MAST FOUNDATION FOR PHOTOGRAPHY GRANT ON INDUSTRY AND WORK is a biennial selection of young artists that aims to facilitate pictorial research related to industry, the changes it causes in society and the environment, and the role of work in economic and productive development.
An international jury appoints about thirty nominators who select a number of young photographers to participate in the competition. Candidates must present a photographic project about industry and labor. Among the applicants, five finalists are finally selected to receive a scholarship, and eventually exhibit their result here at MAST.The five finalists for the 2023 MAST Photo Grant are: Farah Al-Qasimi, Hicham Gardaf, Lebohang Kganye, Maria Mavropoulou and Salvatore Vitale.
Farah Al-Qasimi engages with the large Arab community in Dearborn, in the state of Michigan, the world headquarters Ford Motor Company. She moved through the city by day and by night, observing it as a transportation system and as a cultural system. She doesn't even try to get inside the Ford factories, since you're usually not allowed to photograph freely, but observes people concretely, their actions, their waiting, their driving to work, and the reflection of their activities and reactions on the walls of the city. She creates a kind of amalgam of glimpses of the real city and the photographed, posterized city.
Lebohang Kganye re-inacts, re-imagines, re-installs and re-mixes real situations, real events with their literary reflections and exaggerations into an impressively fantastic-real visual theater. In her work, Keep the Light Faithfully, she focuses on the little-known and gendered narratives of hundreds of female lighthouse keepers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lebohang Kganye returned from her research trip empty-handed, however; virtually all lighthouses are now automated, and the women lightkeepers have disappeared. But Lebohang resurrects them in her pictorial narratives.
Salvatore Vitali's contribution "Death through GPS" is radical in several respects, His presentation seems like a laboratory, a TV studio and an agitation scene at the same time. He mixes documentary photographs with staged sabotage videos, with a sampled and hard-edited video. He formulates the question of the human being in the current technological revolution, in which every action, every being is determined by technology, by the automation of work processes and by the market.
Hicham Gardaf's work, on the other hand, immediately seems like the exact opposite of Salvatore Vitale's work. In his film and photographs we experience tranquility, a normal heartbeat, indeed a serene rhythm of life, with a workload that is nonetheless exhausting. Hicham's project takes place in Tangier. The theme is the contrast between the prosperous, growing, sprawling part of the city on the one hand, and the old city with its time-honored sound, the cooling walls, the deliberate pace on the other.
Maria Mavropoulou goes a significant step further than we have been able to, She uses the latest publicly available AI technology by inserting a series of text prompts into a text-to-image algorithm, for example, "A complex and sophisticated structure of pipes, valves, gauges used in oil refineries." The AI has an unfathomably large dataset that leads it to its goal of translating Maria Mavropoulou's query into a visual output. The resulting images are so haunting, almost wildly fiery, that we wonder if artificial intelligence could once produce works of art with great meaning.
The exhibition also brings reunioned for the first time all previous finalists from 2008 to 2023.
Discover the finalists:
https://www.mastphotogrant.com/current-edition/finalists
Discover the jury:
https://www.mastphotogrant.com/jury/