"The ANNA Award is a phenomenal initiative. This is women elevating women. This is women supporting women. This is women empowering women. It is sometimes easy to forget that women artists are still underrepresented and under-recognised within the art world. The ANNA Award is a beautiful gesture that seeks to address this. What I like the most about the ANNA Award is that it also a vehicle of inspiration. By having an incredibly open criteria, by seeking to discover new talent, by seeking to uncover overlooked talent – it opens up world of possibilities for women artists across Africa and its diaspora."
— Samallie Kiyingi
Nada won the Anna Award!
Nada Baraka creates paintings that maintain an endless, active state of flux, swaying between abstract and surreal with her evocative application and vivid colours. The core of her work seeks to narrate an experience through expressionist brushwork and surrealist methodology.
"This award validated a lot of my own struggles and doubts and hard work. My mind can’t grasp that I actually won." - Nada Baraka
Second place goes to Alexandra-Naledi Holtman.
Being inspired by shapes and objects that both absorb and echo sound, this work seeks to create a space of intimate sonic transferral based on parabolic receivers and cup phones. One is invited to participate in a conversation across a space bridged by string and sound, where the information exchanged exists only between the two bodies in connection. the title is derived from the work of Roy Ascott, British artist and author who explores potential implications and reflections from increased technological connection. The term, 'telematics', is used to describe the ability of technology and the internet to connect physically separated individuals via an invisible pathway (Ascott, 1990).
Third place goes to Cazlynne Peffer.
The exhibition, Muffled Violations (2022) is derived from my own experience of trauma from an acquaintance rape, through an assemblage of found objects and video works. The body of work offers a poetic account of the trauma felt from the memories of rape. These memories are intimately embedded into the fabric of found objects such as coupled pillows stained with drool that also happen to resemble an accumulation of cum. When it is worn it sits on the body and is stretched over the curvature of skin. Hosiery soaks up sweat, can be stained with discharge and retains these smells. Even pubic hair weaves itself into its threads. When whole, pantyhose takes on human form and becomes a vessel that cups genitalia. The textile is meant to protect skin but remains susceptible to penetrative tears and cuts. Pantyhose references a childhood street game based on boundaries and to my interpretation, the issue of consent.
Audience award goes to Buqaqawuli Nobakada.
Buqaqawuli Nobakada (b. 2000) is an emerging contemporary mixed media artist born in the Western Cape and raised between Phililipi and a remote village in Lady Frere, Eastern Cape. Nobakada was first introduced to Fine Art in Johannesburg in the beginning of her adolescence. Her primary medium is acrylic paint on laced paper, often with the use of custom clay or gold jewellery; wherein much of the passion in her work is expressed as she celebrates border crossings that take place in the imagination, the mind as well as in real life. Buqaqawuli Nobakada is currently in her 3rd year of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand and is partaking in the “I Am & Nothing Else,” group exhibition with Affinity art gallery in Lagos, Nigeria. She has also exhibited in the “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” Open City group exhibition by FNB Art Joburg and the SOMA exhibition in France.