Deutsche Börse Photography
Foundation Prize 2024
Image: Mohlokomedi wa Tora, 2018, Scene 2 [detail] © Lebohang Kganye. Courtesy of the artist
PHOTOGRAPHY
Lebohang Kganye
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize
Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, South Africa) is the 2024 winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her photographic projects cross personal and collective histories. She draws from shared oral narratives and fictional texts, exploring South Africa’s layered history before, during and after apartheid and colonialism. Lebohang Kganye was awarded the Prize for the exhibition “Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home” at Foam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2023). "Haufi nyana?" meaning "too close?" in Sesotho, one of South Africa's official languages, reflects the dialogue between the viewer and the artist. It touches on notions of home as heritage and identity, as well as physical and mental spaces.
About the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize
2026 Suzanne Deal Booth
FLAG Art Foundation Prize
Image: Sable Elyse Smith, Coloring Book 101, 2022. Courtesy of the artist; JTT, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Carlos/Ishikawa, London. Photo by Charles Benton.
ART
Sable Elyse Smith
Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize
Artist Sable Elyse Smith has won the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which is awarded every two years and administered by the Contemporary Austin. Smith, who was born in Los Angeles and is now based in New York, is a closely watched artist known for working in a variety of mediums, from video to sculpture to photography to painting. Her work primarily focuses on the US carceral system and how it not only impacts incarcerated people and their family but also has wide-reaching effects across society.
About the Suzanne Deal Booth FLAG Art Foundation Prize
Activism Award 2024
Image: Nest House built with Studio Bark’s open-source U-Build timber flatpack system, Herefordshire, UK, 2023. Photo: Andy Billman
ARCHITECTURE
Studio Bark
Overall Winner
Studio Bark is the Overall Winner of the Activism Award 2024. The practice was rewarded for its work in response to the climate crisis and towards inclusivity in construction and regenerative building processes. Set up by co-founders Wilf Meynell, Nick Newman and Steph Chadwick, Studio Bark has its base in east London and is guided by a pledge to ‘create positive disruption, show compassion, take responsibility’. Their projects span from housing to installations and office space, all imbued with the practice’s sustainable ethos and passionate advocacy. Called ‘Bark’, the studio uses its name as both a verb (‘speaking loudly’) and a noun (‘the protective life support system of trees’).
2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize
Image: Sameen Agha, A Home is A Terrible Place to Love, 2022, red marble, 55 x 28 x 50 cm.
ART
Sameen Agha
Grand Prize
Pakistani artist Sameen Agha is the Grand Prize winner of the 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Sameen was awarded for her 2022 red marble sculpture A Home is A Terrible Place to Love which shows the collapsed walls of a three dimensional house unfolded like a cardboard box. The fragility of home is a recurring theme in the Lahore-based artist's work. Agha uses her works, which contain elements of both melancholy and hope, to build self-understanding, each piece an effort to resolve a certain emotion or thought.
About the Sovereign Asian Art Prize
Eye Art & Film Prize 2024
Image: Chia-Wei Hsu, An Actor from Golden Triangle, 2023. VR, two-channel video, mirror installation. 9'53". Courtesy the artist. Provided by Hsu Chia Wei Studio.
ART
Chia-Wei Hsu
Eye Art & Film Prize
Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Chia-Wei Hsu is the winner of the Eye Art & Film Prize 2024. In his work, Hsu intertwines geopolitical developments and local life in Southeast Asia, presently, and in the past. In the border region between Thailand and Burma, together with veterans of the Cold War and local soldiers, he created video installations that delve deep into the history and mythology of the region, as well as into the personal experiences of the soldiers. The jury was impressed by the way "he weaves these big themes with small, personal stories, bringing forgotten histories back to life and opening up new perspectives to his audience."
About the Eye Art & Film Prize
Belvedere Art Award 2024
Image: Rabbya Naseer, installation view Promises to Keep, Salima Hashmi (left) and Hurmat ul Ain (right), apexart nyc, 2017. Courtesy apexart
ART
Rabbya Naseer
Belvedere Art Award
Rabbya Naseer was granted the Belvedere Art Award 2024. Artist, curator, researcher and teacher based in Lahore, Pakistan, Rabbya Naseer has been working for several years to build up an archive documenting the recent history of performance art in Pakistan. In a statement the jury said "Rabbya Naseer's work opens up an intimate space that she creates together with her audience and that addresses the economy of time. In her process-based practice, she questions the modes and models of representation and visibility in the contemporary art system as well as in society at large."
2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize
Image: Avion Pearce, Van, Shirley Chisholm Park, 2022, from the series In the Hours Between Dawn, 2022-24. Courtesy the artist
PHOTOGRAPHY
Avion Pearce
Aperture Portfolio Prize
Avion Pearce is the winner of the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize. In her poem “A Litany for Survival” Audre Lorde speaks of the precarious experience of living with the knowledge that one’s survival is not only without guarantee but actively, purposefully threatened. Avion Pearce borrowed a line from Lorde for the title of their series In the Hours Between Dawn (2022–24), an ode to the possibilities of the midnight hours. The experience of the queer and trans community of color in Brooklyn that Pearce photographs is a testament to Lorde’s words. Survival—half shrouded, yet insistent—can appear in forms both soft and strong.
