In partnership with Richard Mille

Landscapes by Tunisian artist Nicène Kossentini has been announced as the winner of the Richard Mille Art Prize 2024. Showcased as part of the accompanying ‘Art Here 2024’ exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi – alongside the works of four other shortlisted artists – the five-channel video installation features Tunisian desert scenes, referencing the effects of human presence. The work invites viewers to contemplate the subtle, often invisible transformations of life and environment, reflecting on the fragility and impact of human actions with a sense of ‘gentle violence’. Kossentini describes Landscapes as ‘an ode to disappearance’.

The five-member Richard Mille Art Prize jury, led by HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, was particularly impressed by the way that Kossentini’s exhibit invites viewers to engage with spaces, both close and uncertain, using contrasts and semi-visibility to create contemplative environments.

Under the expert curation of writer and lecturer Simon Njami, this fourth edition of the Richard Mille Prize marks a significant evolution in both depth and maturity. The prize and exhibition offer a platform for a remarkable selection of both emerging and established contemporary artists from the GCC and North Africa, underscoring the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s dedication to cultural dialogue and innovation via a showcase of the area’s rich creative scene.

This year, artists were invited to explore the theme of ‘awakenings’ for their submissions, with each shortlisted artist’s site-specific installation offering a unique interpretation of this concept, their works creating a tangible experience that invites viewers to explore the intricate layers of awareness, openness and vision within the artistic narrative. Meanwhile, the museum’s silvery dome, designed by Jean Nouvel, creates a dynamic backdrop of shadows, reflections and permeating light, turning the space into a captivating artistic experience.

Alongside Kossentini’s winning entry, the shortlisted works encompass Emirati artist Lamya Gargash’s Debutante Ball, which transforms desert sand into a 2m-high beachball sculpture, exploring Arab identity and addressing human stereotypes; Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr’s Brides of the Sky installation, which looks at themes of bravery and resilience, reflecting on the strength of women while connecting the physical and transcendent worlds; Emirati artist Sarah Al Mehairi’s Shared Motion, which presents the word ‘wind’ in Arabic, Farsi, Hindi and Urdu, reflecting on the linguistic landscape of the region surrounding the Arabian Sea; and Franco-Tunisian artist Férielle Doulain-Zouari’s Tilling the Soil, a multi-dimensional piece that captures sensory details and the interplay between natural and artificial realms, revealing how personal and environmental elements intersect and evolve over time.

‘This exhibition marks a new beginning for the Richard Mille Art Prize,’ says Njami. ‘My career has been dedicated to unveiling new voices in contemporary art, and by widening the scope of applicants, we have expanded the possibilities for aesthetic confrontations, dialogues and challenges. The exhibition aims to reflect the evolution of contemporary art practices in the region and beyond.’

artprize.richardmille.com. ‘Art Here 2024’ is on show until

15 December 2024 at Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE, louvreabudhabi.ae

Max Mara, Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti have announced Dominique White as the recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2022 – 2024. The biennial award, now in its ninth edition, was set up by Iwona Blazwick and established in 2005 with the Max Mara Group, with further participation of Collezione Maramotti. Its aim is to support and nurture women-identifying artists at a pivotal stage in their careers. 

White was chosen from a shortlist including Rebecca Bellantoni, Bhajan Hunjan, Onyeka Igwe and Zinzi Minott, by a panel comprising gallerist Rozsa Farkas, artist Claudette Johnson, writer Derica Shields and collector Maria Sukkar. The panel was chaired by the Prize’s guest curator, Bina von Stauffenberg, in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery director Gilane Tawadros. 

White’s practice focuses on both the cultural, metaphorical and environmental potency of the sea. Her large-scale, ethereal installations use discarded nautical objects, including old sails, masts, chains and rope to explore imagined worlds, nautical legends and Afrofuturism. 

‘It is truly an honour to be awarded this year’s Max Mara Art Prize for Women and I’m thrilled to have been the recipient of an award that not only enables the development of seemingly unattainable skills and ambitious areas of research but also (quite literally) supports the emergence of a new body of works,’ says White, who is based between Marseille and Essex. ‘I’m so grateful to have shared this space of distinction with Rebecca Bellantoni, Bhajan Hunjan, Onyeka Igwe and Zinzi Minott and I would like to express my deepest gratitude again to the jury, Whitechapel Gallery, Max Mara and Collezione Maramotti for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’

White’s winning proposal is titled Deadweight, a body of work that takes ‘deadweight tonnage’, a maritime industry term used to calculate how many units of weight a ship can take before it sinks. During a six-month residency in Italy as part of the prize, White will have the opportunity to develop the idea and interrogate the meaning and exploitation of ‘deadweight tonnage’, tracing its relevance to the historical slave trade and its contemporary forms in the Mediterranean. White intends to build and then submerge elements of the final work in the Tyrrhenian Sea off Italy’s west coast, which will become the foundations for her solo exhibition in 2024, launching at Whitechapel Gallery and touring to Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy. 

‘On behalf of the jury and Whitechapel Gallery, I want to congratulate Dominique White on being awarded this year’s Max Mara Art Prize for Women,’ says Tawadros. ‘The youngest of the shortlist, Dominique’s winning proposal showed a maturity, rigour and consistency of creative approach that is entirely in keeping with the aims of the Prize, which is ultimately to enable women-identifying artists to develop and create projects that speak of and to the world around them. The themes she explores in her work feel especially timely and relevant today, and we are delighted to be able to support her over the course of her residency and through a solo exhibition. At a time when the need for refuge and safe space is so acute and the passage of individuals and communities by sea poses such risks to lives and exposes so much injustice, the interrogation and exploration of both the historical and contemporary systems that control movement and identity seem especially urgent.’

