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The V & A Parasol Foundation Prize for women in photography has announced the four winners of its Open Call Award, now in its third year. The theme of this year's prize, “Unity”, strikes a note of hope after a year of international conflicts and political elections around the world. Each of the four artists – originally from South Africa, India, the United States and Lebanon – widens the potential of the photographic medium in their reflections on the possibilities of a new and different world.
The series of the collaboration artist based in Johannesburg, Tshepiso Moropa, Dreams (Setswana for “dreams”) started with a dream she had made. Moropa was seated with the grandparents she had never met, having a conversation. She translated the dream meeting in a powerful collage, “Ke Go Beile Leitlho” (I have my eyes on you). Inspired by folklore, the large -scale collages of Moropa are free and deceptively simple; Black and white photographs float in thunderbolts of mute pallets, the numbers look like a doll. She invokes family members, present and transmitted, in symbolic arrangements, and described how the images “bring them in a new story”.
Spandita Malik Jālī – Resistance stitches Also works on the surface of photography, in this case with sewing and textiles. The series continues its work for several years with communities of its native India. Although the context is that of gender violence, the images themselves are joyful.
Malik's subjects will embody their portraits, but they choose, enjoying themselves and their environments with a bright thread and a delicate structuring. Even when they choose to darken, protecting their identity, they do it with bright colors.
“The project is a collaboration, not only in the process, but also in perspective,” explains Malik. “Each surface is a shared story.” She found that the work results together in this way were deep. “When we started to share stories with each other, we found that the taboo around speaking of abuse had just disappeared,” reflects the artist. The seams and embroidery evoke repair ideas as much as crafts. “By bringing us together to work and to share our memories and trauma, we were able to heal ourselves,” she says.
Nail spark by the artist of Brooklyn Morgan Levy is a representation of women workers across the United States. “I was not so interested in women working in spaces dominated by men,” explains the artist. “I was really interested in women – and” the woman “is a very open and porous category for me – change space.” The photographs, striking and graphics in white and white whitewashed, mix documentary images with performative re-stagings, overthrowing the idea of the heroic white man as a symbol of American work.
“In this political climate, I needed a feminist project for the construction of the world, and I needed a scaffolding on which to get out of the obstacle in which we live,” explains Levy. For her, the images representing workers at rest are as important as the images of work. “In any social justice work, you have to work and you have to rest, and for me it makes sense as a means of building a world, both literally and metaphorically.”
Tanya Traboulsi also presents rest and leisure as being quietly revolutionary. Beirut, recurring dreamHer work documenting the city where she was born and now lives, is far from the representation of the media often fictionalized by a place focused on the party, or even the besieged Lebanon of the recent war. Instead, his photographs are soft, warm, silent: images of people gathered by the water in a soft light. “In wartime and crisis, we are allowed to have pockets of happiness,” explains Traboulsi. “It is important to accept and allow this, in order to be able to deal with what is happening around you.”
In their work, the accent put by the four artists on imagination or reimagination opens up a space where a unit which often seems inaccessible feels as possible. In this, Levy says that the approach of the American author and the educator Bell Hooks is an influence. “She invites you to get closer,” says Levy. “It is such a warm welcome, to change your mind or to see differently.”
The winners of the V & A Parasol Prize will be exhibited in Peckham 24, 16-25 May
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