My graduation project Hamsa Hamsa Hamsa has been nominated for the Steenbergen Stipendium 2021 and has won the public prize! Since 1998, the Steenbergen Stipendium has been the leading award in the Netherlands for young, talented photographers, and has been accompanied since its first edition with an exhibition featuring the nominated works in the Nederlands Fotomuseum.
From 4 December 2021, the Nederlands Fotomuseum, together with the Steenbergen Foundation, proudly presents the 24th edition of the Steenbergen Stipendium, the country’s leading award for the best final exam photography exhibitions by Dutch art academy students.
The jury members, Merel Bem, Juul Hondius, and Henk Wildschut, selected five photographic final exam exhibitions for the 2021 Steenbergen Stipendium. The winner of the jury prize receives an incentive prize of €5,000 from the Steenbergen Foundation to support the young photographer in their future development. Visitors to the exhibition may also cast their vote for one of the nominees for the public award. On 16 December 2021, the jury announced the winners at the Nederlands Fotomuseum. A jury report will also be published containing a critical review on the quality of the graduation exhibitions at each art academy visited.
“From the moment you are drawn into the world of Julia Gat and her brothers and sisters as a spectator, you’re hooked. Gat presents a family life that – from a distance at least – seems wonderfully free and untroubled, evoking both feelings of tenderness and slight envy. Gat has been documenting her immediate surroundings since she was ten years old; she felt that she wanted to capture and immortalise the happiness she associated with that time. That led to a gold mine of images.
Through beautiful photographs, a book and a film made from a patchwork of home videos, Gat brings an ode to her childhood. Parents, grown-ups – their role is insignificant, except perhaps as the invisible forces that gave the playfulness and experimental behaviour of their children room to flourish. The first image in the book emphatically portrays them as a blurry image. Nonetheless, Gat’s dedication in her publication is explicitly addressed to them, which leads us to suspect that their role may have been greater than we think. Set against a background of sunny, exotic locations, we see a life that is marked by the uncomplicated multicultural identity and the appealing, Bohemian-like lifestyle of the ‘characters’. Together, they form an idyllic miniature society, removed from the big, bad, outside world.”
Steenbergen stipendium jury, 2021