As Luigi Maramotti, chairman of Max Mara, said, ‘I am delighted that the Max Mara Art Prize for Women continues to be such a special project for all partners and stakeholders and that it is enthusiastically supported by Gilane Tawadros, the new director of Whitechapel Gallery. This award offers the winners a rather unique opportunity to focus on their artistic research, to develop an idea and create an ambitious project in relation to their long residency in Italy. I am confident that Dominique White will be able to make the most of this opportunity.’

The Max Mara prize for Women, for UK-based female-identifying artists, is the only award of its kind. Previous winners have included Emma Talbot (2019 – 22), Helen Cammock (2017 – 19), Emma Hart (2015 – 17), Corin Sworn (2013 – 15), Laure Prouvost (2011 – 13), Andrea Büttner (2009 – 11), Hannah Rickards (2007 – 09) and Margaret Salmon (2005 – 07). 

whitechapelgallery.org; maxmara.com

British artist Sonia Boyce’s Venice Biennale 2022 exhibition ‘Feeling Her Way’ – commissioned for the British Pavilion – made both literal and figurative waves. The show was awarded a Golden Lion Award for best national participation and celebrated the expression of five female musicians.

From 4 February-8 May 2023, Turner Contemporary will become the first UK institution to host Boyce's acclaimed show. The Margate show will mark the first leg of the exhibition's tour, which will later move to Leeds Art Gallery from 25 May – 5 November 2023.

Sonia Boyce: 'Feeling Her Way'

Boyce’s exhibition brought together singers Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, Sofia Jernberg, and Tanita Tikaram. Guided by Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen, the group of singers staged an improvisation session aimed at curating expression in song. ‘Wallen was asking them to do certain things that both get them warmed up but also get them to play with their voice,’ Boyce noted. ‘I think there's something immediately connective about singing a song.’

The filmed sessions took place over a short space of time, with the video footage cut and overlaid in the exhibition to create harmony across four screens. ‘It's about exploration,’ she says, ‘trying something out and seeing how it goes and then playing with it,’ about ‘seeing what unfolds.’

After the singers had warmed up and allowed their improvisational flows to play out, each performer was then left unguided, given space to perform ‘something that was improvised or something that they had in mind, that they wanted to bring to that day’. The two portions of the day are displayed in separate rooms. Alongside the videos, a geometrically laid out mosaic of stills from the production is displayed on the walls, with a selection of gold, irregularly shaped seats configured across the floor. 

‘It’s very intimate what we’re seeing, and one of the things we’re talking about is a trust in the creative process and trust in the project,’ explains Emma Ridgway, Shane Akeroyd associate curator 2022. The resulting exhibition is an explorative display of creative feeling, encompassing audio and visual art. Boyce explains her vision for the show, utilising ‘the combination of a visual element of the exhibition as well as the emotion of the singing, I wanted the viewers to feel embraced by the show’.

The concept for Boyce’s show runs in line with what Ridgway describes as ‘an ever-growing archive’ by the artist. In the 'Devotional Collection’, Boyce is documenting a history of Black British female singers in visual art and sound, establishing a much-needed archive of Black musical history in the UK.

The exhibition will run from 4 February – 8 May 2023, before touring to Leeds Art Gallery from 25 May – 5 November 2023.

soniaboyce.net;turnercontemporary.org

Veronica Ryan, a New York- and Bristol-based sculptor who has used handcrafted works to address themes of history, belonging and identity, was named the winner of the Turner Prize 2022 earlier today.

The result was announced this evening at St George Hall in Liverpool, a stone’s throw away from Tate Liverpool – home to this year’s Turner Prize exhibition. Tate director Maria Balshaw presented Ryan with the prize alongside musician Holly Johnson, lead vocalist of the 1980s English synth-pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, in a ceremony that was broadcast live on the BBC.

Born in 1956 in Plymouth, then the capital of the British overseas territory of Montserrat, Ryan pursued her artistic education in the UK (at SOAS, Slade, Bath Academy of St Albans College of Art and Design), where she was inspired by the work of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and Barbara Hepworth.

A scholarship from the Slade enabled her to visit Nigeria, which inspired her interest in the adaptation of everyday consumables in her artwork. One can draw a through line from this visit to Ryan’s best known installation, a memorial to the Windrush generation that was unveiled outside London’s Hackney Town Hall in 2021. Ryan’s giant custard apple, breadfruit and soursop, rendered in marble and bronze, pay tribute to the people who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean between the late 1940s and 1970s.

‘I chose those particular fruit and veg because they’re what my mum ate when she was pregnant with me,’ Ryan explained in a video created for her Turner Prize nomination. ‘I like the idea that there's  this whole side of nurture and healing and mother-daughter relationships and intergenerational  information being passed on.’

Alongside the Windrush memorial, it was Ryan’s exhibition at Bristol contemporary art centre Spike Island, between May and September 2021, that earned her the nomination for the Turner Prize. Titled ‘Along a Spectrum’, the exhibition examined environmental and sociopolitical concerns, personal narratives, history and displacement, and the winder psychological implications of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Key to the exhibition was Ryan’s research on the history of Montserrat, and her attempt to identify its early culture prior to the arrival of Europeans. Among the artworks were large groups of soursop skins and cocoa pods, cast in clay and glazed with volcanic ash.

In awarding Ryan the Turner Prize 2022, the jury recognised the ‘personal and poetic way she extends the language of sculpture’. She was selected from a shortlist of four artists, which also included Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard and Sin Wai Kin.

Accepting the award with joyful exclamations of ‘Power’ and ‘Visibility’ , Ryan acknowledged her family – particularly her dad, whose hat she wore to the prize ceremony, and her siblings that didn’t survive, Patricia, Josephine and David.

