Ernest Cole Award 2022 Nomination Panel

The Ernest Cole Award 2022 Nomination Panel consists of 6 experienced practitioners that will each nominate 2 photographers. The Nomination Panellists are Dean Hutton, Gabrielle Goliath, Jabulani Dhlamini, Zen Marie, Simon Gush and Ashley Walters. The Ernest Cole Award 2022 accepts applications through both a nomination and open call process. 

Dean Hutton

Dean Hutton (b. 1976, South Africa) is a genderqueer* trans media artist provoking dialogue about the gaze, queer bodies, love and social justice. They have worked across photojournalism, print, digital, video and social media, performance and community action since the late 1990s. Their extensive studio practice, as a photographer for over 20 years and a visual artist since 2004 – producing works on paper, digital video and sculptural objects, bridge intersecting genres of documentary, fiction and fantasy – to produce radical queer counter narratives. In an evolving public performance as Goldendean their strategy of simple and often improvised, disruptive actions by a “Fat Queer White Trans body” they share moments of soft courage to affirm the right of all bodies to exist, to be celebrated and protected.

Their arts practice extends into building resilience through compassionate forms of arts education and mentorship of students and praxis through visual strategies to embodied knowledge production.  As a lecturer and facilitator of learning they are deeply invested in finding and improving modes of learning that excites, and encourages ethical self-expression and reflexive modes of engagement that contribute to repairing relationships, care and building resilience for all. 

*Genderqueer is a non-binary transgender identity. Please use They/Them gender-neutral pronouns.

Gabrielle Goliath

Gabrielle Goliath's (b.1983, South Africa) practice works with and within the histories, life worlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme and queer life, refusing its terminal demarcation within a racial-sexual paradigm of violence that governs post-colonial/post-apartheid social worlds. For Goliath, this is the life-work of mourning, “for to imagine and seek to realise the world otherwise is to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to and must transform”.

Goliath’s immersive installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. Her video and sound work Chorus (2021) recently debuted at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, and will travel to Dallas Contemporary and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022. Recent exhibitions include This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel;  The Normal, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburg; This song is  for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm; and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.

Jabulani Dhlamini

Jabulani Dhlamini (b. 1983, Free State, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg. Dhlamini majored in documentary photography at the Vaal University of Technology, graduating in 2010. He is an alumni fellow of the Edward Ruiz Mentorship programme and the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg. His work focuses on his upbringing while also reflecting on various communities within contemporary South Africa. Dhlamini’s approach is meditative and subtly provokes a closer look at what lies on the edges through an exploration of personal and collective memory. Incorporating landscape imagery and intimate portraits, his work captures historical moments — such as the recollection of the Sharpeville Massacre, the effects of land dispossession and the funeral of antiapartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela — while also documenting the quieter moments in the lives of everyday South Africans.

 In 2018 Dhlamini’s work was featured on the Five Photographers, A Tribute to David Goldblatt group exhibition at the Gerard Sekoto Gallery at the French Institute. In his 2018 exhibition at Goodman Gallery, iXesha!, Dhlamini explored how memory is created and archived within a community where the memory has been localised. This exhibition included images from Dhlamini’s recent series iQhawekazi documenting the events around Winnie Mandela’s funeral. In his most recent exhibition with the Gallery, ‘the everyday waiting’, Dhlamini photographed his community in Soweto during the first four months of the national lockdown, drawing attention to the psychological impact of COVID-19.

Zen Marie

Zen Marie (b. 1980, Durban) is an artist and educator working at the intersection of lens-based media, social practice and installation. Zen holds an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and is a graduate of the two year residency program at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Through a practice which spans film, photography, performance, drawing and writing, he investigates the relationships between power and place, and medium and meaning. His current and recent projects propose decolonial rereadings of the narratives that become entangled with nature via conquest and representation. The ocean recurs in his work as a site where the personal, the political and the social are refracted through the experience of the sublime. His current research extends this interest in the politics of the sublime to landscape. Zen's studio practice is complemented by his position as a lecturer in Fine Art at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, where he is also engaged in research towards a practice-led PhD.

Simon Gush

Simon Gush is an artist and filmmaker living in Johannesburg. His work examines labour, subjectivity and land. He completed a postgraduate certificate at the HISK, Ghent and a MA (Sociology), University of the Witwatersrand and is currently completing a PhD (History) at Rhodes University. His work has been exhibited at the MuAC (Mexico City), Göteborgs Konsthall (Göteborgs), MAXXI (Rome), The Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm), Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie (Ludwigshafen), the Dakar Biennale and Bamako Biennale. His films have been screened at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), ICA (London), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Palais De Tokyo (Paris), as well as festivals such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Visions du Réel.

Ashley Walters

Ashley Walters was born in Cape Town in 1983. He completed his BAFA (2011) and a Masters in Fine Art (2013) at the University of Cape Town, where he was the recipient of a number of prestigious awards and scholarships, including the Michealis Prize (2011) and Tierney Fellowship Award (2013). Subsequent to this he completed an exchange at Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig (2013). Thereafter he was awarded an Apexart Fellowship (2015) in New York and an artist residency in Amersfoort, Netherlands (2017/18). Commissioned by Magnum Foundation his work has been featured widely in publications such as Laying Foundations for Change, Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities, and Aperture magazine: Platform Africa, Summer 2017 edition (#227). Walters has taken part in numerous international exhibitions in Bamako, Netherlands, London, Germany, New York, and exhibited his photographs widely within South Africa.

Walters’ work protagonize a subjective and critical approach to the behaviours and processes of urban life in the city and its periphery. His work tells of an interest in the everyday and public space in its least predictable dimension. Waivering between absolute complicity with his subjects and distant observation, his body of work emphasises a non-spectacular representation of reality. Whereas some images provide tableaus of intimate, inhabited spaces, others render non-territories that bespeak of up-rootedness, scarring, anxiety and liminality.

He currently lives in Cape Town and teaches Photography and New Media at Stellenbosch University.

The Ernest Cole Award was established to commemorate Ernest Cole and to acknowledge him both as a key figure in the history of South African photography and as a contributor to the struggle against apartheid. Ernest Cole faced many struggles in his career as a photographer, struggles that lead to his exile and the struggles that continued in his time as a photographer in the United States and Europe. The Award is framed by the need to support and provide professional guidance to photographers facing various difficulties while trying to establish their careers. Conceptualised and operated from within South Africa, the ECA is an important identifier for photography practice in the cultural sphere of South Africa and for South African photography internationally.

For more information about the Award, follow the link in the ‘Awards’ tab to access the Ernest Cole Award website. 

Posted 10/05/2022.