West Palm Beach’s Norton Museum of Art will add another feather to its cap this coming December, when it will become only the second museum in the United States to host the touring exhibition “Prix Pictet: Storm.” The independently juried photography competition Prix Pictet, established in Switzerland in 2008, seeks out photographers from around the world whose work relates to each year’s sustainability-related theme, ultimately awarding the winner the equivalent of $124,000.
Last year’s competition centered on “Storm,” with entrants interpreting the theme in ways both literal (the damage wrought by climate catastrophes) and symbolic (the metaphorical storms creating fissures in societies and their body politics). The work by the winner of “Storm,” Alfredo Jaar, and his 11 short-listed finalists have already toured London, Dubai, Tokyo, Zurich, Taipei, Beijing, and Chicago. Its run at the Norton, Dec. 5-April 7, coincides with a tour in Shanghai, China.
“It is vital for institutions such as the Norton Museum of Art to showcase works that challenge us to ask questions about the world in which we live,” said Ghislain d’Humières, the Museum’s Kenneth C. Griffin Director and CEO, in a release. “The images here are both inspiring and heartrending.”
They include such projects as Takashi Arai’s “Exposed in a Hundred Suns,” launched in 2011 and still ongoing, in which the photographer, working in the 6X6-centimeter daguerreotype format, memorializes sites of nuclear fallout in Japan and the Marshall Islands as so-called “micomonuments.” Marina Caneve’s “Are They Rocks or Clouds?” series (pictured above) is a cautionary tale about the impact of the 1966 flood of the Dolomites in northern Italy—and the possibility that such a disaster could repeat.
“Hurricane Season,” by Hannah Modigh (pictured above), captures the lives of Louisianans who survived a deadly storm season in 2012, while Patrizia Zelano’s “High Water in Venice” focuses on the academic and literary texts the photographer personally saved from the city’s historic flooding in 2019. Other series chart, with various tinges of poetry, melancholy, and alarm, recent actions in Gaza; Odessa, Ukraine; and the United States Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. Alfredo Jaar’s winning selections, from his series “The End,” document the gradual decline of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a keystone ecosystem suffering from excessive water extraction.
For more information on the series, its history, and its judging process, visit prix.pictet.com.
For more of Boca magazine’s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.
