The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. For those three decades, the award recognises the artist behind an exhibition or book in Europe that has made a significant contribution to photography in the past 12 months. It’s an accolade renowned for spotlighting outstanding and innovative art, and celebrating the work of leading international photographers. Today, the 2027 shortlist was announced: Hoda Afshar, Lotus L. Kang, Sasha Kurmaz and Salvatore Vitale. Their projects feature photography, film and sound, sculptural installations, archival photographs and materials, and handmade collage. The compelling shortlist examines how images shape our understanding of bodies, war, labour and power. Together, the artists investigate desire and memory; the human cost of the digital economy; surviving in times of conflict; and the politics in the act of looking.
Hoda Afshar (b. 1983) is shortlisted for the exhibition Performing the Invisible, which was hosted at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. The artist employs a combination of photographs, drawings, mirrors, videos and sound installations to explore the history of established perspectives and photograph as a tool of revelation and resistance. The Fold, at the centre of the exhibition, is a sustained investigation into the enduring legacy of colonial photographic practice, and the ways in which they continue to shape how bodies, particularly veiled Islamic bodies, are seen and consumed. Afshar worked with the archive or French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, encountering thousands of photographs he made in Morocco. Through documenting veiled women, and occasionally men, de Clérambault explored his psychoanalytic ideas around covering and fantasy. Afshar brings this to life with the recurring motif of the mirror, disrupting the historical archive and making the viewer, or the act of looking itself, the object of investigation and knowledge.
Meanwhile, Lotus L. Kang is shortlisted for the exhibition The face of desire is loss, at the Bulgari Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale, Italy. This immersive installation considers how bodies change over time, what we remember and what gets lost along the way. The work continues her signature work of complexly layered environments that meld organic, structural and metabolic languages. Lengths of unfixed photographic film, which Kang calls “skins,” are suspended from steel joists. They respond to light and humidity, developing bruises, blood and bile-like hues over time. Sculptures of tatami mats and cast objects in plaster, bronze and fibreglass of crying birds and kelp knots evoke the body in states of rest, dream, recovery and death. Here, 49 bottles of spirits reflect the days a soul spends between death and rebirth, in Buddhist belief, alongside a film of tidal mudflats and visualisations of birdsong.
Red Horse, a photobook published by Éditions Images Vevey, earned a shortlist place for Sasha Kurmaz. The project began following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This diaristic journey into war tells the deeply personal story of his life, alongside the lives of those around him who are struggling to survive in constant danger. The 800-page visual diary brings together handmade collages in a first-hand account of life in Ukraine perpetually reshaped by the destructive force of war. Kurmaz combines documentary photographs, notes, drawings, newspaper cuttings and found objects to capture both his own experiences and those of the people around him. Alongside his thoughts, fears and pain, the accumulation of these fragile collages questions how prolonged states of emergency and ongoing war affect individuals, society, democratic systems and public spaces.
Finally, Salvatore Vitale is shortlisted for the exhibition SABOTAGE at Photo Elysée, Lausanne. The show examines the hidden human labour sustaining the digital economy, questioning the systems of automation, surveillance and algorithmic control that increasingly shape contemporary working conditions. Vitale exposes a central contradiction of technological progress: behind the promise of automation lies a vast workforce whose labour is largely invisible, precarious and subject to continuous monitoring. Developed through collaboration with South African freelancers, the series investigates how contemporary digital infrastructures reproduce historical and colonial patterns of extraction, exploitation and inequality. Through the notion of sabotage, Vitale explores possibilities of resistance, refusal and agency within systems designed to regulate and control human labour.
Anne-Marie Beckmann, Director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, said: “from centuries-old photographic archives to radical contemporary experiments, the 2027 shortlist proves how urgently photography speaks to our times. The nominated projects are both rigorous and profoundly moving. Congratulations to the four artists whose compelling projects push the boundaries of photography.” Each of the shortlisted artists help us rethink how we view the world, with projects that push the boundaries of contemporary practice. Once again, they remind us by this prize is known for singling out art’s visionaries.
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2027 is at The Photographers’ Gallery, London 10 March – 6 June 2027: thephotographersgallery.org.uk
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Salvatore Vitale, Untitled, 2023. From the series Death by GPS, 2022–2026 © Salvatore Vitale.
2. Salvatore Vitale. Film still from Automated Refusal, 2025 © Salvatore Vitale.
3. Hoda Afshar, from the series The Fold (2019-2025). Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Australia.
4. Lotus L. Kang, The face of desire is loss, Bvlgari Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, 2026. Courtesy the artist, Bvlgari, Commonwealth and Council, Franz Kaka, Kukje Gallery and Esther Schipper Berlin/Paris/Seoul Photo © Andrea Rossetti.
5. Hoda Afshar, from the series The Fold (2019-2025). Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Australia.
