Exhibition Opening: VIEW2026
Join us for the opening of VIEW2026.
photo access at Sydney Contemporary
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Carriageworks
Photo Sydney is a bold new sector dedicated to showcasing exceptional works of contemporary photography.
11 – 14 September, 2025, Carriageworks
For its inaugural edition, photo access presents five visionary artists, Odette England, Sammy Hawker, Nico Krijno, Phuong Nguyen Le, and Kai Wasikowski – each pushing the boundaries of the photographic medium.
From analogue processes to digital manipulation and material experimentation, their work explores photography’s shifting relationship to the physical world. Together, they interrogate how images are made, remembered, and reimagined. An exciting, tactile, and thoughtful presentation that asks: What can a photograph become?
Event artists
Odette England
Odette Elix England is an artist and writer. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received grants and awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Anonymous Was a Woman, among many others. She has published six books and will shortly release her first novella Isn’t X Beautiful. Elix England received her MFA in Photography in 2012 and her Ph.D. in 2018. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Brown University while working on her second novella, Once I Was A Photograph.
Sammy Hawker
Sammy Hawker is an Australian-based visual artist working predominantly on Ngunawal / Ngunnawal / Ngambri Country [Canberra Region, ACT] and Walbunja Country [Southern Tablelands / South Coast region, NSW].
Through practices of reciprocity (facilitated acts of co-creation) Sammy’s works explore the potential of interspecies dialogue, giving voice to the presences of more-than human worlds. These works reflect on how knowledge and memory is inscribed within materials, spaces and bodies.
Sammy’s multi-disciplinary practice embraces photography, printmaking, text, sculpture, sound and moving image. These works form a vast and ongoing archive, documenting sites and moments of exchange.
Nico Krijno
With a background in theatre and experimental video, Nico Krijno (b. 1981, South Africa) works at the blurry intersection of photography, collage, painting, sculpture and performance. Probing the thresholds of each, his work materialises through a stream of unique and colourful abstractions that not only act as autonomous pieces of art but when seen as a collection, Krijno’s obsession and constant intrigue into the perception of photographs becomes decidedly evident.
Often working with discarded materials found in his immediate surroundings, he interprets and re-imagines them to find alternative structures for how meaning and matter are both constructed and perceived. Photographing these ephemeral structures, as he describes himself, are a private and physical performance, with the camera being the audience. Importantly, the act of photographing these theatrical scenes is only one part of Krijno’s work. Through an array of digital tools, he then re-imagines the materials, colours and forms countless times until our understanding of each photograph is constantly being challenged, always failing to remain still.
Phuong Le
Phuong Nguyen Le is an emerging Vietnamese artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). He employs photography to explore themes of identity, family, sexuality, and decolonisation. His work critically examines his position within an ongoing colonial structure in the Asia-Pacific region, characterised by violence, censorship, and division.
In 2024, he published his debut monograph, Sunshine, which was featured in the Australian & New Zealand Photobook Awards at PHOTO2024, Melbourne. He also participated in the Today/Tomorrow group exhibition at the Parliament of Victoria during PHOTO2024.
Kai Wasikowski
Kai Wasikowski currently lives and works on Gadigal Land / Sydney, Australia. His practice encompasses photography, video and sculpture. Wasikowski’s projects use photography to question western visual/political systems of knowledge, and aim to spark feelings of curiosity and connectedness towards the powerful lives of images. Wasikowski received his BVA from the University of Sydney in 2016, and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. His work has received notable awards including the Dr Harold Schenberg Art Fellowship from the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2017); the AusArt Scholarship from the American Australian Association (2020); and the Marten Bequest Scholarship from Creative Australia (2021). He has participated in residencies at the Three Shadows Photography Centre, China (2019) and ran educational workshops at the Australian Centre for Photography, the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre; and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney.
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