We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Form Photo Award x photobasel 2026. This year, the standard of work is exceptionally high, reflecting the incredible talent and creativity of contemporary photographers from around the world. Each longlisted artist brings a unique perspective, a fresh aesthetic, and thought-provoking ideas that challenge and inspire.

The top five winners will have their projects exhibited at the photobasel in June 2026, during Art Basel Week, where they will be seen by thouthands of visitors.

The Form Photo Award, supported by photobasel, Picter, and Form Magazine, is dedicated to discovering emerging voices in photography. It aims to foster global dialogue, intellectual exchange, and cross-cultural solidarity within the art community. Every winner represents a new vision.

We Knew the World in Fragments of Color reflects on Victoria Ruiz’s experience of being born in Venezuela during political turmoil and leaving her native country for the United States at a young age. Utilising handcrafted full-body suits — drawing from Latin American cultural symbolism, spirituality, and a strong chromatic language — the artist stages a sequence of photographs in which the subjects convey meaning against a coloured backdrop. Across this series, she represents successive stages of Venezuela’s recent reality, each carrying its distinct historical and emotional weight. Meanwhile, through performative self-representation, her internal world unfolds as one shaped by fragmentation and tension resulting from displacement. The work traces her attempt to reconstruct the scattered fragments of her passage across geographies and states of being, shaped by nostalgia and by the persistent scrutiny placed upon migrant identity — particularly that of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States. Meaning is embedded through richly layered symbols, from floral choices and costume details to a palette alive with colour and shadow. Dreamlike imagery unfolds through the perspective of a child suspended between worlds, capturing the quiet shifts of hope and uncertainty that accompany the experience of immigration; a perspective in which everything feels familiar and strange at once. In this sense, memory is reimagined as fractured yet luminous: like shards of tinted glass refracting identity, resilience, and faith. The work is a meditation on fragmentation as a condition of migration that does not seek coherence but rather embraces multiplicity, suggesting that belonging is not recovered but continually assembled. Through a kaleidoscope of memory, displacement, and spirituality, Ruiz reflects on how life between worlds reshapes perception, and colour itself becomes a language of survival and belonging.

In Ripples in the Pond, the artist undertakes a nuanced exploration of Makharda, a peripheral township on the outskirts of Kolkata, West Bengal. Situated within a landscape marked by over twenty tranquil ponds, Makharda emerges not merely as a geographic locale but as a site of complex temporal and socio-cultural convergence. Through a process-based photographic inquiry, the artist renders visible the entanglements between memory, modernity, and the slow violence of infrastructural encroachment. The project is grounded in a personal act of return, both physical and affective, evoking the fictional sensibilities of 'Malgudi Days' an Indian tv series from the 80's, which serve here not simply as nostalgic reference, but as an aesthetic framework through which to understand the semi-rural imaginary. The ponds, recurrent throughout the body of work, function symbolically and formally as reflective agents, at once literal bodies of water and metaphoric surfaces that refract the tensions between past and present, fantasy and reality, the rural and the emergent urban. This duality is further accentuated in the artist’s methodological gesture: post-journey, the photographs are subjected to an extended process of scanning, not as a means of reproduction but as a conceptual device. The scanner becomes an apparatus of mediation, standing in for the pond itself, its beam echoing the slow scan of the eye across a reflective surface. By physically manipulating the photographic prints during the scanning process, the artist introduces visual rupture, ripples, blurs, and distortions, that function as aesthetic metaphors for temporal disturbance and spatial instability.

Bharat Sikka was born and raised in India, where he began his photographic practice before studying at the Parsons School of Design, NY. Sikka’s long-term photographic projects have centered on the cultural residues and societal transformations within India, rendered with the visual language and material forms of contemporary art photography. His work subtly speaks to India’s history and regionality (of Kashmir, in Where the Flowers Still Grow), premiered at Kochi Biennale 2017, the tide of globalization (Matter) exhibited at Unseen, and masculinity (Indian Men) first showed at Artist Space, NY 2003. For Unseen 2019, Sikka created an installation version of The Sapper - his detailed and layered portrayal of his father. Sikka brought together multiple vantage points; from the remote landscapes his father inhabits and maintains to subtle still-life observations of his habits and routines. His recent work Coming Through In Waves was exhibited at Paris Photo 2022. This project made inroads and small steps in his complex navigation of youth, gender, and sexuality and looks to preserve these independent voices through the medium of photography. Bharat’s and his father’s multi-layered photographic project "The Sapper” was exhibited at Post Books, Tokyo and the book was nominated for Paris photobook award 2023. Bharat Sikka resides in New Delhi, India, and continues his photographic practices.

Valentin Fougeray subverts photography’s relationship with time by showing not the object of memory, but its failure. Working with the impossible nature of remembrance, his series captures blurred, trembling forms, as if the lens had failed to seize a memory and grasped only the space left by its disappearance. These fields of color resemble black holes generated by failing memory. Far from romanticizing oblivion, the work interrogates the precise moment a memory vanishes, overturning photography’s historical role as an inventory of beings and things. Here, stillness gives way to a frenzied pursuit of what is already gone. For Valentin, photography is not a receptacle but an evocation. The subject is absent; absence itself becomes the image. This indistinction allows emotional appropriation: abstract in appearance, the images evoke familiar sensations or landscapes; childhood beaches, first celebrations, ocean depths, sunlit calanques, salt and sand on skin. Materiality plays a central role in enabling this experience. The act of tearing is essential to the work. Visually, it echoes geological forms; fractures, cliffs, chasms; mobilizing a collective memory of territory. Yet these familiar spaces are haunted by forgetting, confronting us with what we may have lost. Open to the white of the paper, the tear symbolizes memory’s fragility while revealing the work’s making: scars, sutures, tape. This visible bricolage suggests the strategies we deploy to resist oblivion. Through symbolic destruction, each photograph becomes unique and retains its aura. The exposed paper invites touch, engaging the body’s memory rather than the eye alone. The tearing concentrates time into a single gesture, recalling photography’s anchoring in the instant; where the image appears or disappears forever. This brief moment confronts our usual conception of memory as long-term, revealing instead the discreet instant in which we cease to remember. What survives the tear is what escapes oblivion.

