IQOQO announced Egyptian artist Nada Baraka as the winner of the 2023 ANNA Award, a prize established by ANNA Organic with Latitudes Online for women-identifying artists from the African continent and its diaspora, open regardless of formal training or age. The piece introduced Baraka's practice to readers encountering it for the first time through the award.
It described her paintings as held in a constant, active state of flux between abstraction and surrealism, built through expressionist brushwork and a surrealist working method rather than fixed compositions planned in advance. The winning artwork entered the ANNA Award Collection, and the prize itself carried a cash award of one hundred thousand rand, an artist profile on Latitudes Online, and a year's supply of ANNA products.
Baraka was quoted describing the recognition as validation for her own struggles and hard work, a marker of a practice built largely outside formal art-school training. Nada Baraka's ANNA Award sits alongside her exhibitions with Tabari Artspace as an early, public sign of the wider audience her painting has since reached.
