Expressions for unity: The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography
From visions of splintered cities to the hidden recesses of the physical and metaphysical, the four winners of The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography offer distinct approaches to this year’s theme of unity. Writer and curator Charlotte Jansen reflects on the works that were recently on display at Copeland Gallery as part of Peckham 24 – their forms, the politics that shape them and the varying degrees to which their subtle and poetic gestures succeed.
Charlotte Jansen | Exhibition review | 29 May 2025
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The dazzling intricacies of Spandita Malik’s mixed-media, photo-based works instantly pull you in. Yet, until I closely encountered three works from her series Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance, I had not fully appreciated how transporting they are. She is one of four winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography and is one quarter of the exhibition at Copeland Gallery as part of Peckham 24. Standing there, it was as if I was standing right in the room next to the woman, in her work, who in turn gazes upon her image reflected in the mirror – a clever and rehearsed classical device drawn from a history of painting – often used to create a sense of hushed intimacy, making the viewer think about the gaze and agency. The curtain seems to be moved by a breeze outside the hot light coming in from the window.
Malik has worked with women in rural Indian communities for years, photographing their portraits and printing them on cloth. Here, those photographs are printed onto khadi, a handspun, handwoven cotton cloth, thick and resistant, made using a charkha. Inscribed into the history of this material is the struggle for Indian independence and freedom: it was promoted by Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement as a tool for self-reliance, and to signal a resolute, political return to Indian-made produce. Khadi is coarse and rough, and the slightly fissured surface of these pieces appear almost reptilian. Printing the portrait photographs on the material allows for incredible texture and depth – that portal-like effect. The tactility is heightened by embroidered embellishments – tracing a stitched language of self-reliance. Once the khadi is printed, each of Malik’s collaborators complete the image with their own craft, allowing them to control what of their image is revealed. One subject completely covers her portrait in thread, rendering her figure a crass, simple stand-in. It is a mysterious act of erasure that creates a necessary tension between the photographed and photographer, now equal agents in the image. This silent refusal to be seen is another kind of resistance. I think of Arundahti Roy’s famous lines in The God of Small Things (1997): ‘she wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one.’ In the background, a teddy bear sits on the shelf, holding a heart that reads: someone special.
Another reason Malik carefully chose khadi for her works might be that it has become a symbol of unity in an India fractured by the colonial regime. And unity is the theme of this year’s prize, which was established in 2022 to support and sustain the work of women and non-binary artists – acknowledging the skew of statistics that still show the lack of gender equality in the medium and industry at large. Each year four winners are selected by a committee – this year, artist Gillian Wearing, Tate curator, Dr Charmaine Toh, and Instituto Moreira Salles’ Thyago Nogueira.
The notion of unity in the contemporary context is fragile and fraught, a frail and distant hope. This selection of work tempers this gently, subtly. Like Malik, the American artist Morgan Levy also finds expressions of unity in a collaborative process of image-making, and in the materials she uses to present them. Levy’s collaborators are women and non-binary labourers and construction workers, seldom represented, little appreciated, as far as visual culture goes. Spark of a Nail is a cool, imaginative, ongoing series of staged pictures where real workers perform and re-enact labour. Levy finds in these poetic, Beckettian scenes a way of disrupting the hyper-masculine status quo of these environments, revealing the building site as a site of transformation, not only in a literal, physical sense. It made me think about who builds the spaces we inhabit, how their bodies contribute, inform and physically shape our movements and interactions. Levy’s works are installed, too, like a working building site – a work suspended from the ceiling, mimicking a breezeblock dangling from a crane. Another rests on the floor, like an abandoned slab of concrete. It’s a work in progress, all this, Levy seems to say. How might we all participate, in fitting these pieces together?
From this body-rooted, physical understanding of uniting, to the unconscious, unseen world of hidden universes – Tshepiso Moropa’s scissored dreamscapes of archival and personal photographs create delicate dioramas, staging her dreams as epic adventures. Moropa’s dreamscapes very closely echo the surreal collages of Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo, and also seems to bear the influence of South African artist Lebohang Kganye’s staged sets of archival and family images. I am not quite convinced by the floating figures in their colonial-era dresses, seemingly out of time or place – like a dream, but as vague as one too. Winged pigs fly in through a window towards a nude female dreamer asleep in bed. What to make of these fragmented visions, outside of the personal resonances? The installation is stylish in its deconstruction/reconstruction technique – aligning with the methods of all the projects of this year’s winning cohort – but doesn’t push the idea of unity further.
The final artist selected for this year’s prize is Tanya Traboulsi, whose documentary accounts for her birthplace, Beirut – new pictures and vintage ones, from the family albums are pasted directly as vinyls onto the wall for this presentation, flattened and layered onto each other, creating non-linear conversations between them, across generations. There’s a lyrical, melancholic tenor to Traboulsi’s images, seeing a city that has had to constantly contend with bombing and destruction, but where joy persists as much as the saltiness of the Mediterranean Sea. These images blend Traboulsi’s meandering, fading childhood memories of the place – where she was raised until the family decided to leave in the 1980s – and her confrontation with the city as she found it, returning thirteen years later, in 1995. In terms of unity, it feels like seeking some kind of bond between past, present, and future, to bring generations displaced and those who remain back together, in one place, the photograph. They are pictures that evoke sounds, noisy and nostalgic, bustling cafes on the seafront, young boys after a swim. A man puffs shisha on the beach, the smoke covering his face as the water laps his ankles. In searching outside between these contradictory and fractured glimpses of a city in constant chaos and motion, building and rebuilding, perhaps the best we can hope for is moments like these – fleeting feelings of unity with a wider force beyond.
The four winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography each address this year’s theme of unity in subtle and poetic ways, and with varying success – moving between visions of splintered cities, reconstructed through memory and photographs, to quiet contemplations of emancipation and freedom, to the hidden recesses of the physical and metaphysical worlds. Each finds iterative expressions for unity by deconstructing and rebuilding images, seeking unity in a tangible sense.♦
The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography ran until 25 May as part of Peckham 24 2025.
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Charlotte Jansen is a British Sri Lankan author, journalist and critic based in London. Jansen writes on contemporary art and photography for The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, British Vogue and ELLE, among others. She is the author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, (HACHETTE, 2017) and Photography Now (TATE, 2021). Jansen is the curator of Discovery, the section for emerging artists, at Photo London.
Images:
1-Morgan Levy, Jess Shimmering; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A
2-Morgan Levy, Raquel; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A
3-Morgan Levy, Rest Unquestioned; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A
4-Morgan Levy, River’s Breath; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A
5-Morgan Levy, Thirty-nine Moved by Hand; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A
6-Spandita Malik, Meena II, 2023. Courtesy the artist and V&A
7-Spandita Malik, Parween Devi III, 2023. Courtesy the artist and V&A
8>11-Tanya Traboulsi, Beirut, Recurring Dream, 2021. Courtesy the artist and V&A
12-Tshepiso Moropa, Ke Go Beile Leitlho, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A
13-Tshepiso Moropa, Stranger Fruit, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A
14-Tshepiso Moropa, Who Knows Where The Time Goes, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A
15-Tshepiso Moropa, Your Worst Nightmare, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A
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