LISBON.- Organized in partnership with the Museu Colecção Berardo – Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Lisbon - the BES Photo prize is an annual initiative that aims to reward the work of artists in the field of Photography. Ever since its very first edition, in 2004, BES Photo has gradually established itself as one of Portugal’s most prestigious contemporary art awards. The reputation of this event has been enhanced by the great talent revealed by the works exhibited and the merit of the award-winning artists in previous editions– Helena Almeida, José Luís Neto, Daniel Blaufuks, Miguel Soares, Edgar Martins and Filipa César.

For this seventh edition, the award has been internationalized and extended for the first time to include artists from Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries: Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola), Carlos Lobo (Portugal), Mário Macilau (Mozambique), Manuela Marques (Portugal) and Mauro Restiffe (Brazil). The works that have been chosen for this year’s event will also be displayed at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. The exhibition opens there on August 20 and it will be on display until October 23.

The international jury was constituted by Agustín Pérez Rubio, historian, art critic, curator and director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla e Léon (MUSAC) in Léon (Spain), Awam Amkpa, director and professor of Africana Studies and Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and Jean-Hubert Martin, curator and director of FRAME France, the French & American Museum Exchange.

Manuela Marques (Portugal, 1959) lives in Paris. For the past two decades, Marques has been exhibiting regularly in French institutions such as the Centre National de la Photographie, the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, the Museé Malraux in Le Havre, the FRAC Auvergne et Haute Normandie, the Domaine Départemental de Chamarande, the Collection Lambert in Avignon and the Galerie du Jour agnès b. in Paris.

Marques’ work was shown in Portugal for the first time in 2002 at Encontros da Imagem in Braga (curated by Rui Prata). In 2005, it was included in Empirismos at the Palácio de Ajuda (curated by Horácio Fernandez and Sérgio Mah) as part of the Lisbon photography biennial LisboaPhoto. The exhibition then travelled to Brazil, to the Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo and later to the ECCO – Espaço Cultural Contemporâneo in Brasília. Also in Brazil, Marques recently took part in Retratos de Cidades at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói (2009) which then travelled to the Museu de Arte Moderna de Brasília (2010). Lately, she integrated the show Da Outra Margem do Atlántico, curated by Paulo Reis at the Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro. In Portugal, her work was shown in She Is a Femme Fatale (curated by Ana Rito, Hugo Barata and Jean-François Chougnet) at the Museu Coleção Berardo and Lá Fora (curated by João Pinharanda) at the Fundação EDP / Museu da Electricidade (both in Lisbon, in 2009). In 2011 Marques held a solo show at Appleton Square, an exhibition space in Lisbon. Marques’ work is shown regularly at galleries in Paris (Anne Barrault), Lisbon (Caroline Pagès) and São Paulo (Vermelho). Her work integrates the French public collections of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris, FRAC Auvergne, Malraux Museum in Le Havre, Domaine Départemental de Chamarande, and Collection agnès b.. In Portugal, it is part of the collections BESart – Banco Espírito Santo Collection and Fundação Arte Moderna e Contemporânea – Coleção Berardo, as well as of the Museu da Imagem, in Braga.