Ernest Cole Award 2022 Jury
The Ernest Cole Award 2022 Jury is Berni Searle, Lebohang Kganye and Nandipha Mntambo. The 3-member Jury will look at the nominated and open call submissions to independently select a shortlist of candidates from which a recipient is selected.
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. Cole’s images are transformative, compassionate, and critical, and marks the importance of photography in history and art making.
Berni Searle
Born in Cape Town in 1964, Berni Searle is an artist who works with photography and the moving image. Often, but not exclusively, using herself in her work, she performs for the camera, producing works that explore issues of self-representation, the relationship between personal and collective identity and narratives connected to history, memory and place.
Searle was previously the Director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and currently Professor in the department, where she completed her undergraduate and post graduate studies. She has won a number of awards including the Minister of Culture Prize at DAK’ART, 2000; the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, 2003; the Rockefeller Bellagio Creative Arts Fellow, 2014 and the Mbokodo Award, 2015.
She has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including, the 49th and 51st Venice Biennale; Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Figures and Fictions at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 2011); Earth Matters at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC, USA., 2014). In 2018 she was included in Social Work at Frieze London featuring eight presentations by women artists whose work emerged in response to the global social and political schisms of the 1980s and ’90s and was the Featured Artist at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda in 2019. Her work was recently published in Phaidon’s 'Great Women Artists’ which features over 400 artists from throughout art history, from the 15th century to the present day.
Lebohang Kganye
Lebohang Kganye was born in 1990 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she currently lives and works.
Although primarily a photographer, her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in myriad ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative, theatrical and the moving image. Kganye’s work has explored themes of personal history and ancestry whilst resonating with the history of South Africa and apartheid, by incorporating the archival and performative into a practice that centres storytelling and memory as it plays itself out in the familial experience. While her work may resonate with a particularly South African experience, it critically engages with oral tradition as form and memory, as a tangible source material. Kganye uses mainly her family archive to explore and re-enact notions of home and belonging, she employs narrative to tell stories of home, refuge, family and identity.
Lebohang Kganye received her introduction to photography at the Market Photo Workshop, in Johannesburg, in 2009 and completed the Advanced Photography Programme in 2011. She 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.
Notable recent awards include the Foam Paul Huf Award 2022, Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/22, Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, 2020, Camera Austria Award, 2019.
Nandipha Mntambo
Nandipha Mntambo (b. 1982 Mbabane, Swaziland) completed a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2007. She is currently based in Johannesburg. Mntambo originally intended to study forensic pathology, but found her way to Fine Arts in an unusual, but fortunate, shift in her career trajectory. Within her sculpture, photography, video and mixed media works, Mntambo’s acute interest in the human body is evident.
Mntambo is perhaps best known for her cowhide sculptures - with the cured hide draped over human forms and set with resin - which confront and question the relationship between humans and animals. These investigations into organic nature and the corporeal address issues relating to performance, gender, identity, life and death.
“My intention is to explore the physical and tactile properties of hide and aspects of control that allow or prevent me from manipulating this material in the context of the female body and contemporary art. I have used cowhide as a means to subvert expected associations with corporeal presence, femininity, sexuality and vulnerability. The work I create seeks to challenge and subvert preconceptions regarding representation of the female body. Themes of confrontation, protection and refuge play out particularly in relation to inner conflicts and to notions of self-love/hatred. The bronze, Sengifikile, uses my own features as a foundation, but takes on the guise of a bull. Referencing the head-and-shoulder busts of the Renaissance tradition, I challenge male and female roles in society and expected associations with femininity, sexuality and vulnerability.”
In 2017, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa presented Material Value, a solo exhibition of Mntambo’s work, including the impressive installation of the work EMABUTFO (2012) in which dozens of hide/human spectres were suspended in mid-air, occupying the gallery room in their haunting formation. Her bronze sculpture, Ophelia (2015), installed in the sculpture garden at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, is part of the institution’s permanent collection.
Mntambo won the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011, for which she produced the travelling exhibition Faena. The artist was shortlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize in Canada (2014), was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2013), and received the Wits/BHP Billiton Fellowship (2010).
To learn more about the Jury and the Award, contact info@phototool.co.za or visit https://www.phototool.co.za/ to access the Ernest Cole Award website, under the ‘Awards’ tab.
Posted 14/07/2022.