Issue 14

Marina Mankarios, born in France in 1996, is a French-Egyptian sculptor living and working in Paris. A graduate of ENSAAMA−Olivier-de-Serres In art and design, she explores the notions of memory and forgetting, questioning our relationship with time through the artistic appropriation of ancient fragments. Marina Mankarios experiments with moulding techniques, using processes of collage, displacement and deformation specific to the literature of the absurd, and appropriates the visual vocabulary of ruins to create works that freeze time like a freeze frame, a pause before a seemingly imminent fall.

Born in 1981 in Sweida (Syria), Nagham Hodaifa is a painter and art historian. Trained at the Damascus Academy of Fine Arts, she moved to France in 2005 and pursued a doctorate at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, which she devoted to the painter Marwan. His thesis, published in 2018 under the title Marwan, face à face, explores the theme of the face and intimacy, which also permeates his own pictorial work.

Stefanos Rokos, born in Athens in 1977, is a Greek painter and engraver who trained with Triantafyllos Patraskidis in The Athens School of Fine Arts, complemented by a postgraduate diploma in printmaking from the Wimbledon School of Art, helped shape his refined approach to drawing and colour. His deeply interdisciplinary work draws on popular culture (pop art, comics, graphic design) while cultivating an intimate and poetic modernism: he does not distort reality, but transforms it into myth – without romanticising it, but translating its ardent desire.

Yosra Mojtahedi, 36, is an artist born in Iran and based in in France, whose work constitutes a meeting point between memory and modernity. Trained in a context marked by the aesthetic and symbolic richness of Persian tradition, his artistic vision is nourished by the tensions and harmonies between East and West, between the intimate and the universal.

Marie Ménestrier, a graduate of the Beaux-Arts in Lyon, has been an exhibition curator and director of the Abbaye of Maubuisson, a contemporary art site run by the Val- d'Oise departmental council, since 2018. She explores the relationships between heritage and contemporary creation through exhibitions that question narrative, between memory and transmission, archives and fiction. Keen to support the emerging scene, it also offers artist residencies a programme of cultural activities that are both demanding and innovative.

Jean-Luc Labrette was born in 1954 in Orléans (Loiret) and has lived in Sarthe since the age of 23. It was a secondary school teacher, who was also a painter, who enabled him to enter the world of art. At around the age of 12, he had already developed a taste for painting and gained some experience thanks to the mother of a friend. He left secondary school at the end of his second year. and enrolled at the Brassart school in Tours. There he trained as a graphic designer specialising in advertising and visual communication. At a time when everything was done by hand, this also involved many subjects, such as the study of composition, art history, etc. A teacher would get help after class to create a hand- drawn cartoon... As with painting, Jean-Luc Labrette taught himself photography, starting in 1983. The advent of digital technology has enabled him to find new possibilities for expression in photography, while remaining faithful to his earliest experiences.

Patrick McGrath Muñíz was born in New York and grew up in Aguadilla. He has spent half his life in Puerto Rico and the other half in the continental United States. Although he grew up in Puerto Rico, he currently lives in Texas with his wife Blanca and son Francis. Muñíz earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Puerto Rico in 2003 from the School of Fine Arts from San Juan and his master's degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, in 2006.