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“Sisterhood in Practice” exhibition: Photography in context
Get to know the artists behind the Der Greif “Sisterhood in Practice” online exhibition for International Women’s Day
Der Greif presents the launch of the online exhibition, “Sisterhood in Practice”, running from 8 March to 8 April, 2026 in honor of International Women’s Day. This special online exhibition endeavors to expand cultural comprehension and foster a more inclusive conversation within the art community through the all diverse languages of photography. Beyond this month-long showcase, Der Greif is reinforcing its long-term commitment to bringing female-identifying and non-binary voices to the forefront. To ensure these narratives resonate beyond the exhibition dates, we are introducing a series of female Artist Features on our website which will follow in the course of 2026.
We selected artworks by sixteen artists with the intention of foregrounding processes and dialogues of mutual support. Gathering images and practices from across geographies and context, this digital circuit of narratives serves as a reminder that through the universal language of photography, we can expand cultural comprehension and foster a more inclusive conversation within our networks.
The exhibition begins with the urban landscape of "Capital Daughters," where Lucia Jost portrays the Berlin woman as a figure shaped by the contradictions of a reunited city. Moving between bedrooms and streets, Jost explores the intimate bonds of sisters and friends, documenting a generation whose story is one of emancipation and belonging.
This search for origin finds a parallel in the work of Anastasiia O., who reconstructs an unlived childhood to examine how girlhood is regulated. By blending personal memory with archival imagery and digital filters, she expands photography into a space where identity is both constructed and questioned, navigating the tension between discipline and play.
Kristina Rozhkova’s "The Bliss of Girlhood" examines the transient, waifish moment between childhood and adulthood, capturing the contradictions of power, weakness, and vitality. The narrative unfolds as an unspoken, intuitive bond between girls on the threshold of adulthood.
The body serves as a central site of negotiation in the works of Daria Nazarova and Yufan Lu. Nazarova reflects on her experience as a model in Tbilisi, where the stillness of the body became a metaphor for life in exile following the invasion of Ukraine. Her work positions the body as the only true habitat, an open and vulnerable landscape reaching for connection. Similarly, Yufan Lu investigates beauty standards and cosmetic surgery in China, using herself as a prototype before creating fragile glass "death masks" based on anonymous medical portraits. These sculptures honor the faces of the past, empathizing with the pain of transformation while protecting the privacy of those caught in the pursuit of a standardized ideal.
Political and social resistance are woven into the participatory projects of Karla Hiraldo Voleau and Aiswarya Rathna Raj. Voleau’s "Doble Moral" addresses the absolute ban on abortion in the Dominican Republic, centering the testimonies of women across generations. By handing over the shutter release, she creates a horizontal process that empowers the subjects to control their own visibility. In post-democratic Nepal, Raj documents the lives of women navigating the gap between constitutional equality and patriarchal reality. Working with the Women’s Foundation Nepal, she traces how resilience is constructed within shelters and urban peripheries, revealing the persistence of collective strength.
The domestic and ancestral spheres provide further layers of connection in the work of Amina Bawa Abubakar, which captures the unstudied, tangled closeness of her sisters, where sisterhood is a physical weight and a practiced support system.
Agate Tūna delves into family history and ancestral healers in the Baltic region, exploring knowledge that survived Soviet power and religious authority by staying close to the body. Her work treats the photographic negative as a "familiar spirit," gathering the scratches and stains of time until it resembles skin, a vessel for whispered prayers and spells. Collaborative and trans-generational dialogues further challenge the male gaze and societal constraints, as in the work of Sophie Flint engages in an ironic analysis of beauty norms through a dialogue with her grandmother, restaging 1950s "beauty bibles" to expose the artificiality of pleasing others.
Maya Nur Vandegehuchte similarly explores rapidly changing beauty ideals, reconciling her experience of growing up between two cultures through community and nostalgia. Meanwhile, Reid+Factor’s work uses layered transparencies to disrupt fixed perspectives, reframing the female subject as something ethereal and beyond reach, yet undeniably present.
The exhibition is rounded out by explorations of the liminal and the political nature of intimacy. Nyo Jinyong Lian’s "I Hope Someday You’ll Join Us" investigates non-normative intimacy and displacement, treating private space as a site of strategic vulnerability.
Sandra Lee Phipp’s "Lessons in Survival" utilizes lumen prints of botanical artifacts to represent healing, stemming from a shared current of sisterhood that moves quietly beneath the surface and, at times, crashes visibly against inherited expectations. The project gathers female artists in a collaborative exchange that both covertly and overtly dismantles rigid perceptions of what it is to be female.
Diana Guerra’s project focuses on softness and joy as a counter-history to the dominated bodies of color. In the northern hamlet of Ganastaan, Zainab’s "Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi" follows two sisters carving out a journey of music and love under a colonizing regime.
Amina Bawa Abubakar (b. 1996) is a Nigerian photographer based in Abuja. Since graduating university, she has transitioned her lifelong passion into a career as a self-employed visual storyteller. Her work aims to share unique perspectives and find beauty in the everyday. A multilingual creative fluent in English, Hausa, and Yoruba, Amina draws inspiration from her love of reading and writing, using her diverse cultural background to connect with subjects and capture the world differently.
Copenhagen-based artist Sofie Flinth (b. 1996, Denmark) explores beauty, vanity, and the trans-generational female experience through semi-documentary photography. By staging collaborators in domestic spaces, she uses a rigorous, ironic lens to challenge the male gaze and empower her subjects. A Gerrit Rietveld Academie graduate, her work has been shown at Photo Vogue Festival and Foam Amsterdam. She was named a Fresh Eyes Talent (2022) and a Copenhagen Photo Festival FUTURES talent (2023).
