GRAND PRIX IMAGES VEVEY 2021/2022

For the first time since its creation, the organisation of the Jury took place byvideoconference due to the pandemic. The jury of the Grand Prix Images Vevey chaired by the photographer, curator and writer Teju Cole and composed by Frederica Angelucci (director of the Stevenson Gallery), Milena Carstens,(director of Photography at ZEITmagazin), Julien Guerrier, (publications director at Louis Vuitton) and Shoair Mavlian, (director of Photoworks), rewarded the following projects:

Grand Prix Images Vevey
Lebohang Kganye (ZA): Staging Memories

In recognition of its visual inventiveness, historical rigor, and daring conceptualization, the jury was pleased to unanimously select Lebohang Kganye’s Staging Memories project as the winner of the Grand Prix Images Vevey.

Staging Memories is a particular development in Lebohang Kganye's new series entitled In Search for Memory begun in 2020. In this series Kganye proposes to "offer a response to the fictional novella by Malawian writer Muhti Nhlema titled TA O’REVA, seeking so to interrogate the human need to retain and recall shared narratives and exploring the contradictions and fictions therein". For the first public iteration of Staging Memories, Lebohang will conceive for Images Vevey in September 2022 a large-scale three-dimensional installation exploring the materiality of photography in dialogue with the disciplines of theatre and literature.

Lebohang Kganye’s project applies an intriguing and resonant approach to the ways personal and familial experiences intersect with wider societal realities. She employs archival photographic imagery, much of it derived from family albums, and moves that material across a seamless series of genres: photography, collage, installation, and set design. Born in South Africa and based in Johannesburg, Kganye has a practice deeply informed by the concerns and techniques of master artists from South Africa like William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa, and Zanele Muholi. But she is very much working in her own unique voice, which melds the fantastical, the political, and the intimate in strong and exciting ways.

Staging Memories is rooted in specific post-Apartheid realities, but it calls out with a clear voice across the world, confirming once again that history is always local as well as global. In Lebohang Kganye’s capable and fearless hands, we are given an opportunity to encounter the world in new frames: playful and dark, accessible and challenging, steadily mournful and indomitably hopeful.

Lebohang Kganye (ZA) was born in 1990 in Johannesburg, where she currently lives and works. Kganye obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2014 and is currently doing her Masters in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University.

Images Vevey Book Award
Carmen Winant (USA): Arrangements

All members of the jury were impressed with Carmen Winant’s book proposal Arrangements, and pleased to award it the Images Vevey Book Award.

This new project draws on Winant’s collection of close to 2000 intact sheets of paper which the artist has ripped from books and stored in her studio over a period of several years. A journey into the archive, this book promises an exploration of formal structure, primarily using material drawn from commercially reproduced imagery. One formal innovation that impressed jury members was Winant’s enlargement of the scope of a collaging practice by using full found pages that already embedded combinations of their own; she is exploring, in other words, the possibilities of juxtaposing found juxtapositions.

She proposes a book project of multivalent narratives. The specific design solutions will be conditioned by various rules determined at the outset, including strategies of recycling and recovery. Arrangements signals a shift in Winant’s practice, moving her from her typical deconstructing and reworking of images to a more formally restrictive approach of editing recontextualized content. Her practice situates her as an inheritor of the insights of the "pictures generation" but by retaining the original full-page object and seeking sequences directed by sensibility, she makes an original and promising contribution to contemporary photographic practice.

Carmen Winant (USA) is an artist and writer based in Columbus, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at The Ohio State University. Her work utilizes installation and collage strategies to examine feminist modes of survival and revolt.

Images Vevey Light Broncolor Honourable Mention
Stefanie Moshammer (AT): Her Sweet Poison

The jury is pleased to unanimously award the Images Vevey Light Broncolor Honourable Mention to Stefanie Moshammer for her proposal titled Her Sweet Poison, an extensive research project on alcoholism among women. Using her childhood memories and her personal experience with her mother as a point of departure, Moshammer combines staged photographs with images from her family archive, and also draws on art historical references, commercial pictures, and scientific illustrations.

Her Sweet Poison intends to avoid a sentimental view of its difficult and universal subject: Moshammer proposes an approach that would subtly mixes rigour, candour and sometimes even a dose of humour that made this proposal stand out. The jury was impressed by the complexity and the scope of her investigative intention, as well as by its potential as an installation.

Stefanie Moshammer (AT) is a visual artist whose practice blends photography, video, collage and installation. After graduating from Fashion School Vienna, she received a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design & Photography at University of Art and Design in Linz/Austria and she attended the BA in Advanced Visual Storytelling at the Danish School of Media and Journalism.

Images Vevey Documentary Honourable Mention
Juan Brenner (GT): Marvelous Phenomena

The jury unanimously wished to recognize Juan Brenner for his commitment to exploring new documentary practice, tackling the complex history of his native Guatemala. Marvelous Phenomena is the final chapter of Brenner’s trilogy of work presenting an important contemporary reframing and critique of the colonial invasion and conquest of the Americas.His current project seeks to reveal the traces and ongoing impact of an important historical event: retracing the exact path of Pedro de Alvarado's failed expedition from Guatemala to Ecuador in 1534. Alvarado attempted to appropriate the gold Francisco Pizarro had looted from the Inca empire, and in the process, he abandoned thousands of Guatemalan warriors to their death in the Andean winter. That historical cataclysm has an ongoing sociopolitical legacy, the traces of which are still present, and made newly visible in Brenner’s work.

Juan Brenner (GT) is a photographer and independent art director, lives and works in Guatemala City. For more than a decade he lives in New York where he works as a fashion photographer.

Images Vevey Special Jury Prize
Alba Zari (IT): Occult

The jury unanimously awarded a Special Jury Prize to the Italian artist Alba Zari for her ongoing project about the Christian fundamentalist cult Children of God. Zari was born in Thailand in 1987 into this Western-led cult, and spent some of her formative years, with her mother and grandmother, in it. As an adult, she has undertaken a deeply moving and occasionally distressing investigation into the lasting damage the cult on herself and others.

Making use of archival images, as well as her own photographs, Zari patiently accumulates visual evidence of the abusive practices of the "Children of God". She also undertakes memory work around the uncertain figure of her own father. Finally, she looks into contemporary cults that similarly have Western leadership and questionable ethics, and that are based in Asian countries.

With a proposal to include thermal imagery and found video, Alba Zari’s Occult proposes a remarkable and inspired use of the possibilities of images to confront suppressed and terrifying histories.

Alba Zari (IT) was born in Thailand and lived there until the age of eight. In Italy she lived first in Trieste then in Bologna, where she graduate from the DAMS with a degree in film. She went on to study documentary photography at the International center of photography in New York, and then continued her studies in photography and visual design at the NABA in Milan.

Images Vevey Book Award Special Jury Prize
Paola Jimenez (PE): Rules for Fighting (Reglas para pelear)

The jury wished to unanimously acknowledge Paola Jimenez for her book Rules for Fighting (Reglas para pelear). The publication takes the shape of a notebook of intimate size in which the artist has collected images and notes related to the murder of her father in 1998, when she was still a child.

The archival images and her own photographic meditations intertwine with a delicate rhythm through the pages, while a special section printed black on black collects the court documents and evidence related to the murder. The jury was very moved by how such a personal matter has been developed with visual acuity, bold design, and emotional precision.

Paola Jimenez (PE) majored in photography in Centro de la Imagen (Peru). She focuses on topics such as memory, loss and death using photography, video, archive and text.