We are Tis Zamler-Carhart & Vitaly Zamler, a parent-child duo working as visual artists and archeologists. Tis (*1975, they/them) was born in France and educated in the United States and the Netherlands. Vitaly (*1994, he/him) was born in Russia and educated in Poland and Belgium. Vitaly is the adopted son of Tis and Tis’s spouse Andrew.

Our main medium is photography, which we approach as a material art form involving physical and digital interventions on the image and its support, sometimes bordering on textile art, assemblage, sculpture, and scenography.

Our work focuses on the daily objects and spaces of late capitalism in their material as well as social dimensions. In that banal universe, we see our artistic practice as a form of sense-making through play: with our art, we play at finding some sense amid the debris of industrial consumerism. When we succeed, our artistic discourse offers a poetic sublimation of the daily, the banal, the mundane, an art of mise-en-scène in which the viewer is invited to join us on stage.

We formed our duo in 2022, after Vitaly graduated from VUB/ULB with a masters in Urban Studies. Our collaboration began in Rwanda, with an archeological research project on rural households, leading to solo exhibitions at Rwanda’s Kigali Centre for Photography and Nigeria’s National Museum of Unity in Ibadan, and subsequently at Galerie Mhaata in Brussels.

Our academic research in archeology concentrates on household archeology of the contemporary period, with the same focus on objects and spaces as our artistic practice. Our publications include two book chapters, one on Rwandan houses, which will be published by Bloomsbury (London) in a reference volume on household archeology, the other on abandoned homes in Poland, which will be published by Springer (Berlin) in a volume about the archeology of oppression and resistance.

Our photographic work is held in the permanent collection of the Textile Museum in Kamienna Góra, Poland, as well as in private collections in Belgium, France, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria, Rwanda, Switzerland, and the USA.

Before our duo was formed, Tis worked as a multi-disciplinary artist and academic for 20 years, and briefly as a corporate lawyer in the United States. Tis founded the medieval music program at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (The Netherlands), where they taught medieval music and Latin. Tis also taught music history and medieval literature at the New School in New York City, as well as trans-disciplinary design at the same university’s Parsons School of Design. Tis is the author of two books of fiction around Byzantine history and design theory, both published by Punctum Books; a composer of contemporary classical music ranging from chamber works to large-scale opera; and a singer on albums from medieval music to opera and jazz improvisation. Tis’s musical work is available on Naxos Concordance, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Innova Recordings, and other labels.