Līga Spunde (LV, b. 1990) is a visual artist working across digital print, video and installation. A graduate of the Art Academy of Latvia, her practice fuses digital aesthetics with speculative fiction to explore contemporary emotional states through visual culture and symbolic codes. She has exhibited internationally, including at MMCA Changdong, Seoul; MO Museum, Vilnius; and Survival Kit 15, Riga. Her works, meanwhile, are held in major public and private collections.

Here, Kogo Gallery brings together works from a number of Spunde’s past projects. Among them, the wall sculpture Still Life with Computer Mouse – first produced for Riga Photography Biennale – serves as a visual allegory of the relentless pace of contemporary life and its impact on mental health. Elsewhere, sculptures from The Pin series address questions of present-day instability, while the digital drawing User I reframes the ‘digital native’ as a contemporary explorer.

Artist is presented by Kogo Gallery

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

Elina Brotherus (FI, b. 1972) is one of Scandinavia’s most recognised contemporary artists, now living between France and Helsinki. Her work encompasses both autobiographical and art historical approaches, exploring the human figure, landscapes, and the artist–model relationship. Recently, Brotherus’ focus has turned to revisiting Fluxus scores, as well as to photographing in architect-designed homes. Her works are held in major international collections, including that of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Here, Brotherus presents photographs from the Villa Tammekann series, shot in one of the only private homes designed by Alvar Aalto outside Finland. The photographs reflect on the house’s layered history and the Tammekann family’s forced departure in 1940: as the series unfolds, bright summer light contrasts with a growing sense of darkness, evoking absence, memory, and the quiet tension of imminent loss.

Artist is presented by Gallery Halmetoja

Flo Kasearu (EE, b. 1985) is a Tallinn-based artist who studied Painting and Photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts and Multimedia at Universität der Künste Berlin. Known for her ironic take on social processes, Kasearu creates videos, drawings, paintings, installations, and performances, adapting her approach to various themes. Where her early work focused on tradition and national identity, her later projects have explored local political contexts, often working outside the scope of traditional gallery spaces.

Kasearu’s Thaw series features melting ice creams, symbolising the fragility of small businesses in Estonia – especially during the pandemic, when many had to close or adjust their operations significantly. This imagery, in turn, establishes a broader metaphor for resource depletion and ecological imbalance, highlighting issues of overproduction and consumerism while emphasising the urgency of climate change and environmental degradation.

Artist is presented by Temnikova & Kasela 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