2021 Jurors
2021 was another year in which the effects of the pandemic continued. Many artists may have had their activities restricted and it was very unfortunate that we were unable to proceed with the 2020 winner’s residency programme as planned and for the production of the prints to be carried out remotely.
With no prospects of the travel restrictions being lifted, I was afraid that many applicants woud be hesitant to participate in this award. We were grateful to find that the impact was minimal and it was encouraging to have received applications for this year’s Hariban Award. This showed us that there is, and remains, a strong interest in what this award has to offer and we were delighted to have received 324 applications. I would like to express my gratitude again to all the participants, and also to the jury members who took the time to take part in forming this year’s results.
The Grand Prize Winner of the 8th Hariban Award was awarded to Tarrah Krajnak. In addition to her, thirteen other winners were selected by the same rigorous judging process which included the Juror’s Choice Award, Honourable Mentions and Benrido Award that was introduced last year. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to view all of the wonderful award-winning works, and I am looking forward to encountering new works that push the possibilities of the Collotype technique further next year.
— Takumi Suzuki CEO of Benrido, Inc.
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Yanyou Yuan Di
Founder Jiazazhi Press/Library
Benrido’s Hariban Award perfectly blends and finds a balance between the unique aesthetic style of the collotype and the attempts with visual language by contemporary image artists. It offers new creative possibilities for photographers and image artists. It is very surprising and exciting that photography, a medium that has constantly evolved with technology, has been given a new light by this traditional craft!
BIO
Yanyou Yuan Di, Publisher, founder of Jiazazhi Press/Library. He curated many photobook exhibitions/festivals in Beijing, Xiamen, Lianzhou, Shanghai and Ningbo from 2012–2018. Some books edited by him are shortlisted and have won some international photobook awards. Jiazazhi Press/Library takes part in many practices, such as archiving, research, publishing, distribution, education and makes its effort on broadcasting the photo art book culture in China.
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Yasufumi Nakamori
Senior curator of International art (photography), Tate Modern
I was impressed by many of the submissions that suggest innovative methodologies in photography (i.e., visual and narrative strategies) to critique conventional approaches and re-tell narratives of critical events in the recent world history, for example apartheid and the Vietnam War. While most of contemporary photography is created digital, many photographers who participated in the Hariban Award value the medium’s materiality and history and show their renewed interest in a trans-historical dialogue over medium’s physical qualities and expressions. Many of them address their interest as a concern both conceptual and formal, and are ambitious about expanding what photography is about, and can do.
BIO
Yasufumi Nakamori is the senior curator of international art (photography) at Tate Modern. He is responsible for organising exhibitions and collection displays involving photography, acquiring photographs to the Tate collection and co-curated the Zanele Muholi exhibition at Tate Modern in 2020. Formerly with the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, he has authored numerous essays and four books, including Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Yasuhiro Ishimoto (2010), which won the 2011 Alfredo H. Barr, Jr. award from the College Art Association. His essays are included in Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (Haus der Kunst, 2016) and Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan (Noguchi Museum, 2019). He received a Ph.D. in the history of art from Cornell University.
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Oluremi C. Onabanjo
Curator & Scholar of Photography and the arts of Africa
The photographic medium continues to confound when one meditates on all that it can to hold. Myriad topics, forms, positions, and narratives can be pursued with and through photographic inquiry, and this year’s artists demonstrated that there remain many avenues available to pursue when one is attuned to the sheer capacity of the medium. Recognizing the monumental chronological scope and impeccable materiality of the collotype printing process, I relish the collaborations that the Benrido Hariban Award makes possible. Throughout this process, I have also deeply appreciated the breakdown of divisions across geographies and histories, concept and form, the archival and the contemporary.
BIO
Oluremi C. Onabanjo is an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The former Director of Exhibitions and Collections for The Walther Collection, she has organized exhibitions across Africa, Europe, and North America, and managed one of the most significant private collections of photography in the world. In 2017, she co-curated Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art, and edited its accompanying publication (Steidl), which was shortlisted for an ICP Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research (2018). Onabanjo lectures internationally on photography and curatorial practice, and her writing appears in Aperture, The New Yorker, The PhotoBook Review, Tate Etc., as well as publications by The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, the RISD Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, amongst others. A 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee, Onabanjo is the editor of the forthcoming photobook, Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022). She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Columbia University, and holds degrees in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University and African Studies from Columbia University.
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Pauline Vermare
Independent curator and photography historian
It was an honour to be part of this year’s jury. The quality of the work was remarkable, and it is a joy to unanimously celebrate the brilliant work of Tarrah Krajnak. Her series is a very playful and powerful statement–a tribute as much as a subversion–that speaks universally. It is an important and beautiful contribution to the field: a thought-provoking pirouette on representation, self-representation, and agency. It was also an immense pleasure to have this opportunity to support and write about the work of Donavon Smallwood, which I greatly admire. It was a beautiful surprise to find his series “Languor” in the selection, and an honour to be able to distinguish it here, thanks to you.
BIO
Pauline is a French independent curator and photographer historian. Formerly the cultural director at Magnum Photos and curator at the International Centre of Photography (ICP), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation in Paris.
Category
Hariban Award 2021