Mast Foundation for Photography Grant on Industry and Work


Mari Bastashevski is an artist, writer and researcher. She was born in a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. She is currently based in Switzerland, but is rarely at home. Her work – usually a result of extensive online and field investigations – combines documents with photographs and texts and explores the intersections between individuals, corporations, and states. She has recently concluded a project, 10,000 Things Out of China, a work that navigates through the violent, complex and politically ambiguous culture of logistics by which products made in China reach Europe and the United States.

Bastashevski’s work has been exhibited in France, the Netherlands, United States, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, and published in the NYT, Le Monde, NYT, Vice, among others.

Sara Cwynar’s videos and photographs of found objects and images court feelings of time passing. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she produces intricate tableaux that draw from magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogues. Cwynar is interested in how design and popular images work on our psyches, in how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness. In her book, Kitsch Encyclopedia (2013), she considers how familiar, sentimental images smooth over unpleasant realities, to cover up “the systems of control embedded within our social, economic, and political lives.”

She presents dated commercial images to expose the failure, with time, of their visual trickery and the waning of their seductive powers. Her works highlight how the once familiar becomes foreign, how the fetishized object loses its luster, how glamour fades.

Sohei Nishino produces works based on his personal experiences obtained through walking and travelling. In making his “diorama maps,” he combines photography, collage, cartography and psychogeography to create large prints of urban landscapes. He walks a city’s streets for an average of three months, exploring many vantage points and gathering hundreds of rolls of exposed film. He then painstakingly prints the photographs by hand and compiles them to form tableaux. From a distance the maps are almost abstract, it is not until we examine them in detail that the full diorama unfolds – the theatre of one man’s city played out in miniature.

Sohei Nishino graduated from Osaka University of the Arts in 2004. He has exhibited his work internationally and gleaned numerous awards including “President Award”.

Cristóbal Olivares

(Santiago, Cile, 1988)

In November 2015 he published the book “A-MOR” about femicide and domestic violence in Chile, which has been awarded as best photobook of the year by POY Iberoamerica.