Photographs by artists shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2017 are now on show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery until June 11th.
The winner of the £30,000 award will be announced from four shortlisted finalists, Sophie Calle, Dana Lixenberg, Awoiska van der Molen and Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, on May 18th.
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is now in its twentieth year running, having initially been set up in London in 1997 and this year the exhibition of shortlisted photographs will tour internationally. The works will be shown at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main and subsequently at Aperture Foundation in New York, making the works available to a broader audience as contemporary photography continues to grow in popularity.
The Shortlisted photographers
Sophie Calle’s work, one of her most personal projects „My mother, my cat, my father, in that order“, deals with the death of her parents and cat, her relationship with each of them and their impact on her life. The newly printed photographs of objects she identifies with her loved ones are exhibited alongside personal text panels written by Calle. These delve deeper into the sentimental attachments connected to these everyday objects, exploring her emotional responses and how their meaning has been transformed since her loved ones have passed away. Ultimately, her most recent work is also a reflection on her life and career to date, examining the transitory nature of relationships and the persistence of memory.
Dana Lixenberg has been nominated for her publication “Imperial Courts” (Roma, 2015). Lixenberg has built up a multifaceted portrait of the mainly African-American neighbourhood of the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts in Los Angeles. Returning countless times over a time span of twenty-two years, Lixenberg gradually created a collaborative image of the changing face of this community. Some in the community were killed, while others disappeared or went to jail, while others, once children in early photographs, grew up and had children of their own. Lixenberg started to document the conversations and specific soundtrack of the neighbourhood. Extracts of sound recordings are available through headphone spots within the space.
Dana Lixenberg Wilteysha, 1993 © Dana Lixenberg Courtesy of the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam
Awoiska van der Molen has focused on black and white, abstracted images in different scales and formats. The artist has been nominated for her exhibition „Blanco” at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (22 Jan. until 3 Apr. 2016). Van der Molen creates images that revitalise the genre of landscape photography. Traveling for weeks in solitude in foreign landscapes, from Japan to Norway to Crete, she explores the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities and her personal experience within it. Her work questions how natural and manmade environments are commonly represented and interacted with.
Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs’ project “EURASIA” which has been on display at Fotomuseum Winterthur last year, playfully draws on the iconography of a road trip constructing experiences drawn from memory and imagination. Onorato and Krebs’ journey begins in 2013 in Switzerland, continues through the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and ends after 3-years and 17’000 kilometers in Mongolia. Throughout their travels, the duo encounters landscapes and people in a state of ongoing transition, from ancient traditions and post-Communist structures to modernity and the formation of an independent identity. Using a mix of analogue media and techniques including 16mm films, large-format plate cameras and installation-based interventions, Onorato and Krebs compose a narrative that is as much fiction as documentation.
The Photographers' Gallery
16 - 18 Ramillies St
London
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