Sara Abbaspour Receives The 1st Prize Of The PhMuseum 2024 Women Photographers Grant

Floating Ocean traces transitional states in Iran, Abbaspour's homeland, through portraits of young people and urban spaces. Sara Faustino claims the New Generation Prize. Read all the judges' motivations and see the selected projects of this 8th edition.

A independent jury comprised of Danaé Panchaud (Curator, Museologist, Lecturer and Director Centre de la photographie Genève), Farah Al Qasimi (Visual Artist), Gem Fletcher (Writer, Host of The Messy Truth podcast) and Pixy Liao (Visual Artist) has assigned the €5,000 PhMuseum 2024 Women Photographers Grant Main Prize to Iranian photographer Sara Abbaspour for her project Floating Ocean. Judge Gem Fletcher motivates the choice on behalf of the jury:

“Sara Abbaspour’s Floating Ocean charts a transitional moment in Iran’s socio-political landscape told through the relationship between spaces and their inhabitants. Making poetry out of collisions—temporal and eternal, interior and exterior, familiar and peculiar, personal and political, seen and unseen, magic and mundane, imagined and experienced—Abbaspour conjures a complex and moving contemporary portrait of a society in an era of profound social transformation. Leveraging a collection of narrative threads, Abbaspour's potent body of work reminds us to continually renew our perspectives, not only as a way of imagining but as a means of survival.”

The €2,000 second prize was claimed by American photographer Lisa Elmaleh, who presented the project Tierra Prometida / Promised Land. Judge Farah Al Qasimi elaborates on the jury's choice:

“Lisa Elmaleh's Tierra Prometida offers an attentive journey along the U.S. - Mexico border. The region has long been a symbol of American exclusionary politics and border violence, but Elmaleh's 8x10 view camera approach slows down the process of witnessing and invites us into humanizing moments with the many people whose livelihoods are defined by the wall's presence. While technically beautiful, the photographs also feel timeless, which works to highlight the ongoing urgency of the border crisis in America and beyond. I believe that this work straddles traditional reportage with narrative storytelling in a way that is both informative and emotionally striking.”

With her work Padre, Bolivian photographer Marisol Mendez was granted the third prize of €1,000. Danaé Panchaud comments on her work:

“Skilfully weaving personal family history over three generations with the broader social context of Latin America, Marisol Mendez's ongoing project Padre is a delicate and thoughtful exploration of contemporary masculinity. Taking as its starting point letters from her grandfather to his sons, including her father, she sets out to examine and deconstruct how notions of masculinity are embedded in, and imposed on, individual, familial and collective identities. Using hunting, a gesture of dominance, control and strength as her framework, Mendez produces a nuanced narrative, imbued with a determined softness countering its expected violence.”

The Main Prize Honourable Mentions were assigned to L'Amour Amor by Lisa Gervassi, My Favorite Shapes by Robin Crookall, Everything Is Uncomfortable When The Earth Shakes by Joana Dionísio, Flowers Drink The River by Pia Guilmoth, After A Denied Abortion by Stacy Kranitz, and Helmersstraat by Marens Van Leunen.

The €2,000 New Generation Prize was assigned to Swiss photographer Sara Faustino who presented the project A Home With No Roof, here commented by judge Pixy Liao:

“Sara Faustino's project A Home With No Roof brilliantly uses a 1:15 scale model of a house to explore the dysfunctionality within her home. By immersing herself in this miniature world—incorporating scaled-down everyday objects, sculptures of body parts, and striking juxtapositions of size—she transforms the apartment into a monstrous entity while positioning herself as both subject and object within the space. Her imagery vividly conveys a sense of discomfort and awkwardness, evoking the emotional experiences of her younger self. Through this process, Sara not only invites the audience to empathize with her journey but also uses art as a medium to reflect on and reconcile with her past.”

Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl by Cheryl Mukherji, Based On A True Story by Charley Tengbergen, and Veiled By Cloud And Mist by Yixi Tian received the New Generation Prize Honourable Mentions.

Pia Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink The River was selected for a featured interview in Vogue Italia by Alessia Glaviano, Head of Global Photovogue, to be published in the upcoming weeks.

The solo exhibition at PhMuseum Lab was awarded to Heirloom by Lucija Rosc. PhMuseum's Founding Director Giuseppe Oliverio and Visual Editor Camilla Marrese comment on their choice:

“Can memory be implanted in one’s body? In Heirloom, Lucija Rosc turns her grandma Mica’s former gold tooth from the ‘60s into a coating for her own dying tooth. She films the process, collects family photographs, dental molds and X-rays, she photographs Mica and herself as the two halves of one same body. Seen as the latest chapter in Rosc’s long-term artistic dedication to celebrating her grandparents, Heirloom is a symbolic gesture of visceral attachment, one of her many attempts at connecting layers of time and materialising heritage.” 

A big thank you to all participants, jurors and organisations who supported this 8th edition. The 37 shortlisted projects will be screened at Photo Vogue Festival 2025 and many of them will be featured on PhMuseum in the coming months. The grants program will return in January 2025 with the 13th edition of the PhMuseum Photography Grant. Meanwhile, enjoy all the selected and shortlisted projects at phmuseum.com/w24.