Shortlist

A shortlist was compiled by the jury panel after all applications were collated. The Ernest Cole Award 2022 shortlist was Lunathi Mngxuma, Motlhoki Nono, Phumzile Khanyile and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo. The shortlist was selected independently by the Jury.

Lunathi Mngxuma

 Lunathi Mngxuma (b. 1998) in Lady Frere in Eastern Cape, South Africa and based in

Thokoza, Gauteng. Mngxuma is a photographer and visual artist who through mask making and poignant self-portraits, explores grief. His start in photography came from conversations with his friends; he found out that most of them had hobbies that they wouldn’t talk about. He decided to explore photography, and was introduced through the Of Soul and Joy Photography project in 2016.

Mngxuma believes that through photography one can start conversations and raise debates.

Motlhoki Nono

Motlhoki Nono (b. 1998 in Mabopane, Pretoria) completed her Honours in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her studio practice is currently based in Johannesburg, where she uses photography, video and printmaking as tools to investigate the intimacies and violences that are implicated in romantic love. She engages the nuanced ideas of inheritance, consumption, texture, and materiality to perform and document the internal lives and politics of black women in love. Her practice is characterised by a valorisation, problematisation and curiosity towards black love, as well as abstract narrative and relationalities of the domestic and heart spaces. She defines her practice as a decolonial and sociological enquiry into love, exploring how love manifests at the intersection of race, class and gender. Currently, Nono is interested in domestic gestures as a manifestation of love, and the domestic space as a site of self-erasure.

Phumzile Khanyile

Phumzile Khanyile (b. 1991, Soweto) lives and works in Johannesburg. Khanyile is a Market Photo Workshop graduate. She is the recipient of the 2015 Gisèle Wulfsohn Mentorship in Photography mentored by Ayana V. Jackson. She was awarded the 2018 CAP Prize, and in 2020 she became the first winner for The Artphilein Photobook Project Contest.

Since her debut exhibition at the Market Photo Workshop in 2017, Khanyile has been featured in The Financial Times, Aperture, The British Journal of Photography, Elephant, Art Africa Magazine, CNN, the New York Times, and Vice Magazine. She has also been part of several exhibitions including NGV Triennial (Melbourne), ‘Welcome Home Vol. II’ (Marrakesh), ‘AFROTOPIA’ (Bamako). Others include the Africa Museum (Bergen Dal), ‘Not the Usual Suspects’ (Cape Town), and ‘African Passions’ (Évora). Her work is featured in local and international collections, in Europe and the US.

Phumzile Khanyile has also founded a project space with fellow artist Nkosinathi Khumalo called Zulu Republik.

Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo

 Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo (b. 1993) is a photographer based in Lawley, Johannesburg.

He uses the tavern run by his parents as a studio in which to investigate themes of first-hand and generational trauma, violence and memory. Hlatshwayo was mentored by the photographer Jabulani Dhlamini and photography curator and educator John Fleetwood.

He won the 2019 CAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography with his series ‘Slaghuis I’. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Fotomuseum Winterthur, IAF Basel Festival, and Johannesburg’s Turbine Art Fair.

Hlatshwayo was the Gisèle Wulfsohn Photography Mentorship Recipient for 2019. He held his first solo exhibition, ‘Slaghuis II’ at the Market Photo Workshop in February 2020, and was an overall winner of the international Blurring the Lines photo award for 2020. His work will be featured at the upcoming Rencontres de Bamako, African Biennale of Photography, Mali.

Jury

Berni Searle, Lebohang Kganye, Nandipha Mntambo comprised the Jury, who would select the shortlist and ultimately the recipient of the Award.

Open Call

An Open Call was advertised to invite applicants to apply for the award. The open call application form was posted here.

Nomination Panel

The Ernest Cole Award 2022 Nomination Panel consists of 6 experienced practitioners who each nominated 2 photographers. The Nomination Panellists are Dean Hutton, Gabrielle Goliath, Jabulani Dhlamini, Zen Marie, Simon Gush and Ashley Walters. The Ernest Cole Award 2022 accepted applications through both a nomination and open call process

Dean Hutton

Dean Hutton (b. 1976, South Africa) is a genderqueer* trans media artist provoking dialogue about the gaze, queer bodies, love and social justice. They have worked across photojournalism, print, digital, video and social media, performance and community action since the late 1990s. Their extensive studio practice, as a photographer for over 20 years and a visual artist since 2004 – producing works on paper, digital video and sculptural objects, bridge intersecting genres of documentary, fiction and fantasy – to produce radical queer counter narratives. In an evolving public performance as Goldendean their strategy of simple and often improvised, disruptive actions by a “Fat Queer White Trans body” they share moments of soft courage to affirm the right of all bodies to exist, to be celebrated and protected.

