The shortlist has been announced for the 24th annual Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Anton Kusters, Clare Strand, Mark Neville and Mohamed Bourouissa have been nominated for the prestigious prize of £30,000, which will be announced at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, on 14 May 2020, following an exhibition of all four nominated projects that will open in February 2020.
Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa has been shortlisted for Free Trade, which was exhibited at the Monoprix supermarket at Les Rencontres d’Arles this summer. The exhibition considers the relationship between individuals and the complex systems of markets and capital, while also reflecting on historically and socially prescribed aesthetics from art history to rap culture.
Anton Kusters is shortlisted for his exhibition for The Blue Skies Project at Fitzrovia Chapel, London, in May 2019. The Belgian artist is known for creating conceptual photographic projects that often investigate the difficult premise of representing trauma. The Blue Skies Project is an installation of 1078 polaroid photographs of blue skies shot from every former Nazi-run concentration camp in Europe. The installation is accompanied by a 13-year-long audio piece by musician Ruben Samama that recreates the period between 1933 and 1945 when the camps were operational.
Clare Strand’s shortlisted exhibition, The Discrete Channel with Noise, from this year’s PHotoESPAÑA festival in Madrid, Spain, draws on references as diverse as mathematician Claude Shannon’s information theory to novelist Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to discuss the nature of communication. The project also examines how we perceive, code, and categorise visual information in the digital age, while raising questions about interpretation, perception and the ownership of knowledge.
Mark Neville is shortlisted for his publication Parade, published this year by the Centre d’art GwinZegal in France. Beginning on the day that the UK voted to leave Britain, Parade was produced over a three-year period in Guingamp, Brittany, a region known as “little Britain”. Commissioned by the Centre d’art GwinZegal, the book is a portrait of an agricultural region in the north-west of France that explores the economic drivers of the region, from small sustainable farms to large agricultural industries.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize was founded in 1996 by The Photographers’ Gallery, and the Deutsche Börse Group have been sponsors since 2005. Past winners of the prize include Susan Meiselas in 2019, Juergen Teller, Rineke Dijkstra, Richard Billingham, and Trevor Paglen.
The exhibition of shortlisted projects will be on show at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, from 21 February until 07 June 2020, before touring to Deutsche Börse’s headquarters in Frankfurt on 26 June 2020. The winner of the prize will be announced at a ceremony held at The Photographers’ Gallery on 14 May 2020.
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