Surveillance and sabotage on the Deutsche Börse photography prize shortlist – in pictures
Untitled, 2023, from the series Death by GPS, 2022–26
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize identifies and rewards artists for an exhibition or book in Europe that has made a significant contribution to photography in the past 12 months. Salvatore Vitale (born 1986, Palermo, Italy) is shortlisted for the exhibition Sabotage at Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland. In Sabotage, Vitale examines the hidden human labour sustaining the digital economy, questioning the systems of automation, surveillance and algorithmic control that increasingly shape contemporary working conditionsPhotograph: Salvatore Vitali
Listen All Y’All, It’s a Sabotage, 2022, from the series Death by GPS, 2022–26
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 monitoringPhotograph: Deutsche Börse prize
Untitled, 2025, from the series Death by GPS, 2022–26
Developed through collaborations with South African freelancers, Sabotage investigates how contemporary digital infrastructures reproduce historical and colonial patterns of extraction, exploitation and inequalityPhotograph: Deutsche Börse prize
Film still from Automated Refusal, 2025
Through the notion of sabotage, Vitale explores possibilities of resistance, refusal and agency within systems designed to regulate and control human labour. Bringing together film, photography and sculptural installations, Sabotage connects the invisible processes of digital labour to their material consequences, revealing a system driven by productivity, exhaustion and obsolescencePhotograph: Deutsche Börse prize
From the series The Fold (2019-25)
Hoda Afshar (born 1983, Tehran, Iran) is shortlisted for the exhibition Performing the Invisible at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, France. 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 it continues to shape how bodies, particularly veiled Islamic bodies, are seen and consumedPhotograph: Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Australia/Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac/Photo Carlos Ayesta
From the series The Fold (2019-25)
Working with the archive of French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), Afshar encountered thousands of photographs he made in Morocco Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Australia/Hoda Afshar
From the series The Fold (2019-25)
Through photographing veiled women, and occasionally men, de Clérambault explored his psychoanalytic ideas around covering and fantasyPhotograph: Hoda Afshar/Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Australia
From the series The Fold (2019-25)
Using the recurring motif of the mirror, Afshar disrupts this historical archive and shifts the usual focus to turn things around, making the viewer, or the act of looking itself, the object of investigation and knowledge. She questions the violence of the gaze and exposes deeper issues concerning the nature of vision and controlPhotograph: Hoda Afshar/Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Australia
From Red Horse
Sasha Kurmaz (born 1986, Kyiv, Ukraine) is shortlisted for the publication Red Horse, published by Éditions Images Vevey. Kurmaz began the project following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022Photograph: Sasha Kurmaz 2022–25
From Red Horse
This diaristic journey into war tells the deeply personal story of Kurmaz’s life, alongside the lives of those around him who are struggling to survive 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 warPhotograph: Sasha Kurmaz
From Red Horse
Kurmaz combines documentary photographs, notes, drawings, newspaper cuttings and found objects to capture his own experiences and those of the people around himPhotograph: Sasha Kurmaz 2022–25
From Red Horse
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. Red Horse is an urgent reflection on how war reshapes lives and our collective memory, while asking what it means to make art in times of conflictPhotograph: Sasha Kurmaz
Lotus L Kang – The Face of Desire is Loss, Bvlgari Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, 2026
Lotus L Kang (born 1985, Toronto, Canada) is shortlisted for the exhibition The Face of Desire is Loss. Combining photography, film and sculpture, this immersive installation looks at how bodies change over time, what we remember and what gets lost along the way Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Bvlgari, Commonwealth and Council, Franz Kaka, Kukje Gallery and Esther Schipper Berlin/Paris/Seoul/Andrea Rossetti
Lotus L Kang – The Face of Desire is Loss, Bvlgari Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, 2026
The exhibition’s title is drawn from Thresholes (2020), a poetry collection by American writer Lara Mimosa Montes. Echoing Montes’ writing, Kang’s installation lives in the space in between, where time and the body are fluid and constantly changingPhotograph: Courtesy of the artist, Bvlgari, Commonwealth and Council, Franz Kaka, Kukje Gallery and Esther Schipper Berlin/Paris/Seoul/Andrea Rossetti
Lotus L Kang – The Face of Desire is Loss, Bvlgari Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, 2026
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. Together, they symbolise the constant flux of life and deathPhotograph: Courtesy of the artist, Bvlgari, Commonwealth and Council, Franz Kaka, Kukje Gallery and Esther Schipper Berlin/Paris/Seoul/Andrea Rossetti
Lotus L Kang – The Face of Desire is Loss, Bvlgari Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, 2026
Forty-nine 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 birdsongPhotograph: Courtesy of the artist, Bvlgari, Commonwealth and Council, Franz Kaka, Kukje Gallery and Esther Schipper Berlin/Paris/Seoul/Andrea RossettiKioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.