The exhibition DOKUMENTARFOTOGRAFIE FÖRDERPREISE 14 DER WÜSTENROT STIFTUNG will be on display from 22 September at Museum Folkwang

Museum Folkwang and the Wüstenrot Foundation are showing new works by Jana Bauch, Marc Botschen, Dudu Quintanilha and Ramona Schacht, which were created as part of Wüstenrot Foundation's Documentary Photography Award 14. The artists deal with people in historical and current social structures in different ways.

The four award winners illuminate different positions in the field of documentary between archive material, artistic and journalistic practices and conscious staging. The focus is on questions about processes of collectivisation as well as the subject, the body and gender, genealogy and socio-political conditionality.

For her project Y-Topia, Jana Bauch (*1992) accompanied activists in the occupied lignite mining town of Lützerath until the eviction in January 2023 and documented their living conditions and hopes on film and in photographs. In his work Soft Pass, Marc Botschen (*1991) deconstructs his great-grandfather's ancestral passport and uses photography as a medium for reflecting on critical questions about identity, genealogy and the mode of action and aesthetics of the document. In the video installation Unstable Group, Dudu Quintanilha (*1987) explores group dynamics with the means of staging and addresses the relationship between individuality and various forms of institutionalisation. Ramona Schacht's (*1989) series of works PICTURES AS A PROMISE (p.a.a.p.) analyses and fragments historical photographs of cotton spinners from Leipzig and Kyiv and in this way addresses the relationship between gender and labour.

The Documentary Photography Award has been presented every two years since 1994 by the Wüstenrot Foundation in cooperation with the Photographic Collection of the Museum Folkwang to four artistic positions. The prize is the most important award of its kind in Germany. It is aimed at photographers who deal with topics from the real world and who use contemporary means to redefine the representational function of photography.

The prizes are each endowed with 10,000 euros and enable the realisation of a new project. At the end of a project year, a touring exhibition with an accompanying catalogue will be created from the results of the work. The touring exhibition and the catalogue are part of the award and are fully funded by the Wüstenrot Foundation.

The jury members were: René Hartmann (Wüstenrot Foundation, Ludwigsburg), Anna Planas (Freelance curator, Paris), Anne Ruygt (curator, FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerpen), Thomas Seelig (head of the Department of Photography at Museum Folkwang, Essen), Joscha Steffens (artist, award winner DF12, Heidelberg/Amsterdam).

The exhibition Dokumentarfotografie Förderpreise 14 will tour and be shown at the Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Museum for Photography Braunschweig.

An exhibition catalogue will be published (Dokumentarfotografie Förderpreise, ISBN: 978-3-96075-030-7), which will be available free of charge at the exhibition from 22 September and can be downloaded from the Wüstenrot Foundation website.

In cooperation with the Wüstenrot Foundation.

Information

DOKUMENTARFOTOGRAFIE FÖRDERPREISE 14 DER WÜSTENROT STIFTUNG 
Jana Bauch, Marc Botschen, Dudu Quintanilha, Ramona Schacht
22 September 2023 – 1 January 2024 

Free admission

Artist talk
Sa, 23.9., 3 p.m.: Ramona Schacht, Dudu Quintanilha and Matthias Gründig
Sa, 4.11., 3 p.m.: Jana Bauch, Marc Botschen and Matthias Gründig