Echoes of Resistance explores the connection between the Baltic Partisan movement and the landscapes that served as sanctuary and symbol for its fighters. At its core is a personal search: my great-uncle joined the Partisan resistance in Latvia and was killed for his involvement, yet the details of his life and death remain unknown. His story, passed down in fragments, shapes my approach to these forests as sites of both history and unresolved memory. Although the Partisan movement shaped 20th-century Baltic history, few beyond the region know of it. After World War II, when the Soviet Union reoccupied the Baltics, tens of thousands retreated into the forests to wage a guerrilla war. Known as the “Forest Brothers,” they built bunkers, carried out sabotage missions, and relied on civilians who risked their lives to provide food and shelter. Despite overwhelming odds, brutal reprisals, and mass deportations, they fought for nearly a decade, determined to preserve national identity. For many, the forests were not only refuge but a living symbol of resistance. I use native plant pigments through the 19th-century photographic process of anthotypes to create these images. Colors derived from local flora embed the material of the landscape into each photograph, grounding the work in the environment itself. This process reflects the Partisans’ reliance on the land and positions nature as both witness and participant in their struggle. Through this integration of material and image, the work honors those who lived and died in hiding. Echoes of Resistance moves beyond documentation, inviting viewers to consider what remains when histories are fragmented or lost. These forests hold both presence and absence, carrying traces of lives that cannot be fully recovered. In engaging with them, the work reflects on memory, resistance, and the enduring impact of stories that continue to shape the present.

Krista Svalbonas holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her work has been exhibited at various prestigious venues, including Paris Photo, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Spartanburg Art Museum in South Carolina, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Klompching Gallery, and ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. Her work is featured in private collections as well as public institutions such as LACMA in Los Angeles, Cesis Art Museum in Latvia, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in North Carolina, and Woodmere Art Museum and Temple University in Philadelphia. Svalbonas has received several awards, including the Center for Photographic Art Artist Grant (2022), Baumanis Creative Projects Grant (2020), Rhonda Wilson Award (2017), Puffin Foundation Grant (2016), and a Bemis Fellowship (2015). In 2022, Svalbonas had solo exhibitions of her series "Displacement" at the Copenhagen Photography Festival in Denmark, the Tallinn City Museum in Tallinn, Estonia, and the Museum of Textile and Industry in Augsburg, Germany. She currently serves as an associate professor of photography at St. Joseph’s University and resides and works in Philadelphia.

Zibaya works with visual performance, experimental video work, experimental painting, sculptural, installation and photography. This also includes bodies and found objects to create contrast of realities.
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Khanya’s practice attempts to bring to light subjects often ignored, drawing on his personal relationship with themes of the discarded to create multidisciplinary works that challenge viewers to confront what is usually left unseen. 
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Through performance-based visual art, he invites people to see themselves reflected in what he terms “euphemisms of life.” By manipulating materials associated with the everyday violence of human behavior, he exposes these distortions, making visible the acts of those who perpetuate them.
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Khanya has a keen interest in people reforming their relationships with the mundane. His work reflects an ongoing fascination with the fluid, often unexamined ways in which people both shape and are shaped by systems. This dynamic fuels his drive to create in innovative ways, bringing to light the persistent, often unseen patterns that linger within the familiar.
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His previous group exhibitions include, The Portrait Show, Through The Lens Collective, Johannesburg, 2023; Got Junk GoldFingers, The Fourth Gallery, Cape Town, 2023; Post Fair Blues, The Fourth Gallery, Cape Town, 2023; The Wildest Most Beautiful Ugly, Too Tired Project, Digital, 2023, Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2025, Vela Projects and LagosPhoto Biennial, Nigeria, 2025. 
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Khanya matriculated from Lakehaven Secondary in Durban, South Africa in 2014. He went on to study at City Varsity in Johannesburg for an Acting in Camera Certificate in 2015. He then went to the Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, for Acting, Writing, Directing between 2018 -2021. He has been in residence at Through The LensCollective, Johannesburg, 2023 - 2024, DAC on Dorp, 2024 and The 3rd Space Residency, 2025. 
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For his work, he has been recognised by the National Art Festival Student Theatre Awards for Best Actor(s) and Best Writer(s) Award, 2019; Where The Leaves Fall Magazine, London, Winner, 2023; Photo Tool 10:10, Photography Presentation Workshop, 2023 ; LagosPhoto Portfolio Review, 2023; CAP PRIZE 2024, Shortlisted; Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize,Top 8 Finalists 2024 and Void x Futures Photography 2025 shortlist.
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Zibaya’s experience in acting, directing and writing include, Vodacom World, Industrial Theatre Show, Kyalami, 2019; Le Journal, Market Theatre Laboratory,Johannesburg, 2019; Indulge Your Senses, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2019; How to Crack a Coconut, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2018; Babylon Beyond Borders, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2018; Actors Looking for Directors, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2018 ; Words Fail, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2019.

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