2021 Grant
The Judging Panel;
Bianca Saunders, Frank Lebon, Obongjayar, Pol Taburet, Rhea Dillon, Rosie Marks, Alex Grey, Nancy Andersen
As an interdisciplinary artist, Hillario Reyes’practice (b. 1996) is situated at the crossroads of sonic performance, land installation, and expanded cinema. Within their iterative works, they largely explore the impossibility of the black body, the failure of mechanical optics, and the reverb of cultural dissonance. By fragmenting their own positionality and history - utilising familial footage, 3d animation, and land practices to remedy environmental and political disruption and to question ideas of comfort and belonging.
Through the examination of queer rave culture and carnival practices, the work inhabits a necessary satirical approach to undermine the systems at play. In the act of reconciliation with generational and environmental trauma, Hillario Reyes re-maps their body as a site of multitude, to fracture the autobiographical nature of the work.
Abdulhamid Kircher (b. 1996) is an artist from Queens, New York. He was born in Berlin to German and Turkish parents, and immigrated with his mother to the United States at the age of eight. His work is a living archive of place and people, as it is also a dedication to the language of photography, the mechanics and aesthetic possibilities of the form. Through his devotion to classical forms of image making and the radical experimentation required for each of his subjects, his process bridges the idea between document and narrative. He received his BA in Culture and Media from The New School in 2018 and his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego in 2022. Abdul currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Daniel Mebarek (b. 1993) is a Bolivian photographer and independent researcher based in Paris, France. His work engages with questions surrounding the construction of historical narratives, memory (both individual and collective), state violence and national identity.
He graduated from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. His work has been published in Fotofilmic JRNL 7 (CAN), Der Greif (DEU), Humble Arts Foundation (USA), Kris Graves Projects (USA) and Balam Magazine (ARG). His work was also selected for Aperture’s 2020 Summer Open exhibition held at Fotografiska, New York. He most recently co-curated the exhibition “DUST: The Plates of the Present”, a photographic installation of 1031 photograms initiated by artists Jo-ey Tang and Thomas Fougeirol, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (October 2020-March 2021).
