What is still true today - and what is merely a good story? This is exactly the question Polish artist Weronika Gesicka explores in her project Encyclopaedia. For the book she collects deliberately invented dictionary entries - so-called “fake facts” that editors once smuggled into reference works to detect copyright theft - and translates them into a surreal visual world of manipulated stock photography and AI-generated imagery.
The work is both clever and humorous and strikes a nerve of our time: in a present where information, advertising and fiction constantly overlap, knowledge itself becomes uncertain territory.
With Encyclopaedia, Gesicka is shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026, one of the most important international awards for contemporary photography. Also nominated are Jane Evelyn Atwood, Amak Mahmoodian and Rene Matić.
The works of the four artists will be on view from 6 March to 7 June 2026 at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 14 May 2026.
Weronika Gesicka’s work (b. 1984, Poland) also reflects the breadth of this year’s shortlist - ranging from long-term documentary research and collaborative projects to installation-based works incorporating film, text and sound. Themes such as exile and memory, identity, social inequality - but also the boundaries between photographic reality and staging - run throughout the exhibition.
Amak Mahmoodian (b. 1980, Shiraz, Iran) explores the impact of exile on memory and identity, creating collaborative works that imagine a borderless world where shared dreams bridge geography, politics and time.
Rene Matić (b. 1997, Peterborough, UK) captures intimate moments in vivid, layered images of everyday life, exploring how bodies and identities are shaped - and often constrained - by political and social forces.
Jane Evelyn Atwood (b. 1947, New York, USA) is nominated for her publication Too Much Time / Trop de Peines, based on a ten-year photographic investigation documenting the lives of incarcerated women in prisons across the world and revealing the often overlooked realities of female inmates.
This year’s jury includes Elisa Medde (Director of Foto Colectania Foundation in Barcelona and former Editor-in-Chief of Foam Magazine), Newsha Tavakolian (photographer and member of Magnum Photos), Mark Sealy OBE (Executive Director of Autograph ABP), Anne-Marie Beckmann of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and Shoair Mavlian of The Photographers’ Gallery, who serves as the jury’s voting chair.