January 13, 2021

Sara Cwynar, Sahara from SSENSE.com (As Young as You Feel), 2020. Courtesy Sara Cwynar 

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (IMJ) proudly announced Sara Cwynar as the Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography winner, awarded every second year. This new prize was initiated In recognition of photography as a leading contemporary cultural medium, by the Shpilman family and the Shpilman Institute for Photography together with the Israel Museum, with the joint objective of cultivating original work in the field of photography.

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has named Sara Cwynar as the recipient of the 2020 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. 2020 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography comes with $40,000. The funds will support the artist’s research, production, and post-production of a multi-platform video and photography project. Honorable Mentions were also granted to Penelope Umbrico (USA) and Lebohang Kganye (South Africa).Since the 2010, Cwynar is the sixth winner of the prize.

This year the Shpilman Prize was dedicated to the theme of Action, exploring the tension between camera work that arrests action and the actual activities of cameras in current social and cultural spheres. The suspension of human movement that the COVID-19 crisis has inflicted globally only underscores this subject and its creative interpretations.

New York-based artist Sara Cwynar is a conceptual video artist and photographer whose practice disrupts the intersection of art history and popular culture. Cwynar creates assemblages from found objects and pictures; she then photographs the assemblages and reproduces the images as c-prints. In her own words, she takes these found elements “out of the shared image world and into a space for personal, often very obsessive intervention.” The artist’s still-life images are highly manipulated while maintaining references to reality, foregrounding the artist’s interest in photography’s power to deceive. Cywnar's work generates discourses that open up new possibilities for the site of the artwork, in wider fields of photography, and beyond.

The jury members of SIPEP2020 were: Selen Ansen, Contemporary Art Curator at ARTER, Istanbul; Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Anne Lacoste, Director of the Photography Institute, Lille; Nicola Trezzi, Director and Curator at CCA - Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; and Dr. Noam Gal, Curator and Head of the Department of Photography, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.