The prize jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, and Helen Legg, director of Tate Liverpool. Other members are Irene Aritsizábal, head of curatorial and public practice at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art; Christine Eyene, lecturer in contemporary art at Liverpool John Moores University; Robert Leckie, director of Spike Island; and Anthony Spira, director of Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery.

The Turner Prize 2022 exhibition runs until 19 March 2023 at Tate Liverpool. tate.org.uk

Tate Liverpool has unveiled the shortlist for the 2022 Turner Prize, which comprises four artists: Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Sin Wai Kin.

Last year, the Turner prize 2021 encompassed a full house of artist collectives for the first time in history, with Belfast-based Array Collective crowned the winner. 

This year, it’s largely back to business as usual, if such a thing can ever be said for the Turner Prize. 

Turner Prize 2022: meet the four shortlisted artists 

Heather Phillipson

Brimming with absurdity, tragedy and wit, Heather Phillipson's work is characterised by a wide, and often wild collision of materials, media and concepts, what the artist terms ‘quantum thought experiments’. Phillipson was nominated for her solo exhibition ‘Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach’ at Tate Britain, London, and her Fourth Plinth commission, The End. 

Ingrid Pollard

Ingrid Pollard’s work explores our increasingly complex and fraught relationship with the natural world and delves into ideas around Britishness, race and sexuality. The jury selected Pollard for her solo exhibition ‘Carbon Slowly Turning’ at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, struck by the artist’s astute unearthing of histories hidden in plain sight, and her ambitious recent developments in kinetic sculpture. 

Veronica Ryan

It’s been quite a year for Veronica Ryan, who was nominated for her solo exhibition ‘Along a Spectrum’ at Spike Island, Bristol, and her Hackney Windrush Artwork Commission in London. The artist’s ultra-tactile sculpture and installations blend natural and fabricated forms to explore themes of displacement, fragmentation and alienation, as well as the ongoing psychological impact of the pandemic.

Sin Wai Kin

Sin Wai Kin’s multifaceted work blends fantasy and reality through storytelling in performance, film, writing, and print. Their work draws on the experience of existing at the intersection of fixed categories, specifically the experience of being non-binary and mixed-race. Nominated for their involvement in the ‘British Art Show 9’ and their solo presentation at Blindspot Gallery, Frieze London, the artist was praised for their film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts, 2021, in which ancient Chinese philosophy and dramaturgy merged with contemporary drag, music and poetry. 

An exhibition showcasing the Turner Prize 2022 shortlisted artists will be held at Tate Liverpool from 20 October 2022 to 19 March 2023, with the winner announced in December 2022 at an award ceremony in Liverpool. 

This year marks the Turner Prize’s return to Liverpool for the first time in 15 years. Tate Liverpool was the first gallery beyond London to host the prize in 2007, when it helped launch the city’s year as the European Capital of Culture.

Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and co-chair of the Turner Prize jury, said: ‘With so many museums and galleries [having reopened] in May 2021, it’s been a terrific 12 months for contemporary British art, as demonstrated by this excitingly rich and varied Turner Prize shortlist. Art has provided much-needed enjoyment and escape over the past year, but it has also helped to reconnect us with each other and the world around us, as the practices of the four shortlisted artists variously exemplify. I congratulate all four artists on their brilliant contributions and can’t wait to see their exhibition at Tate Liverpool.’

The Turner Prize 2022 jury comprises Irene Aristizábal, head of curatorial and public practice, Baltic; Christine Eyene, research fellow at the School of Arts and Media, UCLan; Robert Leckie, director, Spike Island; and Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery.

INFORMATION

The Turner Prize 2022 shortlist exhibition will be held at Tate Liverpool from 20 October 2022 to 19 March 2023, with the winner announced in December 2022. tate.org.uk

The four nominees for the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize offer an astounding depth of research and engagement in projects spanning personal and political themes. Last year, Chinese artist Cao Fei (profiled in Wallpaper's November 2021 issue) was awarded the prize for her first large-scale UK solo exhibition, ‘Blueprints’ (2020), at the Serpentine Gallery. The 2022 exhibition will be on display at The Photographers' Gallery, London until 12 June 2022, with the winner announced on 12 May. 

Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022: the nominees

Anastasia Samoylova

Shortlisted for the exhibition ‘FloodZone’ 

In ‘FloodZone’, Anastasia Samoylova reflects on the confusing yet alluring imagery that promotes tourism and property development, against the backdrop of climate disasters facing America’s coastal cities. Oscillating between paradise and catastrophe, ‘FloodZone’ has an interesting dialogue with the Russian-born, Florida-based artist's other works. Particularly her series Landscape Sublime, for which she assembled printouts of natural landscapes and those subject to human intervention, interrogating notions of the sublime and algorithm-driven popular tastes. This analysis of aesthetics and networks in relation to contemporary culture is integral to Samoylova’s metaphor-laden practice. ‘FloodZone’ was first exhibited at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (8 June – 28 July 2021).

Jo Ractliffe

Shortlisted for the publication Photographs 1980s – now 

After 40 years of photographing life and landscape post-apartheid and civil war, South-African Jo Ratcliffe’s complex recordings came together in Photographs 1980s – now, a comprehensive monograph, published by Steidl/The Walther Collection in 2021. Through Ractliffe’s lens, violence isn’t documented head-on, rather its tangled consequences are seen from broad angles resulting in an all-encompassing record. With work that’s simultaneously stark and poetic, Ractliffe tells The Photographers' Gallery, ‘It’s hard to articulate precisely what photography holds for me. The crux of it, I think, is its trace of the real, coupled with the fact that things are not simply how they appear.’

