2020 Blurring the Lines
©Riti Sengupta
©Ragna Arndt Maric
©Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo
Congratulations to the 2020 Blurring the Lines winners and finalists!
The three winners Ragna Arndt-Maric, Riti Sengupta, and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, will be exhibited at Espace F15 in Paris in November.
Apart from the 3 winners, 33 finalists will be included in the Blurring the Lines catalogue: Silvy Crespo, Zoë Sluijs, Romain Roucoules, Lucas Pandolfo, Marco Loi, Hrafn Jónsson, Terna Teejay Jogo, Josephina van de Water, Max Arens, Lisbeth Luft, Daan Russcher, Evgeniia Koreshilova, Marina Istomina, Maxim Zmeyev, Natalia Davtyan, Leif Houllevigue, Kincső Bede, Juliette Alhéritière, Marthe Buer, Alexandra Maldonado, Weronika Perłowska, Paolo García Nigrinis, Bianca Salvo, Eréndira Gómez Espinosa, Gabriela Elena Suárez, Alejandra Edwards, Katerina Voegtle, Tolga Akbaş, Jeevanantham SivaSai, Oğulcan Arslan, Muhammad Nurhakim Ngatimin, Nadia Adler en Thero Makepe.
Blurring the Lines is an international academic network aiming at fostering talent and dialogue on visual culture. This call aimed to select, exhibit, and publish projects representing the rapidly changing field of photography.
The 2020 Jury was John Fleetwood, Lisanne van Happen and Steve Bisson.
The Jurors Report of Blurring the Lines 2020
At a moment where the world is shrouded in uncertainty due to the lingering COVID19 pandemic and subsequent economic and social crisis, what is it that we can commit to? How can an award for graduating photographers help us to navigate our understanding through these times? For us, as a jury, this was an opportunity to find work that was convincing, necessary and beautiful.
Even though this 5th edition of the Blurring the Lines International Contest was not set out to respond to the pandemic/crisis, photography has long attempted to foreground the urgencies of our world. Embedded in the histories of photography, complicated conventions developed as responses to these urgencies in different contexts, delivering many visual languages. As a jury we wanted to pay attention to how we can learn to understand our worlds better. We wanted to learn from our worlds and from these different languages.
Part of this looking is foregrounding stories that have been ignored, overlooked or not seen before. Race, gender, geographies, identities, intimacies, nature and our global world are some of the recurring themes of our time. We also welcomed the inclusion of non-formal institutions and schools especially as they bring stories from places that are often not shared.
Our brief was to welcome a wide panorama of perspectives and inputs raised through the Blurring the Lines’ network and to encourage a comparison between the largest number of schools and participants, as a way to celebrate the variety of content, practices, and cultural backgrounds. We received 151 applications coming from 38 participating photography schools worldwide. 36 photographers were shortlisted and will be featured in the catalogue, while even more will be included in the associated programmes of Blurring the Lines.
It was no small task as the majority of the submissions underlined the dynamic pace of photography methodologies, practices and content. Defined by its broader definition, we looked at photography as lens-based practices and were interested in the depth of modes.
We would like to congratulate all institutions that have entered, and we hope that it sets off more sharing and exchanges. We hope that the selected winners’ work shows the wide scope of practices, the determination to look at self and our worlds around us, and a commitment to understand.
For more (visual) information about these artists and their projects look here
Posted 8 Jul 2020