The shortlisted artists are Poulomi Basu, Alejandro Cartagena, Cao Fei and Zineb Sedira
The shortlisted artists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021 have been announced – they are: Poulomi Basu, Alejandro Cartagena, Cao Fei and Zineb Sedira. The 2021 edition of the award is its 25th anniversary, which recognizes artists who have made significant contributions to photography in the past 12 months.
An exhibition of the shortlisted artists will be shown at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, 19 March – 27 June 2021, curated by Anna Dannemann. The winner of the GBP£30,000 award will be announced in Spring 2021. The jury consists of: artist Cristina de Middel; curator Simon Njami; Anna Tellgren, curator of photography at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Anne-Marie Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Frankfurt; and Brett Rogers, director of The Photographers’ Gallery acting as the non-voting chair.
‘All the artists in this year’s shortlist invite us to examine urgent, though often unexamined political, cultural and social upheavals across four vastly different geographic terrains – China, India, Algeria and Mexico,’ Rogers said in a statement.
‘In exploring their subjects, they each draw upon an extraordinary range of strategies: dark humour and dystopian fiction in the work of Cao Fei; richly layered personal and political narratives in Poulomi Basu’s publication; irony, the archive and personal storytelling in Alejandro Cartagena’s approach; and collective and individual memory within Zineb Sedira’s practice. Together they amplify universally resonant themes that reflect our times and illuminate photography’s ability to encompass the micro and the macro, the surface and the undercurrent simultaneously.’
Indian artist and activist Poulomi Basu has been nominated for her book Centralia (2020), shot in central India, which examines the conflict between indigenous people fighting under the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army and the Indian state. Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena has been nominated for his book A Small Guide to Homeownership (2020), which continues his recording of processes of urbanisation in northern Mexico.
Chinese artist Cao Fei has been shortlisted for her show Blueprints (2020) at London’s Serpentine Gallery, which explores the intersections of technology, identity and reality. And London-based artist Zineb Sedira has been nominated for her exhibition A Brief Moment (2019) at Jeu de Paume, Paris, a retrospective which explores the artist’s use of archives in our understanding of images and meaning-construction.
2020. © Alejandro Cartagena; courtesy the artist
The 2020 edition of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize was awarded to the French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa. ‘When I was in school I learned about the history of art but that didn’t introduce other aspects of my home culture or leave traces of the people around me, so later I decided to try to bring my home culture into the history of art,’ he said. ‘For me it’s about the idea of integration – how we can integrate our own histories into that one.’
