KABK students on the shortlist of the 2021 Dior Award @ Luma Arles
18 June 2021
Congratulations to Sophie Allerding and Kata Geibl, students of our master's programme
Since 2018, this competition has aimed to build a dialogue nourished by major international art and photography schools, in order to recognize the young talents of tomorrow.
The work of the 12 Laureates, including the winner and any Jury Mentions, will be featured in an exhibition produced by Dior with the support of École Nationale supérieure de la photographie (ENSP), curated and hosted by Luma Arles. The exhibition will be open from 4 July to 26 September at the Luma Arles’ Forges in the Parc des Ateliers.
Competition theme 2021: Face to Face
This year's competition theme was “Face to Face; an invitation to explore everything that separates us from others in order to get closer to them, to measure what we need to deploy in order to forge unexpected, hoped-for and desired alliances.”
photos © Sophie Allerding - courtesy of the artist
“With my work, I want to conjure up old images again into the present, and load them with new magic. I am challenging the prevailing juxtaposition of humans and nature in the western world.”
Born in Hamburg in 1993, Sophie Allerding is a young German photographer originally from South America, who is now studying at the Master's Photography & Society program of the Royal Academy of Art in The Netherlands. In her work, she blends traces of Amazonian culture and the magical beliefs she has known since childhood, with a critical vision of the western world. Part ancestral mythology, part modernity, her images provide a mix of colour and black and white. Both introspective and referential, her shots are imbued with a strange, striking poetry.
Glowing Eyes has previously won “The Gute Aussichten – New German Photography Award” and will be exhibited in 2021 at the Künstlerhaus Dortmund, the Landesmudeum Koblenz, and the Deichtorhallen Museum forPhotography in Hamburg.
Sophie Allerding is a first-year student of the Master Photography & Society at the KABK
photos © Kata Geiblg - courtesy of the artist
A racehorse staring at us blindfolded. A golden ladder in the middle of a tranquil mountain range…
Poetic and surprising, these images by Kata Geibl show imposing natural landscapes, and cities with monumental buildings, a young athlete hard at work, or holiday-makers out in the middle of nature. The young photographer who comes from Hungary and is graduating this year from the Master's Photography & Society program at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK), asserts a representation that expresses her anxiety and frustration faced with the vanity of a contemporary consumerist world doomed to fail. Her universe, as attractive as it is equivocal, is a world in which the viewer is invited to accommodate and ask questions, face-to-face.
“My aim is to take the viewer on a journey where there are no clear answers but instead ambiguous questions, which we have to ask sooner or later, as we are not only the sole heirs to the system, but also suffer under it.”
Kata Geibl is graduating this summer from the Master Photography & Society and her graduation work will be showcased during the KABK Graduation Show 2021, 8-11 July at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.