Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award Symposium 2024, V&A South Kensington
Drawing together political and personal histories, artists Hristina Tasheva, Alice Proujansky and Lewis Bush will present their award winning and nominated publications, followed by an in-conversation chaired by Dr Duncan Forbes, Head of Photography at the V&A.
Tuesday, 19 November 2024
17.00 – 19.45
V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL
The Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre
Free event, booking required
Update, 20 November: A recording of the symposium will be available shortly. Please check back here in the next few weeks.
Programme
17:00 – 17:05 – Welcome
17:10 – 17:35 – Hristina Tasheva (Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery (self-published)
17:35 – 17:55 – Lewis Bush (Depravity’s Rainbow, Disphotic Editions)
17:55 – 18:15 – Alice Proujansky (Hard Times are Fighting Times, Gnomic Book)
18:15 – 18:45 – In-conversation chaired by Duncan Forbes (Head of Photography, V&A)
18:45 – 19:45 – Drinks reception in Silver Galleries
This symposium will be hosted in-person only. A recording will be made available on the Kraszna-Krausz webpage after the event.
Artist biographies
Lewis Bush is a researcher whose work represents powerful agents, technologies, and
practices. His projects have focused on topics including intelligence gathering, offshore
finance and multi-national property development. Trained as a historian and then as a
photographer, he employs a range of research and visual strategies to examine his subjects,
from ethnographic interviews to experimental narratives. Through their overlapping
connections each project is part of a larger whole, and add up to an archive of contemporary
power that he is in the process of developing.
Depravity’s Rainbow (2018 – 2023) examines the colonial and fascist origins of modern
space exploration, through the figure of Wernher von Braun (1912-1977). Best known for
his work on the American Apollo lunar landing project, von Braun’s other triumph was the
development of the V-2 ballistic missile, a Nazi terror weapon which killed thousands. Using
archival material and site visits, Depravity’s Rainbow reveals the improbable connections between these two rockets, and through them, argues that contemporary space exploration
is still deeply shaped by its largely unacknowledged origins.
www.lewisbush.com
Alice Proujansky is a photographer who looks at family labour: birth, work, motherhood and
identity. Her photobook, Hard Times are Fighting Times (Gnomic Book, 2023), uses archival
and documentary images to consider the legacy of radical activism in her family. It was
shortlisted for the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award and the Rencontres
d’Arles Author Book Award, and was selected for 2024 exhibition through Baxter St’s MidCareer Artists Initiative.
She has received support from the International Women’s Media Foundation, Magnum
Foundation, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, New York State Council on the Arts and
others. Her work has been published widely, including by Aperture, Fraction Magazine, the
New Yorker, New York Magazine, the New York Times and Virginia Quarterly Review.
Alice has taught photography since 2002, currently for Aperture. She is working on a
photobook about culturally-responsive birth work and a photography and quilting project
about psychological formation and motherhood. A member of Women Photograph, Alice
grew up in Greenfield, MA. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the
Arts and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
www.aliceproujansky.com
Hristina Tasheva is a visual storyteller and researcher from Bulgaria based in the
Netherlands. She studied Photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and
earned her Master Photography at AKV | St. Joost, Breda, the Netherlands. As an Eastern
European living in Western Europe, migration, identity, and belonging have been central
themes in her work. Using photography, text, and performance, Tasheva develops most of
her projects in photo book format.
Her publication Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery investigates
the questions of what it means to be a communist today or to define yourself as one and how
the interpretation of history and politics of remembering influence the formation of our
identities and our view of the future.
Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery was subsidized by the
Mondriaan Fund Stipendium for Established Artists in the Netherlands.
www.hristinatasheva.com