Photography alumna selected for New Contemporaries 2025
05 December 2025
Photo: Hydar Dewachi
BA(Hons) Photography alumna Viviana Almas has been selected for New Contemporaries, a prestigious showcase of the most exciting emerging artists living and working in the UK.
New Contemporaries is a registered charity. Founded in 1949, it exists to support emerging artists at the beginning of their careers by introducing them to the visual arts sector and to the public through a variety of platforms, including an annual exhibition.
Being selected is both prestigious and a tangible career boost. As one of this year’s 26 selected artists, Viviana will receive one-to-one mentorship from an arts professional and will take part in two exhibitions at South London Gallery and MIMA Middlesbrough in 2026.
“New Contemporaries is a brilliant chance to test yourself in the ‘real-world art world’, including the parts no one warns you about until you’re already knee-deep in them”, Viviana tells us.
“When the email arrived confirming my selection, it felt like a small but unmistakable ‘eureka’ moment; not ‘dramatic thunderbolt-of-genius' energy, but rather the internal version of standing up a little straighter.
“Being chosen by another contemporary artist and supported by a team of practitioners who actually know how to shape and challenge work feels like stepping back into the best parts of university: time, space and people who get it. It’s the sense of being welcomed into a room full of artists who are all searching, learning, and pushing themselves. That feels like the right place to be.”
Viviana’s striking art practice moves between photography, printmaking, and film, with each medium feeding the others in unexpected ways. An unwavering openness to ideas – a facet celebrated by New Contemporaries – underpins her practice.
“Ideas arrive, become insistent and then it’s simply easier to make them than to ignore them”, she explains. “The two works selected for New Contemporaries –Solus and In Silence Seeds Weep – were both shot on Super 8 and hand-developed using natural developers made from apples and acorns. Before those films existed, I was deep in photography and intaglio printmaking, and the process of assembling images, thinking in sequences, and working physically with materials shaped the way I approach film.”
Viviana’s curiosity and confidence to experiment flourished during her time at Falmouth. “Having grown up in a seaside town in Lithuania, I thought I needed a big city, yet somehow chose another coastline instead”, she says. "My time there was all experimentation: photography, film, materials, departments I probably had no business wandering into but did anyway."
“During my third year I discovered the printmaking studios on the Falmouth Campus and essentially moved in. Under the guidance of Tom Woodward, I spent every day working on photo-etchings and screen prints. Because I was drawn to film but didn’t yet know how to make one ‘properly’. I also slipped into the film department, learning the fundamentals of collaboration, structure and sound. All these threads eventually pulled together into the way I work now.”
2026 is full of exciting prospects for Viviana. As well as the New Contemporaries exhibitions, she is preparing for a residency at the Arctic Culture Lab in Greenland. “The plan is to meet local communities, visit remote settlements, and continue research that will shape a future film responding to the region’s growing global focus”, she tells us. “I don’t yet know what the final work will look like. But that’s part of the process: the landscape decides the rhythm: I just try to listen.”
Top image: Credit: Hydar Dewachi.
Triptych: stills from Solus, 2024, shot on Super 8. Credit: Viviana Almas.
Bottom image: In Silence Seeds Weep, 2025, moving image. Credit: Viviana Almas.
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