KBr Photo Award
Edition 2025
Photo: Jewgeni Roppel
Gloria Oyarzábal, winner of the KBr Photo Award.
Spanish photographer and visual artist Gloria Oyarzábal has won the third edition of the KBr Photo Award for her project Appunti per un’Orestíade africana_una democracia en fatiga II.
The award, decided unanimously, recognizes the project’s contribution as postcolonial research and reflection on African countries.
The jury
The jury for this third edition was composed of:
- Diane Dufour, co-director of LE BAL (Paris)
- Ramón Reverté, editor at RM Publishing
- Krzysztof Candrowicz, independent curator
- Gabriela Urtiaga, chief curator of the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA, Los Angeles)
- Carlos Gollonet, chief photography curator at Fundación MAPFRE.
Between myth and machine, this project interrogates the ruins of power. Echoing Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458 BC)—which depicts a cycle of revenge, justice, and redemption—a new tragedy emerges: that of an exhausted democracy, fragmented by colonial heritage and digital mirage. Technology, presented as an instrument of progress, reproduces the same algorithms of domination: it classifies, orders, erases. Its neural networks inherit the bias of empires, and the shadows of colonial archives linger in its data.
Women—body, memory, living archive—appear as a territory of dispute and resistance. In their gaze, the layers of a history that AI cannot read intersect: an embodied memory that disobeys the code.
Appunti per un’Orestíade Africana_una democracia en fatiga II is an exercise in rewriting and (self)questioning. An essay that reflects on how to decolonize image and machine, and imagines diverse forms of justice that do not come from gods or data, but from the possibility of listening—in the noise of the system—to other ways of narrating, of being community, and of deciding.
In addition to the cash prize, the KBr Photo Award includes the organization of exhibitions at the KBr Fundación MAPFRE (Barcelona) and at the Foundation’s headquarters in Madrid to promote the project, as well as the publication of the corresponding catalog.
Gloria Oyarzábal (London, 1971) is a photographer and visual artist. Her work explores the legacies of colonialism and how they condition the construction of narratives around representation, identity, and power, questioning the position of women at the center of this framework. Her career has been marked by her relationship with the medium of film, the years she lived in Bamako (Mali), and the process of internal reflection in her practice. She conducts her research both in African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, and in European colonial institutions, aware of the tensions that exist in postcolonial discourses on image and archive.
Of the 430 projects received, the jury selected as finalists, along with the winner, the proposals by Juan Valbuena and Juan Brenner.
