PARIS.- The winners of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac Photography Award are Abhishek Rajaram Khedekar (India) for his project DAPOLI, Lost and Found and Sara Kontar (Syria) for her project On the Edge of Home. The jury also awarded a special mention to Sudanese artist Ammar Yassir for his project I Will Never Find Home.

In the footsteps of its program of biennials and photography residencies, the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac established its Photography Award in 2022, reaffirming its long-standing and enduring commitment to contemporary and non-European photography.

Invited jurors

• Julie Jones, director, Maison Européenne de la Photographie

• Géraldine Lay, photographer, publisher for Photography and Contemporary Art, Actes Sud

• Jeanne Mercier, exhibition curator, co-founder of the platform Afrique in visu

• Devika Singh, art historian, art critic, curator and Senior Lecturer in Curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London

• Bindi Vora, Senior Curator, Autograph Gallery, London

Abhishek Rajaram Khedekar (India)

Abhishek Rajaram Khedekar (born in 1991 in Dapoli) is a photographer based in New Delhi, India. He combines a documentary approach with surrealist techniques—particularly collage—to give a voice to those on the margins of society. His work incorporates fictional elements that challenge dominant narratives, often drawing on historical research and archival images. Pushing the boundaries of photography, he conceives his projects as installations that combine sculpture and sound art. In 2022, he received the “Publishing Performance” Residency and Publication Award from Loose Joints and Mahler & LeWitt Studios for his project Tamasha. He published his first book of photography, Tamasha, in 2023, and was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Award in 2024.





DAPOLI, Lost and Found

This long-term project marks Abhishek Rajaram Khedekar’s return to his hometown of Dapoli, on India’s west coast. By focusing on a generation of young people from fishing families, he explores the profound transformations taking place in a region where the sea—long at the heart of local ways of life and family legacies—no longer guarantees a future. Caught between staying rooted and leaving, these younger generations are coming to terms with uncertainty, migration, and the changing landscapes and identities around them.

Nurtured by long-standing friendships, Abhishek Khedekar’s work moves beyond a traditional documentary approach to offer an intimate and sensitive perspective. His images focus on moments of waiting, rest, and transition, making coastal landscapes the silent witnesses to a territory in the midst of transformation. Without succumbing to heroic or melodramatic portrayals, the photographer explores the transmission of traditions, models of masculinity, the sense of belonging, and the aspirations of a generation facing the gradual erosion of a way of life.

Members of the jury for the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac

• Emmanuel Kasarhérou, president

• Christine Drouin, director, Cultural Development Division

• Olivia Bourrat, director, Heritage and Collections Department

• Christine Barthe, head of the photographic collections heritage unit, Heritage and Collections Department

• Annabelle Lacour, head of the photographic collections, Heritage and Collections Departments

Sara Kontar (Syria)

Born in 1996, Sara Kontar is a Syrian artist, photographer, and filmmaker who has been living in France since 2016. Her work explores the experiences of exile, migration, and identity through the lens of her own journey as a refugee. Through documentary and experimental photography, installation, video, and film, she examines the personal and collective dimensions of displacement and memory. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD) with a degree in animated film (2023), she is a former resident of the Magnum Foundation and the VII Foundation, and a member of Women Photograph. The recipient of several awards, including the Magnum Inge Morath Award, her work has been exhibited at numerous international institutions, including the Palais de Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou, and the Sharjah Art Foundation. In 2021, she founded Al-Ayoun, a platform dedicated to contemporary Syrian visual artists.

On the Edge of Home

With On the Edge of Home, Sara Kontar explores the impact of exile on a sense of belonging, memory, and identity. A refugee in France, she has been traveling along the borders surrounding Syria since 2023, seeking to get as close as possible to a country she is now barred from entering. These border territories become the setting for a reflection on the border, viewed not only as a geopolitical boundary but also as an intimate experience that permanently shapes people’s lives.

By photographing these landscapes situated on the threshold of her homeland, the artist seeks to evoke a sense of “quasi-presence”: being just a few kilometers away from a land that has become inaccessible, attempting to see it, approach it, or even touch it through the image, without ever being able to reach it. Through this gesture, On the Edge of Home explores what it means to belong to a place to which one cannot return and offers a sensitive reflection on borders, distance, and the invisible bonds that continue to unite a territory with those who are separated from it.

Special mention

The jury also awarded a special mention to Sudanese artist Ammar Yassir for his project I Will Never Find Home.

The musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac Photography Award

Serving as a museum, cultural center, and venue for research and education, the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac houses a collection of more than 710,000 photographs—both historical and contemporary—covering all the geographic regions represented in the museum, as well as the entire history of the medium, from 1842 to the present day.

Since 2008, the museum’s Photography Residency Program has actively supported contemporary artistic creation. Each year, artists are selected based on their applications, which must propose an original project consistent with their artistic approach. The museum oversees the final production of a selection of images from these projects, which are then added to the national collections.

Open to ambitious photographic practices from around the world, the program highlights diverse approaches—going beyond the purely documentary genre—that represent one of the four continents featured in the museum’s collections. It has thus helped bring numerous talents to the forefront and enriched France’s public collections with a broader perspective on international contemporary art. Among the artists supported are Sammy Baloji, Hugo Aveta, Che Onejoon, and Lek Kiatsirikajorn (2012); Guy Tillim (2015); José Luis Cuevas (2017); and Fatoumata Diabaté and Emilio de Azevedo (2020).

This program has already facilitated the inclusion of 49 photographic series in national public collections. These works now form a reference body for international contemporary photography, addressing a variety of themes: ecology (137 Years, Zhao Renhui – Singapore), migration (Cartographies of Escape, Luis Carlos Tovar – Colombia), postcolonial memory (Imaginary Trip II, Gosette Lubondo – Democratic Republic of the Congo), the deconstruction of patriarchal norms (La Etapa Bruja, Liza Ambrossio – Mexico), and contemporary issues of identity (Resident and Visitor, Brook Andrew – Australia).

Since 2022, the program has evolved into the “Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac Photography Prize.” The prize money has been increased to 30,000 euros per winner, including royalties associated with the work’s inclusion in the museum’s collections. Winners are selected by an international jury following a broad call for submissions.

Since 2024, works by several Prize winners have been exhibited each year at the Théodore Monod Museum in Dakar, Senegal.

The works of the last 49 winners (2008–2025) of the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac Photography Prize can be viewed on the quaibranly.fr website.