AND THE WINNERS OF THE CAP PRIZE 2019 ARE…

The five winners of the CAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography 2019 were announced at photo basel international art fair and selected by an international panel of 19 judges from 25 shortlisted artists.

Jodi Bieber

Born in 1966 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives Johannesburg, South Africa
www.jodibieber.com | instagram | twitter

#i, 2016–2017

Jodi Bieber deals with the subject of apartheid by dealing with the official absence of apartheid. As such, her photographic project begins on 27 April, 1994, the day the ANC won the first free and general elections in South Africa, which she reported on as a journalist for a major daily newspaper.

Since then, her focus has always been on the next generation. All of the 45 protagonists featured in her portrait series #i are born after 1994: young people and young adults from various social classes in Johannesburg who talk about their dreams, plans, hopes and ideas. Designer Brenton Maart transforms the protagonists' statements, their own photos from their smartphones, as well as a central portrait in which the subjects place themselves in front of Bieber’s camera into tableau collages, which the photographer presented both during the 2019 elections and on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the end of political apartheid.

The interactive component involved in the work’s creation corresponds to the collaborative approach to the acquisition of the models, and the presentation of the pictures as slide shows or posters in schools or sometimes in a women's prison.

SANNE DE WILDE & BÉNÉDICTE KURZEN

Born in 1987 in Antwerpen, Belgium. Lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Born in 1980 in Lyon, France. Lives in lagos, Nigeria
www.noorimages.com

Land of Ibeji, 2018

Twins are in league with demons, herald disaster, and must be ostracized or even killed. This was once a widespread belief, and not just in Africa. Twins mean twice as much luck, twice as much fertility and twice as much love. Or so goes the fundamentally changed interpretation that is now widespread among the Yoruba in south-western Nigeria. So many twins are born here – more than anywhere else – that the small town of Igbo-Ora, located north of Lagos, has adopted the title of “Twin Capital of the World”.

In their “twins research”, the two photographers, Sanne de Wilde and Bénédicte Kurzen, relied on staging techniques that are very different but at the same time showcase their characteristic sense of flair and spectacle, emphasizing traditional and symbolic colors. The pair also made use of blending and, of course, reflections.

Yet the sets of twins in Land of Ibeji always have something fragile about them, conveying a conspiratorial closeness that also manifests in the idea that twins share one soul. All the protagonists seem to be preoccupied by an atmosphere of contemplation regarding the interplay between attachment and individuality. By seeing themselves reflected in the other, they reflect about themselves.

THEMBINKOSI HLATSHWAYO

Born in 1993 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa
instagram

Slaghuis, 2018

The photographer from Johannesburg could be in the age group that Jodi Bieber had in mind, yet here, he is reporting on the essence of his own existence. The energy this unlocks makes way for innovations of an entirely different kind. The very title Slaghuis, which conjures images of a slaughterhouse or, in a broader sense, a massacre, makes it clear that there is no room for hopes and dreams here. The artist's sense of shame and despair regarding the space in which he grew up has given rise to anger and rage.

Growing up in a house with a tavern, he was confronted with violence and schizophrenia early on. As part of the pub, this home could never be a secure place of refuge. So where should he escape to? Perhaps his mind could have been a place of refuge, but he felt that even his mind was wounded.

Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo now uses the medium of photographic collage in minimalistic compositions to roughly and rawly get to the heart of violence and hopelessness. The result is a series of oppressive visual spotlights that gives the impression that life is slipping out of focus and is on the verge of destruction.

ABDO SHANAN

Born in 1982 in Oran, Algeria. Lives in Algiers, Algeria
www.collective220.net | instagram | twitter

Dry, 2017–2019

Abdo Shanan's black and white and color photographs cannot be ordered into a logical chain of associations. Rather, they are erratic and thus unsettling. The subtext is provided by the photographer both in the title Dry and in his thoughts on the inherent solitariness of the individual. Perhaps the “I” is an island after all, and the others are the ocean. But if the “I” is an island, doesn't that mean the others are also islands?

The notion of Algeria as a multicultural country led the photographer to question the relationship between personal history and the present. And what medium is better suited to such a line of interrogation than photography?

Our unconditionally subjective view of the subjects, who either respond inquiringly to our gaze or avoid it, contrasts with found objects and fragments of landscapes that seem as if they were relics of a life, collected over decades in a shoebox. This shoebox has now been opened like a Pandora's box, in order to expose one thing in particular: the infinite emptiness between the images, which become islands in an ocean of forgetting.

Jansen van Staden

Born in 1986 in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Lives in Cape Town, South Africa
instagram

Microlight, 2015–2018

Aware that he belonged to one of the first South African generations that grew up during post-Apartheid, Jansen van Staden turned his attention to questioning tradition and trauma in his homeland.

When he was 25 years old, his father died in a microlight accident. He found a letter in his father’s estate addressed to a therapist. In this letter, his father spoke of his experiences of war at the age of seventeen in the South African Border War and the subsequent associations to killing; experiences that followed him throughout his life, but that he at the same time had kept hidden from his family.

This set out a journey for Jansen van Staden to trace the history and memories that he had of his father through his archives, road trips to his father’s family and to Kenya where his father’s accident took place. With the sensor that he retrieved from his father’s camera that survived the accident, he now relooks the entanglement of the ideologies of apartheid, war and violence as an intergenerational trauma; a complicated trauma that he inherited. This research, retracing and re-enactment deals with the acceptance and rejection of memory and love.