Deana Lawson

Shortlisted for the exhibition ‘Centropy’ 

Creating what the American artist describes as her ‘ever-expanding mythological family’, Deana Lawson’s work reframes the Black experience in ‘Centrophy’ (exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel from 9 June – 11 October 2020). The tableau-like images are usually of strangers, staged in enigmatic domestic surroundings with thoughtful reference to the tropes of art history and documentary photography. Symbolism relating to the Black diaspora is woven throughout these intimate and reverential scenes, in which Lawson’s subjects are radiant. The inclusion of holograms and striking natural phenomena feels fitting in the work of an artist renowned for understanding power. 

Gilles Peress

Shortlisted for the publication Whatever You Say, Say Nothing

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing is a test of photography’s capacity to interpret conflict. Magnum photographer Gilles Peress began this work of ‘documentary fiction’ in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Now, decades later, it has come together in a monumental, 2,000-page publication depicting protest, resistance, mourning and distraction (originally published by Steidl in 2021). The French photographer is also acclaimed for reportage in Iran, Rwanda and the Balkans.

INFORMATION

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022 runs until 12 June 2022 at The Photographers' Gallery, London, and will later tour to the Deutsche Börse headquarters in Frankfurt, on 30 June 2022. thephotographersgallery.org.uk

The 2022 prize winner will be announced on 12 May 2022.

Northern Ireland’s Array Collective has been crowned winner of the Turner Prize 2021 in a ceremony held at Coventry Cathedral. 

In 2019, the Turner Prize made headlines after all four nominees were awarded the top prize, at their collective request. This year’s format was also unprecedented; for the first time in the award's history, the shortlist was a full house of artist collectives. 

Their common thread is art for social change, but each collective is dispersed in theme, and diverse in approach. Array was chosen from a shortlist of five collectives, which also included Black Obsidian Sound System, Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works. As the winner, Array Collective will be awarded £25,000, while £10,000 will be given to each shortlisted collective. 

Each nominee was selected for their close and consistent work with communities across the UK. The collaborative practices selected also reflect the solidarity demonstrated in response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. 

An exhibition of the collectives’ work is currently being held at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry (until 12 January 2022), forming part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations. 

Belfast-based Array Collective is known for work that tackles issues around language, gender and reproductive rights, as well the politics and identity of Northern Ireland, often conveyed through collaborative performances, protests, exhibitions and events. 

For its Turner Prize show, Array Collective created The Druthaib's Ball a fantasy síbín (‘a pub without permission’). The work has been realised twice. In Belfast, it was a wake for the centenary of Ireland’s partition, in the Black Box (grassroots venue). Quasi-mythological druids were in attendance, along with a community of costumed artists and activists. 

Array Collective’s Herbert exhibition hosts a film created from the Belfast event, and a TV showing Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive. A large canopy styled from banners provides a floating roof. Visitors can approach the síbín through a circle of flag poles that references ancient Irish ceremonial sites, and is illuminated by a dusk-to-dawn light.

The collective has staged a contradictory world that simultaneously inhabits trauma, black humour and angst. It is a place to look beyond sectarian divides that have overwhelmed Northern Ireland’s collective memory for the last century. In a more subtle intervention, Array has also made its mark in the Herbert’s collections, inserting an etching of The Druthaib's Ball into Gallery 2 of the museum.

Array Collective comprises Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell, Jane Butler, Emma Campbell, Alessia Cargnelli, Mitch Conlon, Clodagh Lavelle, Grace McMurray, Stephen Millar, Laura O'Connor, and Thomas Wells.

The Turner Prize 2021 jury consisted of Aaron Cezar, director, Delfina Foundation; Kim McAleese, programme director, Grand Union; Russell Tovey, actor; and Zoé Whitley, director, Chisenhale Gallery.

INFORMATION

The Turner Prize 2021 exhibition will be on show at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry until 12 January 2022. tate.org.uk

Lawrence Lek has been named as the Grand Prix winner of the 4th VH Award, a biannual event organised by Hyundai Motor Group to discover and support emerging artists from Asian backgrounds.

Lek’s Grand Prix-winning work, Black Cloud (2021), is the culmination of an ongoing body of virtual reality artworks. The multimedia artist, who is London-based and of Malaysian-Chinese descent, explores the geopolitical implications of artificial intelligence and illuminates links between art and AI. Through his virtual-space creations, Lek explores different societal attitudes toward AI and how it can control values, lifestyles and modes of operation around the world. 

‘The virtual tools, such as computer-generated images and computer games, can enable contemporary artists to create environments that reflect some of the utopian ideas of architecture,’ says Lek.

Utilising gaming software and computer-generated animation tools, Lek creates digital environments that combine real-place settings and fictional scenarios. 

Launched in 2016, the VH Award has brought into the public limelight diverse Asian artists working in the new media realm. This year marks the first time artists outside of South Korea have been eligible to apply. Lek, together with the remaining 2021 finalists – Doreen Chan, Paribartana Mohanty, Jungwon Seo and Syaura Qotrunadha – will be offered the chance to showcase their work at renowned art institutions and virtual museums around the world. Each artist received US$25,000 to produce a screen-based, audio-visual work, and as the Grand Prix winner, Lek will receive an additional US$25,000.

‘With the 4th VH Award, Hyundai Motor Group celebrates the diversity and creativity of Asian media artists around the world who share the group’s vision of coming “Together for a Better Future”,’ says DooEun Choi, art director of Hyundai Motor Group. ‘These emerging artists have illuminated our views on the future of humanity and empowered us to forge connections across cultural boundaries,’ she adds.

All finalists took part in an online residency programme hosted by Eyebeam, a New York City-based art and technology centre, which supports the production of new artworks while providing professional development sessions with mentors. The mentors include curators Barbara London, Karen Archey and Ute Meta Bauer, as well as artists Zach Lieberman and Kamau Patton. 

INFORMATION

hyundaimotorgroup.com

World leaders will soon gather in Glasgow for COP26, the much-anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference. Parties will assemble to accelerate global action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (31 October – 12 November 2021). 

