical and inner recovery of my mother. The photographs were made as part of a series of portrait collages created as a school assignment. The woman, undergoing a radical yet deeply needed change, faced complex inner dilemmas. She questioned whether taking such a step was right and feared losing her sense of identity. Yet after the surgery, she was able to see the world anew- and although the experience challenged her sense of self, the transformation was ultimately inevitable.
Liliom Kovács, Hungary
Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest
Project Name: Just because i’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after me
Description: In this series I examine the phenomena of schizophrenia and psychosis through the medium of photography. These illnesses affect many areas of our lives. The sub-themes are intended to represent individual symptoms or sets of symptoms: the disintegration of self-image, hallucinations, distorted or missing memories, paranoid thoughts and delusions, feelings of persecution and alienation from society, and loss of contact with reality. Throughout the series I used a mixture of analog and digital techniques (and occasionally other media, such as drawing and painting), with a particular emphasis on exploiting the experimental possibilities inherent in photography. Although my work is personally motivated and partly based on my own experiences, it aims to present the phenomenon as a whole, bringing it closer to the viewer. My goal is to make visible what is invisible to society, to dispel misconceptions and prejudices about the illness and to find possible connections between my own mental world and that of others. These 10 images are just a part of the still ongoing series.
Slava Lyu-fa, Russia
Docdocdoc – School of modern photography, Russia
Project Name: Yakutsk Poultry Factory
Description: The project takes place inside the Yakutsk Poultry Factory — one of the largest food production sites in Siberia. Over several months, I observed and photographed the full cycle of industrial life: from the sorting of eggs and the selection of chicks to the slaughter, cutting, and packaging
of meat. What interested me was not exposure or judgment, but the quiet coexistence of people and animals within the same repetitive rhythm. Behind each mechanical gesture, I saw traces of care, fatigue, and acceptance — small moments of humanity that often go unnoticed. In this environment, justice is not about law or morality, but about presence and endurance. It exists in the way workers perform their tasks with precision and empathy, and in how life continues within the logic of production.
Through the photographs, I reflect on cycles — of labour, of consumption, of transformation. The series invites viewers to consider what fairness and balance might mean in a world where living beings, machines, and necessity are inseparably linked. In this closed loop, I look for a quiet form of truth — one that lies between feathers and steel.
Special prize for student from Serbia
Special prize awarded by non-government organization “Vojvodina OK” for the best student project in the national category
Discover
CATALOGUE 9th WORLD BIENNIAL OF STUDENT PHOTOGRAPHY
2023
GALLERY
Set up the exhibition of the World Biennial of Student Photography 2023
Photo: Mitar Simikić
Opening of the exhibition of the World Biennial of Student Photography 2023
Photo: Milana Milovanov & Mitar Simikić
