The annual Deutsche Börse Photography Award celebrates outstanding bodies of work that have been exhibited or published in Europe in the previous twelve months. All the nominated artists are acknowledged for their major achievements and innovations in the field of photography and contemporary culture. All the entrants are whittled down to just four artists who are displayed every spring at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, Central London.
This year’s four finalists are Lebohang Kganye, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Hrair Sarkissian and VALIE EXPORT.
Lebohang Kganye (born 1990, South Africa)
Kganye’s display is the simplest. It looks like a junior school project. She has selected photos from her family album, blown them up and then stuck them on plywood stands. She’s then arranged them into four groups. The overall title is Mohlokomedi wa Tara and the four settings are: the inside of her grandmother’s kitchen; an outdoor scene with her grandfather sitting in a chair; a landscape with a herd of cows; a farm landscape with a mud house in the background.
Installation view of ‘Mohlokomedi wa Tara’ by Lebohang Kganye (2018) Photo by the author
You can’t possibly deduce it from the installation itself, but the piece is intended to commemorate, among other things, the fact that the family was forced to migrate and to change their surname by the Apartheid regime’s Land Acts and Apartheid laws. According to the curators:
Using her family archive, Kganye skilfully explores and reimagines notions of home and belonging. Her fusion of images and words not only navigates the complexity of the South African experience but also contributes to the process of decolonisation through the visualisation of personal and collective memories and knowledge.
When I was in the room before it, I noticed people going into the Kganye room and spending as little as a few seconds in it. In, look around for 10 or 15 seconds, out. There’s nothing more to see or interact with than these wooden stands displaying family photos. It’s a neat gimmick or brand, but do you think they’re contributing anything ‘to the process of decolonisation’ in South Africa?
Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad
This is the most complex display, spread across two spaces and 6 or 7 walls. It is a collaboration between the photographer Gauri Gill (born 1970, India) and the painter Rajesh Vangad (born 1975, India). Over the years Gill has taken photos of rural Indian life in and around the village of Advasi and Vangad has used the techniques of the Warli culture he was born into to paint over them. The results are a fusion of photography and painting, documentation and art. Or, recognisable photos of rural India with lots of fiddly lines and details drawn onto them.
Installation view of photos from ‘Fields of Sight’ by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad (2023). Photo by the author
The criteria for inclusion in the prize are not only to be featured in an exhibition in Europe but also for any books of photography published in Europe during the previous twelve months and it’s for their joint book, published in 2023, that Gill and Vangad have been nominated, and copies of it are on display here.
Installation view of copies of ‘Fields of Sight’ by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad (2023). Photo by the author
Tate have bought one of their photos, ‘The Eye in the Sky, and devote a long web page to it, which explains their aims and techniques better than I can.
Hrair Sarkissian (born 1973, Syria)
Sarkissian’s works is about war and conflict. As his name suggests, he is of Armenian heritage, scion of a family which lost members in the Armenian Genocide during the Great War and the trauma of war and state repression ring through his work. Thus one of his first major projects, Executions Squares (2008 to 2010) depicts deserted public spaces in Syrian cities which were once sites of execution. The two works on display here are on the same theme of state repression.
Last Seen (2018 to 2021) is a set of 50 photos showing the locations where 50 people who were removed, arrested, interned, disappeared or abducted were last seen by their loved ones. Sarkissian travelled far and wide to locations in Argentina, Brazil, Bosnia, Kosovo and Lebanon. Some images have the appearance of a shrine where every detail has been left exactly as it was when the loved one vanished.
‘Last Seen’ (2018 to 2021) by Hrair Sarkissian
The second work is an installation which contains no photographs at all. You pass into a smallish room which is complete darkness, the walls painted black, no light, so dark I worried I might bump into one of the other visitors. No visuals just audio. Speakers on the walls play a soundscape. You totally have to have read the wall label to understand what’s going on.
First of all it’s called Deathscape and it is the recordings of forensic archaeologists exhuming bodies from the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). Over 2,000 mass graves survive from the period in which over 100,000 civilians are buried. The soundscape of the installation mixes the sounds of shovels breaking the soil with brushes clearing away the dirt mingled with the heavy breathing of the excavators.
Quite obviously this isn’t a photograph and doesn’t include any photographs so what it is doing in a photography prize exhibition is open to question. For the tragic seriousness of the themes this is the most important display, but weighed solely as photography, it’s probably the weakest.
Trigger warnings
More and more art galleries post warnings at the entrance to warn visitors about dangerous material which might ‘trigger’ them. There are visitor warnings at the Royal Academy slavery exhibition and there’s a warning at the entrance to this exhibition, too.
The exhibitions have potentially triggering content including nudity, depictions of violence, and other sensitive matter.