Ahead of the summit, #CreateCOP26 – a competition and virtual exhibition engaging young artists on themes of climate change – has announced its winners. Presented by Art Partner, with support from Unesco’s Regional Bureau for Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean, #CreateCOP26 celebrates the creative output of a generation mobilised to generate urgent change, and avoid inheriting a planet in peril.

Applicants between the ages of 14 and 30 were encouraged to submit work in any medium with any message that shares their view on the climate crisis. Submissions hailed from 54 countries across six continents, and the jurors selected nine finalists, who will each receive sums ranging from $10,000 to $2,000 (USD).

#CreateCOP26: the winners

Camila Jaber, a Mexican freediving record holder and student, won first prize with her video I am Cenote. Drawing on her experience as a water athlete, Jaber’s captivating film raises awareness about marine issues, as well as the climate-related problems surrounding freshwater ecosystems. Her video captures the beauty and the ugliness caused by the destructive tourism industry and hopes to inspire change before it’s too late.

Second place was awarded jointly to: Samuel Antonio Pineda Manzana, whose short film explores toxic environmental actions; Breech Asher Harani, who looked at the often-fatal climate-induced typhoons in an experimental film; and Ghanaian designer Hikima Mahamuda, who submitted her Pure Water Raincoat, made from repurposed plastic water packaging commonly used in Ghana.

Third places were awarded to Jessica Angela O’Neill, Mehrdad Vahed Yousefabad, Charlotte Greenwood, Mingsheng Ni, and Oscar Crabb. 

The panel of judges comprised experts recognised as leaders in their respective creative fields: Lydia Arthur Brito, Unesco regional bureau director for sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean; Han Feng, artist; Ferdinando Verderi, Vogue Italia creative director; Matt Williams, Camden Art Centre curator; Candice Marks, senior global agent at Art Partner; Shaway Yeh, founder of Yehyehyeh; Tyler Mitchell photographer and filmmaker; and Marina Testino, sustainable fashion advocate. 

INFORMATION

artpartner.com

In art, architecture and, by definition, beyond, creative and cross-disciplinary collectivism is the modus operandi of the moment. Connection, by multiple means and in multiple ways, inward and outward directed, is a defining ambition. And almost always, this common purpose has an activist tilt. It is a trend recognised by the organisers of this year’s Turner Prize, which has shortlisted five activist collectives for the award. And they are suitably dispersed and diverse in practice, as showcased in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition, which has now opened at Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, this year’s UK City of Culture.

Inevitably, given that so much of what these art collectives do happens at a street or ‘grassroots’ level, deliberately outside the sanctified gallery space, this presentation is more a series of teaser trailers or documentary evidence of their work.

Turner Prize 2021 exhibition: nominees and works

Array Collective

Belfast-based Array Collective tackles issues around language, gender and reproductive rights as well the politics, identity and otherwise of Northern Ireland. And they do it using performance, photography, video and installation. 

Array Collective has created a fantasy síbín, ‘a pub without permission’, playing a video of The Druthaib’s Ball, its wake for the centenary of Ireland’s partition, rather than the football.

Black Obsidian Sound System (BOSS)

Established in London in 2018 by a community of queer, trans and non-binary Black people and people of colour, Black Obsidian Sound System (BOSS), as the name suggests, re-wires and amplifies the idea of the sound system as a place of community and resistance.

BOSS’s installation, The Only Good System is a Sound System, is a spare but multimedia environment, while the next door space will play host to a local radio station Hillz FM. 

Gentle/Radical

Set up in the Riverside area of Cardiff in 2017, Gentle/Radical is a collection of ‘community activists, conflict resolution trainers, faith ministers, equalities practitioners, youth workers, land workers, writers and artists’, and organises community film screenings, performances and talks.

Here, Gentle/Radical offers a kind of mapping, in various forms, of IRL networks of friendship and community in a system that simply asks us to be more productive, whatever the human cost.

Project Art Works

Working in a space where art meets care, Project Art Works – based in Hastings and the longest established of this year’s contenders – supports neurodivergent artists. 

For the exhibition, Project Art Works has installed a temporary studio, workshop and archive of just some of the 4,000 works by neurodivergent artists it has helped support over the last two decades.

Cooking Sections

Perhaps the best known, and gallery friendly, of the shortlisted practices, Cooking Sections, founded by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwab in 2013, uses food, and the often terrifying details of its production, as a way to address our more broadly calamitous handling of natural resources.

To the exhibition, Cooking Sections brings the Salmon: Traces of Escapees audio and film installation. (There is more evidence of its activity in the gallery’s café, which has stopped serving farmed salmon, replacing it with seaweed and sea vegetables. The Herbert is just one of 21 cultural institutions, including London’s V&A, Serpentine Galleries and Science Museum, to ditch farmed salmon as part of Cooking Section’s Climavore project. Working with the artists and café operator Benugo, these museums will now look to develop menus that support regenerative food production.)  

Of course, there is a sense here of fragmentation, of stories only half told and installations ready to be ‘activated’ but, for the moment, inert. But the displays are surprisingly moving and energising, as the programme has it, ‘pocket utopias’. What unites all these artists is a concentration on the local and community-based activity and action and not – as some of the inevitable sneering has it – on easy sloganeering. It is the difficult art of trying to make change happen. 

The Turner Prize 2021 winner will be announced on 1 December 2021.

INFORMATION

The Turner Prize 2021 exhibition is at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum until 12 January 2022, coventry2021.co.uk

The last year has been far from business as usual, so it would only be fitting for the Turner Prize, one of the UK’s leading catalysts for radical art, to follow suit. Tate Britain has just unveiled the shortlist for the 2021 Turner Prize, and for the first time in history, it’s entirely comprised of artist collectives. 

