democraSEE 2: Jody Brand
Announcing the Recipient of democraSEE 2:
Jody Brand
Brand is the recipient of the democraSEE 2 award. With the R40,000 grant, she will work in collaboration with a mentor/curator of choice, to produce a body of work over the next year. Further, she will be supported through critique sessions with various appointed subject and practice experts, as well as support from Photo:. On completion, the work will be published on www.democraSEE.photography
Jody Brand was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1989; and lives and works there. She has been documenting alternative African realities, wanting to create a future where femme-identified people can flourish. She pursues this through occupying spaces and the radical representation of those who dare to be different. Group shows include Guggenheim Bilbao (2016); The Quiet Violence of Dreams at Stevenson (2016) and Being There at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017). She is a 2017 recipient of a Thami Mnyele Foundation residency in Amsterdam.
Brand was announced the recipient of the award at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair on 17 Feb 2018. The shortlist included Matt Kay (South Africa) and Mauro Vombe (Mozambique).
democraSEE Critique Sessions
20 & 23 Nov 2018
With special thanks to respondents: Donna Kukama, Nckubeko Balani, Kabelo Malatsie, Candice Jansen and Abri de Swardt.
Notes from the selection panel:
John Fleetwood: The work is deeply invested, an urgent conviction. Relevant for a region that struggles with questions of otherness. Her questions go beyond simplistic colonialisms, nationalisms. It is really complex in its simplicity.
Jo Ractcliffe: I found Jody’s entry very compelling. There’s real grit here; her work is declarative, unapologetic, on her own terms. And that, I think, takes courage.
Sarita Lydia Mamseri:
Powerful concepts. There is a real strength in her body of work and proposal, dealing with very pertinent issues. Provoking.
Announcing the democraSEE 2 shortlist
Photo: is proud to announce the shortlisted candidates
Jody Brand
Mauro Vombe
Matt Kay
Jody Brand
Jody Brand
was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1989; and lives and works there. She has been documenting alternative African realities, wanting to create a future where femme-identified people can flourish. She pursues this through occupying spaces and the radical representation of those who dare to be different. Group shows include Guggenheim Bilbao (2016); The Quiet Violence of Dreams at Stevenson (2016) and Being There at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017). She is a 2017 recipient of a Thami Mnyele Foundation residency in Amsterdam.
Mauro Vombe
Mauro Vombe, born(1988) and based in Maputo, Mozambique; started photographing in 2006. His work connects to his earlier experience in theatre, unveiling hidden feelings and creating a form of collective or individual representation, and finds resonance from his work as news and events reporter. Vombe has received numerous awards locally and internationally. He participated in an exhibition dedicated to the 40 years of Mozambican photojournalism at Foundation Fernado Leite Couto in 2015. In 2017 he was invited to the ‘Catchupa Factory’, in Mindelo, Cape Verde.
Matt Kay
Matt Kay
is a photographer based in Durban, South Africa. Kay’s work deals with the deconstruction of narrative, memory and fiction of images linked to his growing up within the South African countryside. He was the 2014 Tierney Fellow, mentored by David Goldblatt, producing a solo exhibition The Front at the Photo Workshop Gallery, Johannesburg, 2015. His work Losing Ground was exhibited as part of the 20th Biel Festival of Photography, Switzerland in 2016. He was nominated for the Paul Huf Award in 2017.
selection panel
The selection panel for democraSEE 2 consists of leading regional and international experts. They are Paula Nascimento, Jo Ractliffe, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Sarita Lydia Mamseri and John Fleetwood.
Paula Nascimento is an architect and curator, co-founder of Beyond Entropy Africa, a research studio that focuses on the fields of architecture, visual arts and geopolitics. Has developed projects for the Angola Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013 (Awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation), and exhibitions in Angola, South Africa, Portugal, Italy among others. A founding member of the cultural collective Pés Descalços in Luanda and collaborator and contributor to exhibitions and international magazines.
Jo Ractliffe is a photographer and educator, based in Cape Town. Her photographs reflect her ongoing preoccupation with the South African landscape and the ways in which it figures in the country’s imaginary - particularly in relation to the violent legacies of apartheid. Her photobooks include Terreno Ocupado (2008), As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2010), The Borderlands (2013/15) and more recently, Everything is Everything (2017). She has exhibited extensively in South Africa, Europe and America.
Malala Andrialavidrazana’s practice interrogates barriers and interactions within cross-cultural contexts, shifting between private spaces and global considerations to explore social imaginaries. Based on extensive in situ, as well as bibliographic and archival research, her visual compositions open up the possibility of alternative forms of storytelling and history-making. Andrialavidrazana graduated from La Villette School of Architecture (Paris), 1996. She was awarded the HSBC Prize for Photography in 2004. Her work has been exhibited in numerous international venues.
Sarita Lydia Mamseri is an independent educator, consultant and curator of visual arts and material culture. She has worked with many cultural institutions in the UK and Tanzania. In 2013, she co-founded Bookstop Sanaa (BSS), a specialist visual art library and creative learning space in Dar es Salaam. BSS regularly works in partnership with local and international organisations to programme talks, seminars, workshops and exhibitions for the city of Dar es Salaam and region.
John Fleetwood is a photography curator and educator. He is the director of Photo:, a platform that develops photography projects, mainly working with photographers from the African continent. He has curated numerous exhibitions such as Cities and Memory (2016), Against Time (2015), A Return to Elsewhere (2014), Transition (2013) in Africa and Europe. From 2002 to 2015 he was the Head of the Market Photo Workshop, a photography school, gallery and project space. Fleetwood lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.