Peruvian-born, NY-based artist and educator Diana Guerra explores memory, belonging, and identity through the lens of a woman of color navigating displacement. An MFA graduate from CCNY with a sociology background, her work has been shown at the Bronx Museum and Photoville. A 2026 Kahn | Mason SIP Fellow and 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, she has held residencies at the Wassaic Project and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at The City College of New York.
Berlin-based photographer Lucia Jost (b. 1998) blends analogue documentary and staged portraiture to explore femininity, sexuality, and belonging. A Lette Verein graduate and Ostkreuz student, her work centers on Berlin subcultures and the emotional bond between women and urban spaces. Focusing on her immediate circle—artists, sisters, and friends—she creates poetic, politically resonant narratives that capture the intimacy and social shifts of her generation.
Nyo Jinyong Lian is a Paris-based Chinese artist and Beaux-Arts de Paris graduate. Her series Trust Me, inspired by The Emperor’s New Clothes, uses "autonomous fables" to explore power and social norms through humor and the absurd. By staging women globally, she uses surrealism as a tool for social critique. A multi-award winner, she received the 212 Photography Istanbul Grand Prize (2025) and has exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles and PhotoSaintGermain. Her 2025 photobook was shortlisted for the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award.
Yufan Lu explores image-making as a vital mode of thinking, remembering, feeling, and living. Their current work investigates photographic-sculptural practices, focusing on the tactile involvement of the hand and body. By emphasizing the physical act of making, Lu seeks to engage with the "soft humanness" often lost in today’s increasingly automated image systems. This approach creates a dialogue between the material world and the digital lens, reclaiming intimacy in the visual process.
Daria Nazarova (b. 1991, Russia) is a visual artist based in Tbilisi. Combining her background in architecture and documentary photography, she explores identity, transformation, and the intricate ties between people, places, and memory. Her practice often involves archives and photo books, documenting personal change and collective experiences through immersion in unfamiliar contexts. By blending reality and imagination, Nazarova builds new forms of empathy and understanding across generations.
Maya Nur Vandegehuchte is a Ghent-based visual artist and photographer exploring the intersections of cultural clashes, Muslim communities, and intersectional feminism. Drawing from her Belgian-Turkish heritage, she examines the tension between tradition and innovation. Through a blend of staged and intuitive photography, Nur critically engages with power structures and stereotypes to challenge existing narratives. Her work seeks a visual language that provokes dialogue around social norms and marginalized voices.
Anastasiia O. is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography and collage. Born in Russia, her practice centers on feminism, identity, and personal memory. She explores the materiality of images, primarily utilizing iPhone photography, mobile applications, and mixed digital and analog collage. By treating photographs as flexible structures rather than fixed representations, she reworks textures and found materials to transform archival experiences into new, fluid narratives.
Sandra-Lee Phipps is a photographer, documentarian, and Professor at SCAD Atlanta. Her work, represented by Whitespace Gallery, explores representations of the self and body through both documentary and fine art lenses. With a background in journalism (UGA) and studio arts (NYU), she previously freelanced for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Village Voice. Today, her practice bridges academic rigors and personal inquiry, with work held in private collections worldwide.
Aiswarya R Raj is an NID Gandhinagar Photography Design student with a background in architecture. Her practice bridges documentary and fashion, exploring identity, gender, and the politics of the gaze. Using digital and analogue processes, she creates intimate, critical narratives rooted in lived experiences and social resistance. Aspiring to be a creative director, she views fashion as a site for activism—reclaiming identity and rewriting visual histories where beauty and storytelling coexist.
Reid+Factor is a collaborative photography duo formed in 2017 by Margaret Reid Boyer and Jodie Factor. Their work, blending conceptual inquiry with felt experience, explores the relationship between subject and object in photography, and the power dynamics of gender performance. Their work has been featured in such places as Platform Project Space, Houston Center for Photography, The Billboard Creative, and Dear Dave Magazine. Reid+Factor were awarded a Dear Dave Fellowship in 2024.
Kristina Rozhkova (b. 1996, Perm, Russia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in the philosophy of art and cinema.A graduate of "Fotografika" St. Petersburg, her debut project DACHA earned immediate international acclaim. Her celebrated photobook, The Bliss of Girlhood, has been exhibited in Bristol and at Milan’s PhotoVogue Festival. With work featured in i-D and Vice, her 2025 "Japan Edition" release with Shaba Gallery in Tokyo marks her continued global influence and evolution.
Agate Tūna is a multidisciplinary artist from Riga, Latvia, working in photography, video, and sound. Her practice explores the link between spirituality and technology, blending her family’s spiritualist heritage with hauntology and techno-specters. Viewing photography as a "haunted medium," she uses analogue techniques like chemigrams to investigate the materiality of the image. Her hands-on process involves set construction and object-making to shape perceptions of the unseen.
French-Dominican artist Karla Hiraldo Voleau (b. 1992) holds an MFA from ECAL. A 2024 PICTO Talent Prize laureate, her work explores intimacy and activism, notably in "Hola Mi Amol" and "Another Love Story." She has exhibited at MEP Paris, ICP New York, and Paris Photo. A former Foam Talent and Swiss Design Awards finalist, she has held residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts and Palazzo Trevisan. Her practice is represented by Christophe Guye Galerie.
Zainab is a Kashmiri lens-based artist and photojournalist whose work documents the intersections of home, homeland, and external violence. Her practice serves as a marker of resistance, capturing the "banal unrest" of daily life. A founding member of the collective Her Pixel Story, her work has appeared in Aperture. A fellow of FICA’s Himalayan Fellowship (2025), she has exhibited at Breda Photo and Gulf Photo Plus. Her images remain a vital testimony to the resilience of her region.