The shortlist includes Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System, Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works. The common thread in each of the collective’s work is social change, with each nominee working closely and continuously with communities across the UK. The collaborative practices selected also reflect the solidarity and community demonstrated in response to the Covid-19 crisis. 

An exhibition of their work will be held at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry from 29 September 2021 - 12 January 2022 as part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations. The winner will be announced on 1 December 2021 at an award ceremony at Coventry Cathedral and will be broadcast on the BBC. 

Despite the common emphasis on social change, the focus of each group is wide-ranging. Through collaborative performances, protests, exhibitions and events, the work of Belfast-based artists Array Collective confronts ongoing issues affecting Northern Ireland. London-based collective Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) works across art, sound and radical activism. Formed by and for QTIBPOC (Queer, Trans and Intersex Black and People of Colour), B.O.S.S. challenges the prevalent norms of sound-system culture across the African diaspora. 

Cooking Sections is a London-based duo delving into systems that organise the world through food, culminating in installation, performance and video work. With a focus at a local level, Cardiff-based Gentle/Radical is a project led by artists, community workers, performers, faith practitioners, writers and others, advocating for art as a tool for social change. Project Art Works explores art through collaborative practice with, for and by neurominorities and disseminates their work through exhibitions, events, films and digital platforms. 

This year, the Turner Prize 2021 jury consisted of Aaron Cezar, director, Delfina Foundation; Kim McAleese, programme director, Grand Union; Russell Tovey, actor; and Zoé Whitley, director, Chisenhale Gallery. 

Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner Prize jury, commented: ‘One of the great joys of the Turner Prize is the way it captures and reflects the mood of the moment in contemporary British art. After a year of lockdowns when very few artists have been able to exhibit publicly, the jury has selected five outstanding collectives whose work has not only continued through the pandemic but become even more relevant as a result.’ 

INFORMATION

tate.org.uk

The winners of the Sony World Photography Award for 2021 have just been announced; with a couple of exciting gongs going to snappers specialising in the architecture field. Architectural photography, from modernist buildings to powerful, colourful spaces, has appeared in two key sections of the prestigious honour – the Professional and the Open Competition, both dedicated to outstanding creative output in the global field. 

The former, a work chosen across professionals in their field, was awarded to Tomáš Vocelka from the Czech Republic. Vocelka's submission, titled ‘Eternal Hunting Grounds', is a series exploring a former military complex turned pet cemetery in his home country. The prize looks at a body of work of five to ten images and the winner's imagery is beautiful and haunting. Other themes in this category include Documentary, Landscape, Portraiture, Creative, Environment, Portfolio, Sport, Still Life and Wildlife & Nature.

The Open Competition, on the other hand, draws on the power of one, single image. The winner, here, Germany's Klaus Lenzen, submitted ‘The Blue Window', a piece depicting ‘a ramp of stairs at the Hyatt hotel in Düsseldorf ascending towards a window from which a view of clear blue skies is reflected.' Graphic and powerful, the winning image leaves a lasting impression. 

The Award scheme also named today its overall winner, UK based documentarian Craig Easton, who will receive $25,000 (USD) cash prize and a range of Sony’s digital imaging kit. Meanwhile, supporting photography creatives of all ages, the Sony World Photography Award also features prizes for youth and student categories. 

A virtual exhibition of winners and finalists' work has just been launched through the organisation's website, where all artwork is available to peruse and admire. §

INFORMATION

worldphoto.org

Every year Wallpaper* selects an outstanding photographer from Hyères International festival of fashion and photography to collaborate with on a fashion story. From the ten finalists of the festival’s 35th edition, we chose Austrian artist Stefanie Moshammer based on her personal series Grandmother Said it’s Okay, a project that explores family, memory and ritual. 

For our March 2021 Style Issue, Moshammer photographed an invigorating Fendi special in the snow covered Fendels. Here, Wallpaper* photography director Holly Hay talks to Moshammer about the realities of shooting in unusual circumstances, how to successfully manoeuvre between genres and her thoughts on the future.

Wallpaper*: We have worked together on stories for Wallpaper* before: a trip story to Ljubljana and a portrait of Pierre Yovanovitch, but this is the first fashion story. Your practice explores the idea of dress up with a strong emphasis on character, colour and place. Was fashion always something you imagined to be part of what you create?

Stefanie Moshammer: Fashion wasn’t really something I imagined being part of at the beginning. Even though I went to fashion school, I didn’t want to focus on fashion afterwards and I was more driven by other art forms. Nowadays my practice feels like a conglomeration of many different disciplines that I’ve worked with over the years. I’m in love with clothing and textiles and have an appreciation for the work of designers. However, fashion is a broad field. There is one side of the fashion industry I can’t relate to at all and that I question a lot. Fashion exists throughout different cultures and groups, where clothing gives glimpses into people's identities and traditions. Visually this is more interesting to me. Overall clothes are social objects with biographies. For me, as a photographer, it becomes an interesting task when you have the freedom to express your visual language while including fashion.

W*: For the audience, this story shows a model unfazed by metres of snow, effortlessly exploring while wearing Fendi's SS21 collection. It's so refreshing to see joyful images outside, in nature. What was the reality of shooting in these conditions?

SM: Generally, I try to avoid shooting in the studio. I prefer a location that already contains a certain character or story. We shot the Fendi SS21 collection in the snowscape of Tyrol. I’m not sure I have ever seen so much snow before. While this was amazing for the images, it was challenging for the whole team. Emily, our model, was very brave and didn’t complain once, despite wearing Spring/Summer clothes at temperatures below freezing.

W*: Your work moves fluidly through documentary and conceptual genres. What's the starting point for a project? And how does the editorial process differ from how you approach personal work?

