The International Women Photographers Association (IWPA) celebrated International Women’s Day earlier this month with the opening of an exhibition in Dubai featuring a selection of works by the winner and 10 finalists of the IWPA Award for 2017. The association had received more than 700 entries from amateur and professional women photographers from around the world to its open call to submit works based on the theme of ‘borders’, or a theme of their choice; and the 11 finalists were selected by a panel of seven international photography experts.
The 2017 IWPA Laureate, Farah Salem is a Kuwaiti based in Chicago, USA. Her winning entry is a series of performance based photographs titled ‘Cornered’. The series, featuring a woman dressed in white crouching inside a small box placed in various rural and urban landscapes, is a powerful and introspective study into the human psyche and its self-imposed limitations. “This work explores the experience of being in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, yet remaining trapped in a box that has been created either by society or ourselves,” Salem says.
The other finalists have addressed subjects that relate to their lives and their surroundings, presenting a panorama of the world as women see it. The artists include Romanian Anna Alexandrescu from Bucharest; German, Anne Ackermann, and Spanish Sumy Sadurni, who live and work in Uganda; Copenhagen based Danish-French artist Cécile Smetana Baudier; Paris based Colombian Marcela Barrios-Hernandez; Japanese Haruri Fuji from Tokyo; Indian Ranita Roy from Kolkata; Tabriz based Iranian Soheila Sanamno; Neus Solà from Barcelona, Spain; and Florencia Trincheri from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The IWPA was established in 2001 with the aim of providing women photographers from around the world a platform to showcase their work to a wide and diverse audience. The IWPA Award was organised by UAE-based Antidote Art and Design in collaboration with IWPA, Alliance Française Dubai and Paris based MyArtSpy.
This is the first time the annual IWPA Award exhibition opened in Dubai. It was kicked off on March 8, International Women’s Day, with a panel discussion titled Real and Ideal, where UAE-based women art professionals discussed women related issues such as the challenges faced by women photographers working in the Middle East and globally.
The exhibition will travel to various cities including Paris, New Delhi, Alexandria, Toulouse, Cairo, Bahrain and Lahore. In addition to giving the finalists the chance to showcase their work worldwide throughout the year, IWPA has also given 2017 winner Salem the opportunity to present a solo show at La Galerie, Alliance Française Dubai in 2018.
The IWPA Award 2017 exhibition will run at La Galerie, Alliance Française Dubai until April 8.
