The 2022 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award winners have been announced with Congolese Australian-based artist, Wani Toaishara, winning the $25K acquisitive award.
The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award is organised by the Gold Coast contemporary cultural precinct Home of the Arts (HOTA).
Toaishara’s work, do black boys go to heaven, is ‘informed by research into African archival material and deep dialogue with family and friends,’ the press release says. Toaishara’s practice, based in videography and performance, has only recently incorporated photography, and ‘responds to African affairs and visual culture while interrogating dislocation for those on the margins’.
‘As a person whose primary form of art making is videography with a background in performance, specifically experimental theatre, photography is something I’ve always loved but only recently had the courage to start practicing publicly and incorporating within my practice,’ he said. ‘Winning this validates that choice and the courage it took to explore it. It’s a huge honour to even be selected amongst these incredible finalists, but an even bigger one to win the award.’
His work ‘connects visual language and spoken word to explore identity which is reinforced in the artist’s statement’. So without further ado, here’s the statement:
‘This is for the bodies painted spectacle long before they could even speak. For that child who was told that their strength was found in silence because speaking made them weak. For those bones so small that their gravestones outsized their casket. For all those tokens who’ve been called broken as they contemplate their suicide. We are worthy. Here. Still.’
The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award was judged by Isobel Parker Philip, senior curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), who picked Toaishara’s entry from 40 finalists, selected from a pool of just over 260 submissions.
‘There is a quiet powerfulness to Wani Toaishara’s do black boys go to heaven. It is a power made explicit in the subjects’ strong and self-assured expressions, but also written into the way that Wani knowingly plays with (and exposes) the conventions of studio portraiture.
‘The two figures are confident yet slightly stilted; they are dressed up but aren’t wearing shoes; the fabric backdrop has been carefully chosen to match their dresses and yet we see the clips securing it in place,’ she said. ‘Standing in this makeshift studio, the figures feel close to the surface of the image. This sense of intimacy and immediacy, as well as their open, front-facing posture, is striking but it is also a political gesture. wani turns a simple portrait into an assertion of presence and visibility. The two subjects ask us to see them as they are. As wani so movingly notes in his artist statement, “Worthy. Here. Still.”’
Here is a few finalist images:
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