Foam Talks

Foam is celebrating a special anniversary: the talent issue of Foam Magazine is turning 15 years old. To put a spot light onto Foam Talents as well as the people behind Foam Magazine, Foam Talks invited editors Elisa Medde, Katy Hundertmark and Henri Badaröh to be part of a mini-series. Each selects one artist from past Foam Talent editions they would like to into conversation with. Together they will dive into the artists current practice, hopes for the future and reflect on the impact the Foam Talent selection had on their careers.

The final episode welcomes Henri Badaröh, assistant editor, and Alice Quaresma who was selected as a Foam Talent in 2014 with her series Roots. Formally trained as a painter, Alice has been experimenting with materials and media that allow her photographs to be sensorial and playful, pushing the boundaries of photography as a descriptive medium. Using snapshots from her archive and painted geometric designs, she reflects on identity and memory, stimulating the ludic quality in her images.

Concept: Amelie Schüle

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

Foam is celebrating a special anniversary: the talent issue of Foam Magazine is turning 15 years old. To put a spot light onto Foam Talents as well as the people behind Foam Magazine, Foam Talks invited editors Elisa Medde, Katy Hundertmark and Henri Badaröh to be part of a mini-series. Each selects one artist from past Foam Talent editions they would like to into conversation with. Together they will dive into the artists current practice, hopes for the future and reflect on the impact the Foam Talent selection had on their careers.

This second episode welcomes Elisa Medde, editor-in-chief, and Mark Dorf who was selected as a Foam Talent in 2017 with his series Transposition. Mark’s practice is influenced by human’s perceptions of and interactions with what we call “Nature”, urbanism, design, and virtual environments. As opposed to seeing these subjects as categorically separate, Dorf reveals their entanglement and integration with one another as an inclusive and lively planetary ecology.

Concept: Amelie Schüle

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

Foam is celebrating a special anniversary: the talent issue of Foam Magazine is turning 15 years old. To put a spot light onto Foam Talents as well as the people behind Foam Magazine, Foam Talks invited editors Elisa Medde, Katy Hundertmark and Henri Badaröh to be part of a mini-series. Each selects one artist from past Foam Talent editions they would like to into conversation with. Together they will dive into the artists current practice, hopes for the future and reflect on the impact the Foam Talent selection had on their careers.

This first episode welcomes Katy Hundertmark, assistant editor, and Ana Vallejo who was selected as a Foam Talent in 2021 with the series Neuromatic. With a background in biology, Ana's work emerges at the intersection of art and science. Ana is interested in the effects of trauma on emotions and perception. Her projects are research based and invite chance, experimentation and collaboration highlighting the importance of social bonding in marginal spaces.

Concept: Amelie Schüle

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

Foam Talks welcomes Ana Nunez Rodrigues and Isadora Romero, whose work traces personal and global stories around one specific vegetable: the potato. When we learn about the histories and ancestral knowledge connected to agriculture, it stimulates us to care about how our food grows. It is important to address this on Earth Day because of the inherent link between agriculture and climate change.

Nunez Rodriguez’s Cooking Potato Stories consists of local ‘potato stories’ that she collected across the world. Through these, she explores how food and agriculture connect to colonial legacies and how they need to be viewed in a wider context of political, social, and emotional relationships. In a similar approach, Romero explores the forgotten memory of the land and crops of her ancestral home, the village of Une, Cundinamarca, Colombia. Her project Blood is a Seed (La Sangre Es Una Semilla) centres around different generations of small farmers. Her grandfather and great-grandmother, who were "seed guardians" and cultivated several potato varieties.

Together with host Amelie Schüle, curator and head of public practice at Foam, the two will address the importance of storytelling as a form of resistance and the social dimensions of agriculture.

Concept: Amelie Schüle

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

This is a new series by Foam Talks featuring a selection of artist, curators, and writers connected to Kısmet. Kısmet is a multi-year project is organised by Studio Polat and Foam with a focus on Turkish visual culture through research, outreach, and exhibitions.

The first instalment of the series welcomes photographer Cemre Yeşil. Her long-term work ‘Double Portrait’ is currently exhibited at Maqam, a creative space located in Amsterdam West. The project examines the relationship between mother and child through different lenses. It deals with topics such as identity, loss, and memory. The exhibition is Kısmet’s first public presentation.

In this episode, Cemre will be in dialogue with Ahmet Polat, director of Studio Polat and co-curator of Kısmet. Through his photography and fieldwork, Ahmet Polat aspires to build bridges between different cultures, identities, and histories. Together, they reflect on their professional connection, Cemre’s extended artistic practice and the Turkish photography scene.

Concept: Amelie Schule

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

In Jonathas de Andrade's work (1982, Brazil), performance occupies a key role. His inquiry into the social and political realities of northeastern Brazil has underlined the power of bodies to store and transmit information through their gestures and actions. Only belatedly considered forms of knowledge, nonverbal practices have been historically important in preserving and contesting norms in the Americas.

In conversation with Diana Taylor (1950, MX/US), performance scholar, Jonathas gives us an insight into his creative process, his work with different communities in Brazil and the way their embodied practices have led him to understand better and intervene his present reality.

Diana Taylor is professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is also the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a leading organization in the promotion of performance research, preservation, and circulation in the Americas for the last twenty years.

