This summer, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation presents two exhibitions at The Cube in Frankfurt/Eschborn: the group show “RAY Echoes. Memory”, which takes place as part of the RAY Triennial of Photography, and the presentation of the works of the four finalists of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024.

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RAY Echoes. Memory

The Photography Foundation is participating in the international RAY Triennial of Photography for the fifth time. More than eleven institutions in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region take part in the programme, presenting contemporary photography and related media on the theme “ECHOES” at various exhibition venues.

From 30 May, the Photography Foundation presents the exhibition “RAY Echoes. Memory”. Under the thematic focus “memory”, it brings together eight international artistic positions that explore the role of photography as a carrier of memory. In their works, the artists examine how missing or vague memories can be (re)created or manipulated through photographic images. They visualise the elasticity of our memory in storing and reproducing the past and show how what we have seen fades and is replaced by new images. “RAY Echoes. Memory” includes works by Jana Bissdorf, Sophie Calle, Maisie Cousins, Omar Victor Diop and Lee Shulman/The Anonymous Project, Lebohang Kganye, Nicholas Nixon, Mimi Plumb and Johanna Schlegel.

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In her series “memories I don’t have”, the German artist Johanna Schlegel searches for a way to visualise the missing memories of her childhood. By chemically processing photographs from her family album, she creates blurs on the surface of the images that express the gaps in her memory. The feeling of anxiety and climatic threat that the US-American artist Mimi Plumb associates with memories of her youth in the small town of Walnut Creek on the West Coast of the United States pervades the cool photographs in her series “The White Sky”.

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The German artist Jana Bissdorf creates a link between different levels of time and narratives in her group of works collectively entitled “Wege zum Glück”, for which she physically combines found black-and-white images with her own colour photographs, thus creating new associative spaces between the present and the past.

In the series “Being there”, created together with Lee Shulman, the founder of the Anonymous Project, Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop places himself retrospectively in the snapshots of a white US-American middle class of the 1950s and 1960s with such playful lightness and irony that the political message of the group of works is not immediately apparent. South African artist Lebohang Kganye revives the memories of her deceased mother in her work “Her-Story” by superimposing her pictures from the family albums with self-portraits in her mother’s clothes. In “Walking back to happiness”, the British artist Maisie Cousins uses artificial intelligence to create images of unphotographed childhood memories, in this case of an amusement park she used to visit. The work of the French artist Sophie Calle revolves on various levels around questions of memory and transience and the associated gaps. She shares her inner monologue in touching combinations of image and text. The questioning of transience through the medium of photography can also be found in the works of the American artist Nicholas Nixon, who, in the impressive series “The Brown Sisters”, portrayed his wife Bebe and her three sisters together every year from 1975 to 2022.

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Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024

In addition, from 13 June 2024, the Photography Foundation shows works by the four finalists of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize: VALIE EXPORT, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Lebohang Kganye and Hrair Sarkissian. In their projects selected for the Prize, the artists engage with urgent issues of our time, from the remnants of war and conflict, to experiences of diasporic communities and issues of contested land, heritage, equality and gender.

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VALIE EXPORT uses photography as a tool for her radical performances and for critically questioning the role of women in society and art. In her works, she points out entrenched patriarchal structures in mass media image culture and explores the relationship between body and gaze, performance and image, subject and environment.

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Through fusing photography and Warli painting, photographer Gauri Gill and painter Rajesh Vangad collaboratively reinvent the practice of painted photography. Gauri Gill’s photographs of the ever-changing landscape of Ganjad, Dahanu in India are enhanced by Vangad’s artful drawings. They depict the multifaceted realities of the family and village life of the indigenous Warli people, from flood and drought to unrest and terror, spirits and myths. Lebohang Kganye explores the complex history of South Africa before, during and after apartheid and colonialism. In her vast, experimental installations she combines silhouettes and life-sized cut-out figures crafted from images found in her family’s private photo albums with text elements. She draws on stories from her family and combines them with excerpts from South African literature. In this way she succeeds in penetrating the complexity of the South African experience.
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Hrair Sarkissian’s conceptual photography focuses on deeply personal narratives that, at the same time, reflect the complexity of larger historical and social issues. For his series “Last Seen”, the artist travelled to Argentina, Brazil, Kosovo or Lebanon to capture the place where a missing person was last seen by their loved ones. The silent images of domestic or public places are visual testimonies that archive the memory of the missing and visualise individual fates within global conflicts.

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize has become renowned as one of the most important international awards for photographers, spotlighting outstanding and innovative works that critically reflect society. This year’s edition marks the 20th anniversary of Deutsche Börse’s partnership with the Photographers’ Gallery, who have jointly awarded the Prize since 2005. With the establishment of the Photography Foundation, the Prize was retitled and has been awarded by both the Photographers’ Gallery and the Foundation since 2016.

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Address: The Cube, Mergenthalerallee 61 ,65760 Eschborn