Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2018 review: Immersive show revels in photography's constant shifting

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Ben Luke26 February 2018

The Deutsche Börse is the best photographic prize because it immerses you in the artists’ work.

Typically, this year’s show presents photography as a constantly shifting, diverse field.

Mathieu Asselin’s project explores the human and ecological effects of products made by the biotechnology company Monsanto. As much about found images and text as it is about his own pictures, it is chilling and angering.

Batia Suter also uses existing images, cut from hundreds of publications, reprinted, and assembled densely on the walls.

There’s a game of classification here: natural and artificial forms, rhyming visually, with red herrings and curveballs everywhere. It’s a delight.

Colour in the show is provided by Rafal Malach’s absorbing look at various systems of control in Eastern Europe: it’s often seductive, confusing the socio-political content.

But I hope Luke Willis Thompson wins. I found his filmic portrait of Diamond Reynolds, the US woman who captured her boyfriend being shot and killed by a police officer on Facebook Live, profoundly touching when it was shown at the Chisenhale Gallery last year.

Here, in a tighter space which lends the film even more intimacy, I was moved all over again.

Until June 3; the winner will be announced in May

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