Gold Coast’s HOTA, Home of the Arts have announced wani toaishara as the winner of the 2022 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, which provides a national platform for emerging and established artists working in the broad medium of contemporary photography.
wani toaishara has been awarded the $25,000 acquisitive award for his work do black boys go to heaven.
toaishara’s practice, based in videography and performance, responds to African affairs and visual culture while interrogating dislocation for those on the margins. Recently incorporating photography into his practice, the winning work do black boys go to heaven is informed by research into African archival material and deep dialogue with family and friends. toaishara connects visual language and spoken word to explore identity, which is reinforced in the artist’s statement:
“This is for the bodies painted spectacle long before they could even speak. For that child who was told that their strength was found in silence because speaking made them weak. For those bones so small that their gravestones outsized their casket. For all those tokens who’ve been called broken as they contemplate their suicide. We are worthy. Here. Still.”
wani toaishara, do black boys go to heaven, installation view, HOTA Gallery, Queensland
wani toaishara was announced as the winner from a finalist group of forty works, selected from over 260 submissions by this year’s judge, Isobel Parker Philip, Senior Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Philip said: “There is a quiet powerfulness to wani toaishara’s do black boys go to heaven. It is a power made explicit in the subjects’ strong and self-assured expressions, but also written into the way that wani knowingly plays with (and exposes) the conventions of studio portraiture. The two figures are confident yet slightly stilted; they are dressed up but aren’t wearing shoes; the fabric backdrop has been carefully chosen to match their dresses and yet we see the clips securing it in place. Standing in this makeshift studio, the figures feel close to the surface of the image. This sense of intimacy and immediacy, as well as their open, front-facing posture, is striking but it is also a political gesture. wani turns a simple portrait into an assertion of presence and visibility. The two subjects ask us to see them as they are. As wani so movingly notes in his artist statement, ‘Worthy. Here. Still.’ ”
wani toaishara, do black boys go to heaven
This year, an additional $25,000 was available for acquisitions. HOTA Gallery’s impressive collection of contemporary Australian photography now includes the following works: Aaron Chapman’s Purple is Black Blooming, 2020; Petrina Hicks’ Hercules, 2021; Katrin Koening’s untitled from between the river and the sea, 2021, and Jemima Wyman’s Flourish 10, 2020.
The forty finalist works represent a selection of cross-generational and culturally diverse artists working at the forefront of photographic media: Abdul Abdullah, Tarik Ahlip, Anthea Behm, Yuriyal Eric Bridgeman, Kieran Butler, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Anna Carey, Aaron Chapman, Michael Cook, Ellen Dahl, Lucas Davidson, Jo Duck, Lyle Duncan, Kath Egan, Ash Garwood, Amos Gebhardt, Douglas Lance Gibson, Guy Grabowsky, Tim Gregory, Yvette Hamilton, Petrina Hicks, Naomi Hobson, Samuel Hodge, Eliza Hutchison, The Huxleys, Katrin Koenning, Paula Mahoney, Ali McCann, Mia Mala McDonald, Phuong Ngo, Selina Ou, Hiromi Tango, Angela Tiatia, wani toaishara, Shan Turner-Carroll, Skye Wagner, Carl Warner, Kai Wasikowski, Lydia Wegner, and Jemima Wyman.
The full selection of finalist works is presented alongside a retrospective of previous winners and acquired works in an exclusive exhibition at HOTA Gallery, highlighting the impact of the award over the past two decades. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary, visitors get to choose their favourite artwork with the inclusion for the first time of a $5,000 People’s Choice Award.
The Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award is currently on view at HOTA Gallery in Gold Coast, Queensland, until 8 January 2023.