SM: Working on a personal project means devoting more time to the process; you give yourself time to rethink, reflect, change, or even fail. It also comes with more insecurities because usually, one opens up about oneself while putting out a personal project. Also, the result doesn’t necessarily need to be printed and can exist in many layers. The work can be developed as an exhibition, a book, a performance or whatever fits the subject. In my opinion, the outcome of a personal project has another significance and weight. However, when it comes down to it, both commissioned and personal work are simply about translating an idea in a meaningful and visually interesting way.

W* In times like this when the world feels shut and our freedom compromised, the creative community seems to rise up with resilience and even better, newer ideas. We would love to hear what's interesting to you in the field of photography right now

SM: It feels like we always need a crisis to understand what’s important to us. The harder the times, the better the art. So far it has been crazy to see how much the digital space has taken over. Of course, this already was in process before, but the pandemic accelerated and intensified the process. Furthermore, I love the concept of recycling your work and delving into your archives. For example, creating new work through existing images, or using them in another context or edited to a new subject matter. This makes even more sense now, when travelling is limited and we are all stuck in front of our computers.

W*: What's next? Tell us your plans for 2021 and beyond.

SM: Currently, I’m based in Mexico for the month. Then pandemic permitting, I’ll be in Shanghai in the late summer for an artist residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, staying there for three months. I’ve been in Shanghai before and I find it very interesting so I’m excited to experience it more deeply. At the moment I’m finishing two projects, one of them includes a small clothing collection with a Viennese fashion brand. Generally, my base is between Vienna and Paris, though I’ll be in Paris more over the next year.

INFORMATION
stefaniemoshammer.com

The Loewe Foundation/ Studio Voltaire award was conceived in March 2021 in response to major gaps in career opportunities and affordable studio spaces for creatives in London, a situation further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Award winners announced

Just announced, the 2021–2023 cohort of awardees comprise Ayo Akingbade, Ufuoma Essi, Adam Farah, Nnena Kalu, Djofray Makumbu, Josiah Moktar and Curtly Thomas. The selected artists work across a range of disciplines and mediums, encompassing myriad interests, experiences and approaches to creating.  

The two-year programme will offer support to seven artists through rent-free studios within Studio Voltaire’s new Matheson Whiteley-developed buildings, a tailored mentoring scheme and a bursary of £2,000 for each creative. Alongside curatorial and pastoral support, the award will also offer artists access to local and global audiences through public programming.

Not–for–profit arts organisation Studio Voltaire has cultivated a reputation for supporting artists at critical points in their careers, fuelled by a spirit of experimentation and risk-taking. It has been responsible for the UK solo debuts of myriad artists and notable participatory and offsite projects and commissions. Previous exhibiting artists have included Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Nnena Kalu and Henrik Olesen. 

‘This special programme is even more urgent given Covid-19’s effects on artists. The need for spaces where artists can connect and be supported is vitally important,’  says Joe Scotland, director of Studio Voltaire. ‘London has lost significant numbers of studio spaces in the last three years and it’s estimated that more than a third of existing studio spaces will vanish by 2024.’

The two-year programme will offer support to seven artists through rent-free studios within Studio Voltaire, a tailored mentoring scheme and a bursary of £2,000 for each creative. Alongside curatorial and pastoral support, the award will also offer artists access to local and global audiences through public programming.

Submissions will be received via both an open call, and through a group of dedicated ‘nominators’ including Sheryll Catto, co-director of Action Space and artist, Abbas Zahedi. Awards will be offered based on merit and need and selected by a panel of judges including Andrew Bonacina, chief curator of The Hepworth Wakefield; Sepake Angiama, artistic director of Iniva and artists Anthea Hamilton and Elizabeth Price. 

As Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe explains, ‘Supporting creativity is at the heart of all Loewe does and it is, therefore, a great privilege for the Loewe Foundation to support this vital new initiative, especially in light of the impact Covid-19 has had on the artistic community.’ 

The second phase of the award comprises a year-long residency at Studio Voltaire for an international artist, set to be announced later this year. The initiative will develop in parallel with the much-anticipated reopening of Studio Voltaire in October 2021.

INFORMATION

studiovoltaire.org

loewe.com

Haisam Mohammed often found himself drawn to the stairwells of the Swedish high rise buildings he grew up in. It was in these meeting points between homes that the scents from the different households would cascade – from cooking, incense burning, and spices.

The son of immigrants who had escaped the conflict in Eritrea, Mohammed’s upbringing saw him surrounded by many different cultures – inspiring a passion for design, architecture and beauty.

Fast forward to 2018, and he would channel this inspiration into his independent fragrance brand, UNIFORM – a vegan, cruelty-free range of perfume oils produced in France.

Blending the minimalism of Scandinavian design with transportive scents drawn from around the world, the brand recently captured the attention of A-COLD-WALL* founder, Samuel Ross, who selected it to receive a grant from his foundation supporting Black-owned businesses.

We caught up with Mohammed to talk about developing the range, how the beauty industry can become more inclusive, and why the future of luxury is sustainable.

Wallpaper*: How did UNIFORM come about as a brand?

Haisam Mohammed: Throughout my life, I have always sought for new formats to express and communicate different cultural messages, but the one format that always stuck in the back of my head, was scents.

So UNIFORM began as a passion project. My interest in scents started in the stairwells of the high-rises in Sweden. Both the one I grew up in, and the ones that I visited throughout my upbringing. The smell of food cooking, incense being lit and spices being blended used to sip through the cracks of the doors of these families and accumulate in a special scent that I have had with me throughout my life. Hence the name UNIFORM.

Talk us through your three signature scents in the range.

