Hasselblad Award | Pritzker Architecture Prize | MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe | UOVO Prize | Gordon Parks Foundation | Female in Focus

photography

Zanele Muholi

Hasselblad Award

Zanele Muholi, recognised as a champion of visual activism, has been named the 2026 Hasselblad Award laureate. Muholi, was born in Umlazi, Durban and now lives and works between Johannesburg and Cape Town. The photographer’s work centres visibility, claiming respect for Black queer subjects using the language of classical photography. In a statement, they passed credit to their subjects: "This prize is not mine alone. I carry it with the many faces, names, and histories that have trusted me with their stories. From Umlazi to every space where Black LGBTQIA+ people continue to fight to exist freely, this recognition affirms that our lives are worthy of being seen – not as statistics, not as shadows, but as full human beings. For years, my work has been about visibility and resistance. It has been about creating an archive so that no one can say, ‘We did not know.’ When this honour comes, I receive it on behalf of my community; those who have been erased, those who are still here, and those who are yet to see themselves reflected with dignity."

Image: Julile I Parktown, Johannesburg, 2016. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town.

architecture

Smiljan Radić Clarke

Pritzker Architecture Prize

Smiljan Radić Clarke, of Santiago, Chile, received the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Radić refuses a repeatable architectural language; instead, each project is approached as a singular inquiry, grounded in first principles and informed by noncontinuous history. Context, use and anthropological awareness take precedence. Site is understood not only in physical terms, but also as a convergence of history, social practice, and political circumstance. "Architecture exists between large, massive, and enduring forms—structures that stand under the sun for centuries, waiting for our visit—and smaller, fragile constructions—fleeting as the life of a fly, often without a clear destiny under conventional light. Within this tension of disparate times, we strive to create experiences that carry emotional presence, encouraging people to pause and reconsider a world that so often passes them by with indifference," expresses Radić.

Images: Vik Millahue Winery, photo courtesy of Cristobal Palma. Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, photo courtesy of Iwan Baan. Guatero, photo courtesy of Smiljan Radić. Teatro Regional del Biobío, photo courtesy of Cristobal Palma.

art

Sonia Gomes

MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe

For its third edition, Art Gstaad took place from 19 to 22 February 2026 under the Festival-Zelt marquee, in the heart of the Bernese village. The MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe was presented to Sonia Gomes for Untitled, 2024, represented by the Mendes Wood DM gallery. Sonia Gomes, born in Caetanópolis in the interior of Minas Gerais, weaves her work over the duration of time. The artist chooses materials that bring with them colors, textures, trims, and an indefinable set of memories. Each fabric, article of clothing, and accessory she uses has traveled its path and was dressed, stored, and altered before undergoing a final transformation in her studio. The ambition to recreate the world around her through gestures of care, starting with the intimacy of the body, clothing, and home, inscribed her practice within contemporary art.

Image: Work by Sonia Gomes acquired by F.P.Journe, Untitled, 2024.

art

Keisha Scarville

UOVO Prize

The Brooklyn Museum has awarded the 2026 UOVO Prize, which recognizes the work of emerging Brooklyn-based artists, to Keisha Scarville. Her presentation for the Brooklyn Museum, which will open in the institution’s plaza on May 8, will be titled Where Salt Meets Black Water. Curated by Pauline Vermare, the show will see the plaza covered in vinyl reproductions of Scarville’s photographs from her Mama’s Clothes series, for which Scarville donned the patterned textiles and garments belonging to her late mother Alma. The title of the Brooklyn Museum presentation is a reference the dark creeks found in Guyana, the nation from which Scarville’s parents hailed. Anne Pasternak, the museum’s director, said in a statement that the presentation will act as "a tribute to the Caribbean community whose creativity, traditions, and histories have profoundly shaped Brooklyn’s cultural life."

Image: Keisha Scarville, Untitled #18, Alma / Mama’s Clothes series, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

art

Sanford Biggers
Amanda Williams

Fellowship in Art

The 2026 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellows in Art are Sanford Biggers and Amanda Williams. Sanford Biggers works across various media, creating works rooted in mythological and spiritual references, often tied to themes related to the Black diaspora. Biggers describes his process as ‘conceptual patchworking,’ a method of transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas, forms, and genres that challenge traditional historiography, provenance, and official narratives to create artworks for a future ethnography. Amanda Williams deconstructs the physical and psychological systems of inequity. Informed by her architectural background, Williams’ command of space shapes her meditations on race, color, and value. Drawing from an array of source material and using color as an operative logic to interpret the elusive meaning of ‘blackness,’ Williams complicates readings of our spatial surroundings.

Images: Sanford Biggers, Orpheus, 2020. Antique quilt, assorted textiles, wood. Amanda Williams, George for George, 2025. House facade painted Innovation Blue using a reformulated recipe of a 1927 patent for Prussian Blue by George Washington Carver. Photo: Amanda Williams.

photography

Laetitia Vançon

Female in Focus x Nikon series winner

The winners of British Journal of Photography’s Female in Focus Award 2025, sponsored by Nikon, have been announced. Laetitia Vançon’s The Other Battlefields is one of two series winners. In the four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, young people have been "standing between two worlds – the life they imagined, and the life the war has imposed on them," says the French photographer. Her project, which began with the photograph of the graduates, "is about this moment of ‘in-between’, between childhood and adulthood, between life before the war and life after it".

Image: The Other Battlefields series. © Laetitia Vançon