Their arts practice extends into building resilience through compassionate forms of arts education and mentorship of students and praxis through visual strategies to embodied knowledge production.  As a lecturer and facilitator of learning they are deeply invested in finding and improving modes of learning that excites, and encourages ethical self-expression and reflexive modes of engagement that contribute to repairing relationships, care and building resilience for all. 

*Genderqueer is a non-binary transgender identity. Please use They/Them gender-neutral pronouns.

Gabrielle Goliath

Gabrielle Goliath's (b.1983, South Africa) practice works with and within the histories, life worlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme and queer life, refusing its terminal demarcation within a racial-sexual paradigm of violence that governs post-colonial/post-apartheid social worlds. For Goliath, this is the life-work of mourning, “for to imagine and seek to realise the world otherwise is to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to and must transform”.

Goliath’s immersive installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. Her video and sound work Chorus (2021) recently debuted at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, and will travel to Dallas Contemporary and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022. Recent exhibitions include This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel;  The Normal, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburg; This song is  for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm; and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.

Jabulani Dhlamini

Jabulani Dhlamini (b. 1983, Free State, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg. Dhlamini majored in documentary photography at the Vaal University of Technology, graduating in 2010. He is an alumni fellow of the Edward Ruiz Mentorship programme and the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg. His work focuses on his upbringing while also reflecting on various communities within contemporary South Africa. Dhlamini’s approach is meditative and subtly provokes a closer look at what lies on the edges through an exploration of personal and collective memory. Incorporating landscape imagery and intimate portraits, his work captures historical moments — such as the recollection of the Sharpeville Massacre, the effects of land dispossession and the funeral of antiapartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela — while also documenting the quieter moments in the lives of everyday South Africans.

 In 2018 Dhlamini’s work was featured on the Five Photographers, A Tribute to David Goldblatt group exhibition at the Gerard Sekoto Gallery at the French Institute. In his 2018 exhibition at Goodman Gallery, iXesha!, Dhlamini explored how memory is created and archived within a community where the memory has been localised. This exhibition included images from Dhlamini’s recent series iQhawekazi documenting the events around Winnie Mandela’s funeral. In his most recent exhibition with the Gallery, ‘the everyday waiting’, Dhlamini photographed his community in Soweto during the first four months of the national lockdown, drawing attention to the psychological impact of COVID-19.

Zen Marie

Zen Marie (b. 1980, Durban) is an artist and educator working at the intersection of lens-based media, social practice and installation. Zen holds an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and is a graduate of the two year residency program at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Through a practice which spans film, photography, performance, drawing and writing, he investigates the relationships between power and place, and medium and meaning. His current and recent projects propose decolonial rereadings of the narratives that become entangled with nature via conquest and representation. The ocean recurs in his work as a site where the personal, the political and the social are refracted through the experience of the sublime. His current research extends this interest in the politics of the sublime to landscape. Zen's studio practice is complemented by his position as a lecturer in Fine Art at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, where he is also engaged in research towards a practice-led PhD.

Simon Gush

Simon Gush is an artist and filmmaker living in Johannesburg. His work examines labour, subjectivity and land. He completed a postgraduate certificate at the HISK, Ghent and a MA (Sociology), University of the Witwatersrand and is currently completing a PhD (History) at Rhodes University. His work has been exhibited at the MuAC (Mexico City), Göteborgs Konsthall (Göteborgs), MAXXI (Rome), The Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm), Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie (Ludwigshafen), the Dakar Biennale and Bamako Biennale. His films have been screened at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), ICA (London), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Palais De Tokyo (Paris), as well as festivals such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Visions du Réel.

Ashley Walters

Ashley Walters was born in Cape Town in 1983. He completed his BAFA (2011) and a Masters in Fine Art (2013) at the University of Cape Town, where he was the recipient of a number of prestigious awards and scholarships, including the Michealis Prize (2011) and Tierney Fellowship Award (2013). Subsequent to this he completed an exchange at Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig (2013). Thereafter he was awarded an Apexart Fellowship (2015) in New York and an artist residency in Amersfoort, Netherlands (2017/18). Commissioned by Magnum Foundation his work has been featured widely in publications such as Laying Foundations for Change, Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities, and Aperture magazine: Platform Africa, Summer 2017 edition (#227). Walters has taken part in numerous international exhibitions in Bamako, Netherlands, London, Germany, New York, and exhibited his photographs widely within South Africa.

Walters’ work protagonize a subjective and critical approach to the behaviours and processes of urban life in the city and its periphery. His work tells of an interest in the everyday and public space in its least predictable dimension. Waivering between absolute complicity with his subjects and distant observation, his body of work emphasises a non-spectacular representation of reality. Whereas some images provide tableaus of intimate, inhabited spaces, others render non-territories that bespeak of up-rootedness, scarring, anxiety and liminality.

He currently lives in Cape Town and teaches Photography and New Media at Stellenbosch University.