Janina Sabaliauskaitė (LT/UK, b. 1991) is a photographer and independent curator living and working between England and Lithuania. Her work is characterised by an intimate, feminist gaze, exploring the body, queer relationships, identity, sexuality, and disability. Sabaliauskaitė’s works have been exhibited at institutions such as The Estonian Art Museum (Kumu), Tallinn; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Middlesbrough; Radvila Palace Art Museum, Vilnius; Fondation Fiminco, Romainville; ParisPhoto, Paris; the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga; and the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland. 

For Foto Tallinn 2026, Sabaliauskaitė displays a series of works that were first exhibited at her solo show Trust, held at Drifts in 2023. The artist sees her works as more than mere images: instead, they form a kind of being – “a bodily coexistence of a human and the earth.” As described by Laima Kreivytė, the curator of the Trust exhibition, “the way that Sabaliauskaitė looks at the earth and rocks is not sculptural, but rather mythological, emphasising a changed attitude in the Anthropocene era. Where previously the earth meant resources, in her photographs the Earth is a deity, a planet…”

Artist is presented by Drifts Gallery

Dénes Farkas (EE, b. 1974) is an Estonian photo and installation artist whose work explores the relationship between image and text, visual representation, and the structures that shape human experience. His practice often avoids direct depictions of people, instead using constructed environments and objects to reflect social systems. In 2013, Farkas represented Estonia at the 55th Venice Biennale with Evident in Advance, an installation examining language, knowledge, and interpretation.

Presented by Tütar Gallery, Farkas’ work at Foto Tallinn derives from his research into global seed banks in Svalbard, Lebanon, and St. Petersburg. The series reflects on systems designed to preserve life under conditions of uncertainty, drawing parallels between acts of safeguarding at scientific, political, and personal levels. The artist’s fragmented images highlight the fragile nature of these structures – where survival depends upon the environment, human decisions, and time.

Artist is presented by Tütar Gallery

David Penny (UK, b. 1979) is a Manchester-based artist working with photography, moving image, and sculptural installation to explore materiality, objects, and their images. His work redefines photography’s boundaries through cameraless techniques, merging art and science in collaboration with physicists from King’s College London. His latest shows include Scatterings (The Arcade, Bush House, London); A Fallen Line of Marble Drums, (SNEHTA, Athens); and Soft Fields (Maksla XO Gallery, Riga).

At Foto Tallinn, David Penny unveils works from two of his latest series: Registrations and Accidents Happen. Using analogue photo-processing techniques, the artist strives to bridge scientific processes with artistic inquiry: working in laboratories and darkrooms, he creates photograms by exposing film to high-powered lasers, producing abstract works that probe the limits of the medium. 

Artist is presented by Maksla XO Gallery

Emma Sarpaniemi (FI, b. 1993) is a visual artist from Finland. She holds a BA in Photography from the Hague’s Royal Academy of Art, the Netherlands. Her works have been exhibited extensively in galleries, museums and festivals throughout Europe: notable recent presentations include shows at Jarmuschek+Partner, Berlin; NEVVEN, Gothenburg; the Finnish Museum of Photography K1, Helsinki; and the photographic festival Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Through the medium of photography, the artist transforms herself into multiple characters while remaining unabashedly herself. Her photographs function not only as constructed images, but also as performance documents: the experience they convey is of paramount importance. At Foto Tallinn, Sarpaniemi shows a range of new works rendered in her characteristically playful style: underpinned by the notion of what it means to experience womanhood, her projects become a vehicle for processing emotions, contemplating the world, and defying norms.

Artist is presented by Helsinki Contemporary

Erkki Huilla (FI, b. 2000) is a visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Across his artistic practice, Huilla combines documentary photography with staged images to create works that reflect on individual experiences within shared space. His works often address both personal and communal queer perspectives, as well as questions of performativity in society.

For Huilla, one of the driving forces of his practice is to reframe how we look at and interpret images, turning to unconventional methods of presenting his projects. In experimenting with new ways to produce images, his work has taken on a sculptural quality; on show at Foto Tallinn is one of Huilla’s lenticular images – an image that constructs and reconstructs itself when viewed at different angles.

Artist is presented by The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki

Diana Luganski (FI, b. 1980) is a visual artist working primarily with photography and lens-based media. Her practice spans different formats, from digital images to large-format photography. Occasionally, Luganski incorporates sculptural techniques such as mold-making to echo the photographic logic – of an imprint being taken from something that already exists. Often presenting her works as spatial installations, her research explores the ambivalent and spectral nature of the photographic medium and its relationship to reality. 

