Gauri Gill received the title and 100,000 Swiss Francs (90,000 GBP) at an award ceremony at V&A Museum in London on 28 September. Source: Prix Pictet, 2023.
Congratulations to Gauri Gill on winning the 2023 Prix Pictet. The Indian photographer was announced on Thursday, September 28, as the winner of the tenth cycle of the Prix Pictet, the global award for photography and sustainability receiving the prize of 100,000 Swiss Francs. Gill was selected from a shortlist of 12 photographers by an independent jury.
Gill’s work emphasizes her belief in working with and through community, in what she calls "active listening." For more than two decades, she has been engaged closely with marginalised communities in the desert of western Rajasthan, and for the last decade with Indigenous artists in Maharashtra. Her winning series, Notes from the Desert, looks at the whole spectrum of life.
Gauri Gill studied at Delhi College of Art; Parsons School of Design, New York; and Stanford University, California. Her work has been shown internationally, including at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), The Wiener Holocaust Library, London (2014); San José Museum of Art, California (2015); and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India (2016). In 2017, Gill’s work was exhibited at Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; the 7th Moscow Biennale; Prospect 4, New Orleans; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. It has been shown at Museum Tinguely, Basel (2018); MoMA PS1, New York (2018); the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2019); Chobi Mela, Dhaka (2019); and BAMPFA, Berkeley, California (2020).
Gill’s first major survey exhibition opened at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, in 2022, moving to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, in January 2023. She also exhibits at locations outside the art world, including public libraries, rural schools and non-profit institutions. Her work is held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Smithsonian Institution, Washington; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
Her awards include the Grange Prize, awarded by the Art Gallery of Ontario (2011), and an India Today Art Award in 2018. She has been a Creative Arts Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy (2013), and was the inaugural Roberta Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford (2022). Gill has recently published two books with Edition Patrick Frey about her collaborations with rural artists, Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023).