South African photographer Sabelo Mlangeni was announced as the winner of the 2026 James Barnor Prize in July. ZAM has featured his work frequently in recent years. Nigerian visual artist Otobong Nkanga will receive the Sikkens Prize in October this year.
Sabelo Mlangeni
The prize is an initiative of James Barnor, the now 96-year-old Ghanaian photographer who became world-famous for his Ever Young studio in Accra. Barnor’s images of Ghana following its independence in 1957 are legendary. Two years later, the photographer settled in London, where he studied at the Medway College of Art. His enduring commitment to the African struggle for self-determination is evident in the photographs he took for Drum, a leading South African magazine that fuelled the desire for freedom among black South Africans and repeatedly featured Barnor’s images on its cover. Barnor also documented the lives of the African diaspora in London.
Sabelo Mlangeni (1980, Driefontein), a self-taught photographer, began his career in 1997 at a wedding. There, he was handed a camera and took his first photograph. Now, having held numerous international exhibitions in cities including Johannesburg, Bamako, London, San Francisco, Paris and Amsterdam, his work is characterised by an intense intimacy. It conveys a strong, compelling identification with those portrayed — villagers, migrants and queer people.
During a residency in 2015 at the Treehouse in Amsterdam, the photographer Inyoni Yezulu (De Zwaluwen) created a poignant statement against the humiliation of migrants and refugees. In an interview published by ZAM at the time, he subtly pointed out that the influx of refugees "is not a European problem"; far more people are fleeing to countries within their own African region than all the refugees heading for Europe put together. The photographer was absent from the opening of his exhibition at the NDSM site in Amsterdam, having flown away like a swallow, vanishing into anonymity and leaving visitors bewildered.
The James Barnor Prize was awarded to Mlangeni on 8 July at the leading Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in France. The jury, comprising Aby Gaye, Taous Dahmani, Adnan Bashir, Naoki Nakatani and Mário Macilau, and chaired by James Barnor, selected Mlangeni from a longlist of several dozen photographers. Mlangeni thus became the third winner of the prize, following Sènami Donoumassou (Benin) in 2024 and Mário Macilau (Mozambique) in 2025.
Read more about Sabelo Mlangeni.
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Otobong Nkanga
The Nigerian visual artist Otobong Nkanga (1974, Kano) is also being honoured. In October, she will be awarded the biennial Sikkens Prize and will open her exhibition Humus Blues at the Singer Museum in Laren, featuring sculptures, textiles, drawings, paintings, photographs and poetry. Previous solo exhibitions have been held at venues including the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the MCBA in Lausanne, MoMA in New York, the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. She has also taken part in leading international exhibitions, including the 2026 Venice Biennale, documenta 14 in Kassel and the Sydney Biennale. She has received various prestigious awards, including the Sharjah Biennial 14 Prize (2019) and the Nasher Sculpture Prize (2025).
Every two years, the Sikkens Prize honours an individual or collective who has made a significant contribution to the field of colour. The prize was first awarded in 1959 to architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld and went to Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist in 2024. Other prize winners include artists Donald Judd and Bridget Riley, designer Hella Jongerius, architects David Chipperfield and Le Corbusier, and landscape architect Piet Oudolf, designer of the sculpture garden at Singer Laren and the High Line in New York.
Eighteen years ago, in 2018, ZAM published a spread featuring Otobong Nkanga’s photograph Workmen in Pool 1. The work was part of the exhibition Snap Judgments at the Stedelijk Museum, curated by Okwui Enwezor.
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