Currently, Ishara Art Foundation is home to Storm, the eleventh cycle of the Prix Pictet award for photography and sustainability. Running through 13 December 2025, this group exhibition displays works by twelve photographers and marks the first international stop of the cycle after its premiere at the V&A (London, UK).
While the title “Storm” immediately recalls the raw, unpredictable power of nature, the exhibition reveals a wider terrain. Storm functions as a metaphor for the hidden and relentless forces that reshape contemporary life, from environmental collapse and political volatility to social unrest and economic uncertainty.
Each artist approaches the theme through a distinct lens, with featured photographers including Takashi Arai (Japan), Marina Caneve (Italy), Tom Fecht (Germany), Balázs Gardi (Hungary), Roberto Huarcaya (Peru), Alfredo Jaar (Chile), Belal Khaled (Palestine), Hannah Modigh (Sweden), Baudouin Mouanda (Congo), Camille Seaman (USA), Laetitia Vançon (France/Germany), and Patrizia Zelano (Italy).
Takashi Arai’s Exposed in a Hundred Suns (2011–ongoing) traces locations tied to the nuclear histories of Japan, the USA, and the Marshall Islands, resulting in multiple small-scale daguerreotypes that stand as quiet acts of remembrance. Marina Caneve’s Are They Rocks or Clouds? anticipates the possible return of the catastrophic 1966 floods and landslides in the Dolomites, probing the fragility of preparedness. In Luciferines, Tom Fecht turns his attention to cold-water bioluminescent plankton on the brink of disappearance as ocean temperatures rise. In The Storm, Balázs Gardi documents the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Roberto Huarcaya presents Amazogramas (2014), which takes shape in the Amazon, where the imprint of a fallen palm tree was captured on a 30-metre strip of photosensitive paper, illuminated in a fraction of a second by four bolts of lightning. The End by Alfredo Jaar observes Utah’s Great Salt Lake as it nears ecological collapse due to excessive water extraction, documenting a landscape in slow, irreversible crisis.
Baudouin Mouanda reimagines the 2020 Brazzaville lockdown floods in a flooded basement together with the people who lived through them. Camille Seaman trains her lens on supercell thunderstorms, colossal cloud structures capable of producing tornadoes and grapefruit-sized hail.
Belal Khaled’s Hands Tell Stories emerges from life in a tent outside Nasser Hospital in Gaza, depicting hands whose marks, tremors and silences communicate experiences beyond language. Hurricane Season by Hannah Modigh turns to southern Louisiana, portraying a community living in a perpetual state of near-eruption.
Meanwhile, Laetitia Vançon pays tribute to the resilience and quiet defiance she witnessed in Odessa, Ukraine, a city marked by symbolic weight and military vulnerability. Finally, Patrizia Zelano photographs encyclopaedias, scientific volumes, and literary works she salvaged from the catastrophic tides in Venice in 2019, transforming books into fragile survivors.
What makes the Storm exhibition especially compelling is the dual-gesture it performs: it bears witness to rupture, yet also gestures toward regeneration. A catalogue of calamities, the show also invites us to consider what lies beyond the break-point, to imagine renewal.
To get more information about Prix Pictet: Storm, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
Additionally, you might be interested in looking through twelve historical photo albums launched by the Akkasah photo archive.
