Prix Pictet exhibition HOPE at Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2019.
Photo©Prix Pictet
Prix Pictet exhibition HOPE at Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Verona, Italy 2021.
Photo©PrixPictet/Cherubini
Prix Pictet
"Life is Them". Emsi Tjambiru and Beverly Tjivinde dance on the road near their craft stall to flag down tourist busses. C35 Khorixas district, Namibia. October 2017
"Melody under the Sun". Gottlieb (“God is love”) ǂKhatanab ǁGaseb aka Die vioolman (The Violinist) is a self-taught musician who lives in a remote outpost beneath the Dȃures granite massif. He earns a living from playing the violin at community weddings and funerals. Tsiseb Conservancy, Namibia. December 2014
"Embodying Hope". A morning in the sand dunes. Dorob National Park, Namibia. April 2015
"A Place Called Shelter". Sara Swartbooi carries a sheet of scrap metal to build a shelter near the gravel road from Henties Bay to Usakos from where she will sell semi-precious stones to the occasional passer-by. D1918, Namibia. July 2015
"Waiting for Rain". Experimental plot to evaluate grass species and measure rainfall. Namib–Naukluft Park, Namibia. May 2015
"Frail and Flowering". The flowering wild tobacco (Nicotiana glauca) is used by local people for hunting rituals and medicinally as a poultice to treat wounds. Walvis Bay District, Namibia. June 2014
"I’ll get Rich". Francois !Uri-khob breeds pigeons to support his siblings after his family lost their goats and donkeys to drought and poaching. Black Ranch, Pos #3, Spitzkoppe, Namibia. August 2017
"Mirror in the Landscape". Liskien Gawanas on her way from an aquifer, a daunting journey on foot up a rock sentinel and a gruelling descent underground. This freshwater spring will have been known to southern Africa’s earliest inhabitants, the San, who left their rock art throughout these parts. Klein Spitzkoppe, Namibia. June 2015
"The Rain will Come". Susanna !Uri-Khos’s iron bathtub, raised on a scaffold, serves as a rain-fed shower – a signal of optimism at odds with the brutal logic of this parched place. Though it has been dry for three years, the sky is now filled with Hope. Black Ranch, Pos #3, Spitzkoppe, Namibia. December 2018
Namibia is steeped in histories dating from the earliest inhabitants – Khoi, San, Herero, Namaqua, Damara et al to German occupation, to the South Africans and apartheid, and now to ‘liberation’ and statehood – a nation of diverse peoples and cultures in a vast land of seeming nothingness and unparalleled light. I seek out the traces of their passing on the land.
Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain is a record of this social process, which has always hinged on the fragility of Hope.
The existential world of the people I photograph is located in an unforgiving environment where life is precarious: little or no rain, scarce water and food, people abandoned by their government and forced to migrate to flee the emptiness ... Their only anchor is the expectation that life will persist against these odds.
I keep returning to the women and men I have met, photographing them anew as they share their unfolding stories. Every form of human existence and of Nature, in its infinite variety, has wonder at its very core, and it is our ‘openness’ to the world that makes us both free to create in it and, at the same time, be responsible for our creations.
My art derives from this space, the point where freedom meets responsibility, rationality meets imagination, and self meets other. This silent point is the source of all that is humanly significant. My own motivation is to find a place here among my fellow people, building relationships over time that allow me to discover, against the seared backdrop, their hidden world of nurtured aspirations, the embodiment of Hope.
Margaret Courtney-Clarke, 2021