photography-award

2023 Edition

The fourth edition of Tosetti Value Photography Award was assigned to Kiluanji Kia Henda, presented by Fonti in Naples, recognizing in his photographic work the ability to become an interpreter of the current international sociopolitical situation, starting with the conflicts caused by the exploitation of fossil fuels. Conflicts arising from the long history and complex political dynamics of the final decades of the Cold War and, even further back, from the time of the long colonial season. In the works-born in the aftermath of the Civil War that marked his country for decades (1975 – 2002) – the connecting lines of pipelines end up ideally uniting territories that have been on opposite sides of history such as Portugal and Angola.

The jury recognized in the artist, the ability to deal with these themes with the humorous freedom and imaginative lightness of a tale in images where photography does not become a document but the site of a fertile paradox: alien figures of silver mannequins seem to project to an unknown dimension the weight of responsibility and guilt. Similarly, Angolan intellectuals appear portrayed as they balance, with something of bravery, on oil pipelines, as if riding the lines of the changing world, or as they pose, with disenchanted pride, next to old fuel drums. This linguistic reversal, with which Kiluanji Kia Henda returns the iconography of the conqueror to the sender, is one of the most interesting and at the same time disorienting aspects that the long and necessary journey of postcolonial thought can offer us today.

Jury

1. Walter Guadagnini, Director, CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Torino
2. Salvatore Vitale, artistic director Futures Photography, Amsterdam 
3. Elena Volpato, conservator GAM – Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna, Torino

Photo courtesy: © Perottino-Piva-Peirone / Artissima