Nudity!? The naked human form is now regarded as dangerous because it might ‘trigger’ viewers? Wow. This growing super-sensitivity can’t help but feel like a big step backwards into the Victorian era. Maybe galleries should cover up the legs of their pianos in order to prevent any suggestive thoughts. Maybe books ought to be rewritten to remove offensive material and anything which might ‘call a blush into the cheek of a young person,’ as Dickens put it in 1864. But then it’s already happening – Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive (Guardian).
There are no warnings about the warnings, though, to help people who are triggered by trigger warnings. These might read: ‘This is a warning that the exhibitions contain warnings which might trigger people who are triggered by warnings about being triggered.’
VALIE EXPORT (born 1940, Austria)
All these warnings are to prepare you for the room devoted to VALIE EXPORTt, a ‘radical’ feminist artist from the late 1960s and 1970s. EXPORT became notorious ‘for her radical performances and critical examination of women’s role in society and the arts’ i.e. taking her clothes off in order to subvert the male gaze, challenge the patriarchy, reclaim her agency etc etc or, as the curators put it:
‘Pointing out entrenched patriarchal structures in mass media image culture, her fearless artistic practice exposes the role representation plays in the construction of gender, sexuality and social norms. Through photographs, filmic works, performances and installations, EXPORT deals with key issues including the body and the gaze, performance and the image, and subject and environment. For over 50 years, VALIE EXPORT has influenced generations of female artists, contorting, cutting and deforming her body to expose the profound social oppression of women – a theme that continues to resonate today.’
The single most striking thing about the EXPORT display is how old it is. It amounts to about a dozen black-and-white photos from her golden era in the 1970s and one small video installation from 1983.
In some of the photos she is shown embracing the stone walls of libraries and public buildings, dramatising the way women are forced to bend and distort themselves to fit into Patriarchal Society (Body Configurations, 1972). In several others she’s stripped naked and is crawling through a maze of electrified wires set up in her studio, acting out the snares and mazes which women have to navigate in a Patriarchal Society (Hyperbulie, 1973).
In 1970 she had a tattoo of a garter belt done on her thigh, where the garter would actually be, and then had it photographed from different angles. This is BODY SIGN ACTION from 1970 and by:
‘juxtaposing the garter with her exposed body EXPORT confronts society’s notions of female sexuality as repressed and shameful. Her work demonstrates female sexuality as liberated and prompts discussions about gender equality and autonomy.’
A pretty clear indication that, for curators, whether a photo is well composed, well shot, well lit, well developed, well framed, whether it is beautiful, evocative, emotionally powerful or aesthetically pleasing are all irrelevant; all that matters is whether it prompts discussion.
Installation view of VALIE EXPORT at the Photographers’ Gallery, showing stills from ‘Hyperbulie’ (1973) on the left, and ‘BODY SIGN ACTION’ (1970) on the right. Photo by the author
The most striking image, probably EXPORT’s greatest hit, is from a shoot when she dressed up as a wild-haired terrorist holding a machine gun, dressed in Velvet Underground-era leather, apart from the crotch, which has been removed to display her pubic hair and pudenda.
‘Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, Motiv’ 1969/2001 by VALIE EXPORT
This is by far her most famous work, so much so that it’s on the front page of her website and all across the internet if you Google the word ‘Aktionhose’. The German title translates as ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’. Action Pants. There’s an idea for Ann Summers or Victoria’s Secret, although it also sounds like a character from Viz.
The photo records a performance where she walked into an independent cinema dressed like this, her exposed pubes at everybody’s eye level. This intervention was intended as:
‘a critique of the sexist voyeurism in film and cinema…Her unwavering gaze into the camera amplifies her challenge against a culture that objectifies and oppresses women, transforming her rage into a bold statement of empowerment and resistance.’
She did this on 22 April 1969, a few months after The Beatles released The White Album, which raises a pretty obvious question which is, Why has an artist whose heyday was fifty years ago been entered in a competition about the best photography exhibitions of 2023? This is the kind of baby boomer cultural imperialism which drives my kids nuts and some of the younger people at work occasionally complain about, too. There’s nothing in EXPORT’s display more recent than the 1980s. I guess it’s like giving a worthy old actor a Lifetime’s Achievement Award at the Oscars.
(Incidentally, this is an award for photography not performance and yet most of the photos of EXPORT – crawling through the wires or showing off her garter tattoo or wearing her crotchless trousers – weren’t taken by her, but my male photographers, in the crotchless case by Peter Hassmann. No award for him.)
Your call
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 16 May 2024, with the other finalists each receiving £5,000. Who do you think should win and why?
Related link
- The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024 continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 2 June 2024
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