28 July 2025
HAPAX ANNOUNCES COMMISSIONS FOR ITS EIGHTH ISSUE
We are pleased to announce the six recipients of the HAPAX artist and curator commissions who are currently making new work for our next issue, to be published in Winter 2025. Following a call-out for submissions of interest, the editors have selected five artists and one curator to create their photographic feature with us on the pages of our next HAPAX Magazine:
Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator, and is Reader in Photography at the School of Digital Arts, Manchester School of Art, MMU. He is the author of 'To Be Determined: Photography and the Future' (SPBH/Mack) and the co-editor of Writer Conversations and Photobook Conversations (both published by 1000 Words) and the co-editor, with Lucy Soutter, of 'The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies' (Routledge). He lives and works in Manchester. duncanwooldridge.com
Hicham Gardaf is an artist whose work spans photography and moving image, often engaging with ideas of time, place and transformation. He is drawn to sites that carry social or spatial tension, such as landscapes shaped by displacement, urbanisation or quiet forms of resistance. Through slow, observational processes, he explores how environments reflect broader political and temporal conditions. Working primarily with photography and film, Gardaf approaches these mediums not only as tools for documentation but as spaces for speculation, perception and re-interpretation. His practice is concerned with what images hold and what they fail to reveal, how they shape memory, suggest presence or absence, and shift meaning over time. Recent screenings and exhibitions include the 74th Berlinale in Berlin, Open City Documentary Festival in London, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Frac MÉCA in Bordeaux, Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, MACAAL in Marrakech, Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, and MAST Foundation in Bologna. Gardaf was born in 1989 in Tangier and lives and works in London. hichamgardaf.com
Karl Bailey is a British photographer living in Portsmouth, England. His work primarily focuses on documenting the fabric of the city, its ebbs and flows as it shifts politically and economically. He is interested in examining the invisible, using class, social history and culture to raise questions within his photographs. Whilst this work is outward-looking, Bailey also makes work that seeks to look inwards, usually reflecting on his background, his rural upbringing, and his family. karlbailey.co.uk
Marta Bogdańska is a visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and cultural manager. Graduating with an MA in Philosophy and a diploma in Gender Studies at the University of Warsaw, her home city, Marta went on to study art at the Home Workspace Programme in Beirut, where she lived for over 8 years. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and scholarships, including the PHotoEspaña award for Best International Photographic Publication in 2022 for her book Shifters. Marta also got the National Grant of Artistic Journey of Hestia, Selma Lagerlöf Society award and Konrad Pustoła Scholarship. She took part in eleven artist residencies including stays at Artists meets Archive by Photoszene (Cologne, Germany), Gasworks (London, UK), Landskrona Foto (Landskrona, Sweden), Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid, Spain), and Nida Art Colony (Nida, Lithuania), among others. To date, she has directed eleven short films and video essays, including Unicorn, In-Between and Next Sunday. Her work has been exhibited all over the world, including at Koelnisches Stadtmuseum & Photoszene (Cologne, Germany), Festival du Regard and Circulation(s) (Paris), Fotografia Europea Festival (Reggia Emilia, Italy), Fotofestival Łódź (Poland), the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne, Australia), the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle (Switzerland), Ujazdowski Castle CCA Warsaw, and the Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale (Greece). martabogdanska.com
Rinko Kawauchi was born in Shiga, Japan, in 1972. She currently lives and works in Chiba. Kawauchi burst on the international scene in 2001 when she was awarded the Kimura-Ihei-Prize, Japan’s most important emerging talent photography prize, shortly followed by the simultaneous publication of three beautiful books, Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako. Met with great critical acclaim, these “visual essays” demonstrate her finesse and skill of telling a photographic tale. Since this triple-debut, the artist has gone to publish another 28 books, include Illuminance, Ametsuchi and Halo. Kawauchi, currently one of the most famed contemporary female Asian artists, is a recipient the eminent Annual Infinity Award (2009) from New York’s International Centre of Photography, in the category Art and similarly was shortlisted in 2012 for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. and Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award 2023. She has joined and held many group and solo shows both at home and abroad, with major solo exhibitions in, among others, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain in Paris, London’s The Photographers’ Gallery, the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg, theTokyo Photographic Art Museum, the KUNST HAUS WIEN in Vienna and the foto-forum in Bolzano. Solo exhibition "M/E On this sphere Endlessly interlinking" was held at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and Shiga Museum of Art from 2022 to 2023. rinkokawauchi.com
Tanya Traboulsi is a Beirut-based photographer whose work explores themes of belonging, memory, and identity, often weaving together her own images with material from her family archive. Beirut frequently appears as both subject and symbol in her practice. She is a recipient of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, and her work has been exhibited internationally, including recent presentations of Beirut, Recurring Dream in the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Morocco, and Dubai. Her photographs have appeared in Aperture, British Journal of Photography, WePresent, and others. Her most recent book A Sea Apart, bringing together photographs from her series Beirut, Recurring Dream, was published by Out of Place Books in November 2024. Her short film Son of the sun (2021), about the Beirut port explosion, was screened at DIAGONALE, LE FIFA, and IDFA. tanyatraboulsi.com
Notes:
HAPAX is co-directed by Christiane Monarchi and Gordon MacDonald. HAPAX Magazine takes its name from the literary term ‘hapax legomenon’ describing something unique, new and ‘said only once’. Twice a year, HAPAX Magazine commissions artists and curators (£500 each) to produce new photographic projects which are shared only in the pages of the publication and not on the internet.
Work is underway on the creation of the eighth issue, to be published Winter 2025. This issue marks 50 commissions of artist and curator features undertaken to date.
A call-out for the next issue will be announced when publication dates for the eighth issue are confirmed. The editors of HAPAX are interested in hearing from artists and curators working with photography in any form and encourage submissions from everyone, regardless of experience, qualification, nationality, geographical location or background.
Issues of HAPAX are available for purchase from bookshops and online, and distributed by Public Knowledge Books.
Proceeds from sales of magazines are reinvested into future publishing commissions, to support photographic projects and the creative professionals making them.
For more information contact editors@hapaxmagazine.com