Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography has announced the four winners of its open call award, now in its third year. The theme of this year’s prize, “Unity”, strikes a hopeful note following a year of international conflict and political elections across the globe. Each of the four artists — hailing from South Africa, India, the United States and Lebanon — expands the potential of the photographic medium in their reflections on the possibilities of a new and different world.The Johannesburg-based collage artist Tshepiso Moropa’s series Ditoro (Setswana for “dreams”) began with a dream she had. In it Moropa was sitting with the grandparents she had never met, having a conversation. She translated the dream meeting into a potent collage, “Ke Go Beile Leitlho” (I’ve Got My Eyes On You). Inspired by folklore, Moropa’s large-scale collages are spare and deceptively simple; photographs in black and white float in expanses of muted palettes, figures are doll-like. She invokes family members, present and passed on, in symbolic arrangements, and has described how the images “bring them into a new narrative”.Spandita Malik’s Jālī — Meshes of Resistance also works into the surface of photography, in this case with sewing and textile. The series continues her years-long work with communities across her native India. Though the context is one of gendered violence, the images themselves are joyful. Malik’s subjects embroider their portraits however they choose, adorning themselves and their environments with bright thread and delicate patterning. Even when they choose to obscure themselves, protecting their identity, they do so with vivid colour.“The project is a collaboration, not just in the process, but also in perspective,” says Malik. “Each surface is a shared story.” She found the results of working together in this way were profound. “When we started sharing stories with each other, we found that the taboo around talking about abuse was just gone,” the artist reflects. The stitching and embroidery evoke ideas of repair as much as craft. “In coming together to work and to share our memories and traumas, we were able to heal ourselves,” she says.Spark of a Nail by the Brooklyn artist Morgan Levy is a depiction of female labourers across the United States. “I wasn’t so much interested in women working in male-dominated spaces,” the artist explains. “I was really interested in women — and ‘woman’ is a very open, porous category for me — changing space.” The photographs, striking and graphic in bleached-out black and white, blend documentary images with performative re-stagings, subverting the idea of the heroic white man as the symbol of American labour.“In this political climate, I needed a feminist world-building project, and I needed a scaffolding on which to climb out of the murk that we are living in,” Levy says. For her, images depicting the workers at rest are as important as images of labour. “In any work of social justice, you have to work and you have to rest, and to me that makes sense as a way to build a world, both literally and metaphorically.”Tanya Traboulsi similarly presents rest and leisure as quietly revolutionary. Beirut, Recurring Dream, her work documenting the city where she was born and now lives, is far from the often romanticised media portrayal of a party-focused place, or indeed the besieged Lebanon of the recent war. Instead, her photographs are gentle, warm, quiet: images of people gathered at the water’s edge in soft light. “In times of war and crisis, we are allowed to have pockets of happiness,” Traboulsi says. “It’s important to accept and allow that, in order to be able to cope with what’s happening around you.”In their work, the four artists’ emphasis on imagination or re-imagination opens a space where a unity that often seems unreachable feels tantalisingly possible. In this, Levy says the approach of US author and educator bell hooks is an influence. “She beckons you to come closer,” Levy explains. “It’s such a warm welcome, to have your mind changed or to see differently.” The V&A Parasol Prize winners will be exhibited at Peckham 24, May 16-25Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