At the 2026 edition of Foto Tallinn, Luganski offers a first look at her ongoing Sacer series. Combining photographic prints with bronze cast sculptures, the project takes conceptual shape around the notion of photography as something deceptively autonomous –  a kind of “twisted vampire that feeds on light, capable of immortalising the fleeting and that which remains invisible to the human eye.”

Artist is presented by The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki

Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė (LT/DE, b. 1990) is a Lithuanian artist and photographer based in Berlin. She holds a BA in Photography and Media Arts from Vilnius Academy of Arts (2015) and an MA in Photography from ECAL / École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (2020). In 2024, she was selected as a FUTURES Talent. In 2026, her solo exhibition Screen Works was presented at Meno Niša Gallery, Vilnius. Her practice spans photography, video, and art direction, with work exhibited internationally.

Tamošiūnaitė’s artistic focus lies in translating contemporary human emotions and feelings into visual digital culture and non-verbal codes. She views digital emotional experience as a bloodless, painless, yet vulnerable collective condition. Through her work, she seeks to detect cracks where this abstract emotional landscape meets reality and becomes tangible. Questioning the status of the image, she delves into its reproducibility, seductiveness, and immateriality — by turning ephemeral digital screen images into slow, tactile, reflective surfaces that resist immediate consumption.

“Screen Works departs from midnight online observations — hours spent inhabiting the continuous time of surveillance streams, dwelling in duration that the infrastructure treats as disposable. I translate screenshots, the remnants of attention, through silkscreen onto glass and paper. The process is slow and manual, the opposite of the fleeting image it originates from.”

gedvile.com

Elena Kristofor (UA/AT, b. 1983) is a visual artist from Odessa, Ukraine, now based in Vienna, Austria. Working with photography, installation, and site-specific interventions, she explores human inscriptions in the landscape, addressing notions of foreignness, displacement, and identity. Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and TU Wien, Kristofor’s work combines photographic, drawn, and sculptural elements. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Kyiv Biennial and Lentos Linz. In 2025, she was the recipient of the Austrian Art Alumni Award.

Here, Kristofor presents an immersive installation exploring the radical ambivalence of the geranium flower. Universally, the geranium is often used as a symbol of home and domestic security; in the artist’s homeland, its meaning has been violently reversed, with Russian kamikaze drones destroying civilian infrastructure across Ukraine under the cynical codename “Geran-2.” The centrepiece of Kristofor’s installation is a 10-metre canvas – sprawling from wall to floor, and coloured with the organic traces of hammer-smashed geraniums in a metaphor for a shattered home. Above, a framed series of aerial photographs of pre-war Ukraine are layered with turmeric prints, their glass engraved with impressions of the military front lines.

www.elenakristofor.com

Francesca Marengo (IT/UK, b. 1994 ) is an Italian visual artist based between London, UK, and Turin, Italy. She graduated from the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Turin in 2016, and later completed an MA in Photographic Research at Leeds Art University. Working with photography, her practice explores close collaboration with subjects, creating dialogue beyond documentary through innovative storytelling. Her project Consonant Time was a winner of the Urbanautica Awards in 2024, whilst her work has featured in a range of major Italian art publications.

Exhibited here, Consonant Time is an ongoing photographic project rooted in a collaborative image-making process. Marengo’s participants contribute to the construction of the photographic space, producing images that operate between staged and documentary practices. The resulting work is structured as a non-linear visual sequence, where meaning emerges through juxtaposition, repetition, and interval. At Foto Tallinn, an installation of vertically-oriented prints emphasises seriality and rhythm, foregrounding the temporal dimension of viewing.

www.francescamarengo.com

Bob Bicknell-Knight (UK/EE, b. 1996) holds a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, and is currently following an MA programme in Contemporary Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Throughout his work, Bicknell-Knight explores ideas of time, control, and degradation through the lens of video games. He has held solo exhibitions in London, Berlin, Klaipėda, Kassel, Brno, Paris and Copenhagen, and has featured in group exhibitions around the world.

Bicknell-Knight’s ongoing Altars series combines hybrid paintings of clocks from different games. Starting life as digital photographs, the images are edited before being printed onto canvas, stretched, and painted over with acrylic paint – pulling the digital image into physical terrain. For the artist, the symbol of the frozen clocks is a means to examine how time in videogames is often fabricated and stretched. As a final step, the works are displayed within elaborate frames that have been digitally modelled, 3D printed and covered in layers of concrete. The frames reference ideas of faith, power and control, functioning as altars to time itself.

bobbicknell-knight.com