Concept: Valeria Posada Villada

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

Foam Talks anniversary episode Rewind takes a moment to look back at the year in photography. A selection of Foam’s past collaborators highlights memorable moments of the last year, artist that have inspired them and share some of the personal insides they have gained. Guest speakers are artist-archivist Angela N. Carroll; writer, creative director and podcaster Gem Fletcher; artists Lisandro Suriel and Tommy Kha. The episode is hosted by Katy Hundertmark, Editor at Foam Magazine and Amelie Schüle, Interim Head of Projects at Foam.

If you want to listen to a specific speaker these are the interview timings:

1:30 Lisandro Suriel

19:12 Angela N Carroll

41:17 Tommy Kha

57:27 Gem Fletcher

Concept: Amelie Schüle

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

Twenty years ago 9/11 took place, leading the United States to announce its 'War on Terror' and involving Iraq in an ongoing conflict. This war was deemed as the first 'smartphone war' due to the introduction of the smartphone as an object of mass consumption in 2007. The widespread use of digital cameras enabled millions of users to capture the conflict from angles which had previously been out of sight. What formerly had been the domain of photojournalists and governmental agencies, became a limitless stream of images shared on the internet. This gave digital media a vital role in portraying the confrontation's countless layers.

In this podcast, curator Mirjam Kooiman engages in a conversation with artists Alexandra Rose Howland (b. 1990, US/UK) and Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, IQ/US). Through their distinctive artistic practices, they reflect on the role of remote-access technology, social media and online and offline participation in the Iraqi conflict from opposite sides of the spectrum.

Concept: Mirjam Kooiman and Valeria Posada Villada

Production: Nordin Janssen

Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

New media techniques like 3D rendering and artificial intelligence are pushing the boundaries of contemporary photography. By not making a distinction between real and generated images Simon Lehner (1996, DE) and Victoria Pidust (1992, UA) question our perception of reality. With Shoair Malvian, director of Photoworks and curator of Paris Photo Curiosa sector, the two artists speak about how they are pushing photography outside the frame.

Simon Lehner’s work is based on personal experiences. Its documentary core explores contemporary issues, social structures, psychology and its relation to current human and social developments through direct and embedded observation. The series uses fundamental elements and physical gestures of image-making as an analogy to the control that trauma can exercise over memories and self-perception. His project ‘’The Mind is a Voice, the Voice is Blind’’ presents a digital reconstruction of Simon Lehner’s childhood memories. The artist sought to relive his childhood traumas, creating 3D-renders of people and places of his past. In this way, Lehner compares the process of digital post-production to the constant unconscious reconfiguration of our own personal memories.

With her hyperrealist, layered panoramas, Victoria Pidust takes us into a visual maze where our perception is stirred up. The artist adapts generative aesthetic and concrete art to her artistic practice thereby transforming photography's traditional purpose of depicting reality into a creative endeavour. In her hybrid baroque-like works, analogue and digital images unite subjective and generative photography. Based on photogrammetry, her expressive digital photographic works are produced through human consciousness and artificial intelligence and describe the path from 2D to 3D.

Together, Foam and Paris Photo present a brand-new season of the podcast series Foam Talks: Talent Edition. This series presents eight talented image-makers from both the fair's Curiosa Sector and Foam Talent 2021. Each of the episodes welcomes two photographers, one of each organisations' talent programme. Brought together by a common theme and approach, the photographers speak about their projects and motivations, as well as the challenges they encounter.

Not to miss the works of the artists, please visit the digital exhibition at Talent.foam.org and the work at the Curiosa sector of Paris Photo.

Concept: Amelie Schüle and Hinde Heast


Production: Nordin Janssen


Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions

“The body is an archive. It remembers everything – even the things that the head forgets.” Visual artist-performers Heather Agyepong (UK) and John Yuyi (TW, 1991) explore their own bodies as a vessel for personal and collective (hi)stories. Their work begs the question of how photography can be, and has been, used to perform a gendered and racialised persona. Through performance and self-portraiture, the artists unearth new ways to engage the body as both a target and an instrument of visual activism. Together with Hinde Haest, curator of Foam Talent Digital 2021, the artists go into conversation about their respective processes and the challenges they face.

Heather Agyepong uses lens-based practices and performance to explore collective wellbeing, activism, the African diaspora and the archive. The lead character of one of Agyepong’s recent projects ‘Wish You Were Here’ is the celebrated African-American vaudeville performer Aida Overton Walker. She was known as the Queen of the Cake Walk, a dance craze that swept the United States and Europe in the early 1900s. By personifying the figure of Overton Walker, Heather Agyepong reimagined her story as one of (black, female) agency instead of oppression.

The work of Yuyi John explores her own body as a malleable object and a product of consumer culture. Through social media, stickers and other lowbrow means of mass-communication she seeks experimental new forms to ‘brand’ her own feminity. With this, John formulates a newfound understanding of what individuality means in the context of millennial culture and the both liberating and oppressive social media landscape. The artist constructs a raw, unapologetic, often jarring and seemingly nonsensical interpretation of her own mediated identity.

Together, Foam and Paris Photo present a brand-new season of the podcast series Foam Talks: Talent Edition. This series presents eight talented image-makers from both the fair's Curiosa Sector and Foam Talent 2021. Each of the episodes welcomes two photographers, one of each organisations' talent programme. Brought together by a common theme and approach, the photographers speak about their projects and motivations, as well as the challenges they encounter.

Not to miss the works of the artists, please visit the digital exhibition at Talent.foam.org and the work at the Curiosa sector of Paris Photo.

Concept: Amelie Schüle & Hinde Heast


Production: Nordin Janssen


Mastering & Mixing: Andersen Audio Productions