Maghrib, which means sunset in Arabic, is our first creation. It was inspired by the experiences of watching the sunset from the rooftops of the high-rises during summer nights. It has cedarwood and tobacco in it, and is the scent that I most clearly recognize from my childhood home and, as I later came to realise, the homes of many more ethnic families as they were cooking, burning incense, and blending spices in their home.

Limbo is inspired by my personal experience of the conflicting emotions that I experienced while commuting between the city center and its outskirts where I live. You either feel like it is an escape or a refuge – therefore the name Limbo. It's our most complicated scent, with a combination of rhubarb, hay, and sandalwood.

Cassis is inspired by the first-millisecond of scent you experience when disembarking a plane at a new destination, preferably in the south of France. It's a fig-scent with elements of sandalwood and coconut.

What was your experience of growing up in Sweden?

My experience growing up was split between two places. A small town in the northern part of Sweden and Stockholm. There were kids from the diaspora in both places, and we managed to build our own culture, way of life, and language to communicate based on our parent’s heritage and the cultures we now resided in.

We were probably the first generation that grew up with the internet, so I managed to discover things within music, arts, and even food that the previous generation could only dream of. During this time I also understood the power of culture and that it sees no geographical borders. I began to understand that a person living 4000 miles away in a city like New York could still be interested in the same things I was.

How does this mix of cultures express itself in your scents?

Not only does the mix of culture express itself in our scents, but also the format that is presented in. Perfume oil is not as big of a deal in the West as it is in some parts of Africa and in Asia. I wanted to introduce the format to a new audience but I have great respect from where it came from. I discovered perfume oil from my father’s collection, which was made up of scents he bought from the mosque and carried with him at all time. 

How have architecture and design shaped the vision for UNIFORM?

They are a huge part of the vision. For our first installation display inside the department store NK, we commissioned the designer Simon Skinner to translate our brand into a physical art piece and the outcome became a structure inspired by the high-rises made out of limestone blocks.    

In an architectural sense, the brand stands on the idea of the stairwell, not only just being a place where you move between different levels but also a gathering location. A place where great conversations are taking place about everything from art to science to politics. 

In Sweden, a defunding of youth centers has been going on for years. Every winter when the youth centres were closed and we had nowhere to go, we always used a random stairwell as our meeting place/office/think centre until we got kicked out.

Redefining what luxury means is a key part of UNIFORM. Is this a shift you see happening in the world right now?

Definitely. In our case, we want to redefine what luxury must look like or where it comes from. In a standard measure, UNIFORM would not be considered luxury based on our background, where our story stems from, and how accessible we want our products to be. But luxury for us means high-quality products that are produced with a lot of care and attention to details. Luxury has nothing to do with heritage or who stands behind the brand.

The shift I see happening is that younger people’s aspiration has gone from wanting to buy luxury products to aspiring to buy sustainable products that they can show off. Sustainability is now the new luxury.

The packaging and design for the scents are very distinctive and minimal. How did you develop these?

UNIFORM was designed to be sleek and a product that you could carry around in your pocket or handbag at any time. It should be so convenient that you pick it up and apply a small amount throughout the day to feel your best. When it came to the bottle – the process was that it needed to be a statement piece to the degree that when you pull out the UNIFORM in public, everyone is intrigued. 

Because the bottle draws a lot of focus, I wanted to keep the packaging very minimal and just include the essential information. I enlisted the help of my friend Fredrika Larsson who designed the logo and helped with the packaging.

How do you think the beauty industry can be more representative? Do you feel that any progress is being made?

In two ways. Either we hire people who truly get the need for representation and are going to make a difference. Or we start our own brands like Fenty.

The beauty world has been getting better at showing diversity in front of the camera, but behind the camera there is a long way to go. Directors, photographers, make-up artists, and more important – clients still lack knowledge about why representation is important. I'm starting to think that people who do not work towards more representation, just don't want to see improvement for under-represented groups. In this day and age, it is no longer about not knowing how to go about it. There is plenty of information online that only requires a Google search. For example, my friend created the platform Afripedia which is a curated database that connects clients and individuals with top African creatives around the world.

To be able to create innovation and further an industry you need more perspective. That is scientifically proven. You need to be open to listening and trying to understand people who don’t come from the same walks of life as you. Inclusivity should not be seen as goodwill or something charitable. It should be seen as a crucial part of an industry or a brand that wants to survive in the future.

You recently received a grant from Samuel Ross and A-Cold-Wall's foundation to support Black-owned businesses – how do you plan to use this to develop the brand?

I am very grateful to Mr. Ross that he is using not only his platform but also his brand's capital to inspire and uplift Black-owned businesses. That is admirable. As somebody who has financed this brand solely from my pocket, I plan to use the grant towards the expansion of UNIFORM to different parts of the world.

I said to Samuel that the plan is to pass it forward. My philosophy is that when somebody opens a door for you, you must do the same for the next person. This grant is no different. I plan to give back the same amount to the next creative entrepreneur that I meet in the near future.

What is coming next for UNIFORM? Do you have plans to develop the product range further?

We are excited for UNIFORM to be accessible in new markets and sharing our work with a lot more people across the globe. We are also looking forward to collaborating with cross-disciplinary artists to find ways to experience our perfumes in different contexts that will challenge their perception of scent.

INFORMATION
barbican.org.uk

It was announced last month (May 2020) that this year's Turner Prize would be staged differently, owing to the difficulties of staging the traditional nominees exhibition during the pandemic. Instead, it was decided that the £100,000 grant would be shared between ten recipients, as a show of support for British artists during these unprecedented times.

Today, the ten Turner Prize winning artists have been announced. They are: Arika, Liz Johnson Artur, Oreet Ashery, Shawanda Corbett, Jamie Crewe, Sean Edwards, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Ima-Abasi Okon, Imran Perretta and Alberta Whittle. ‘They represent the many exciting and interdisciplinary ways that artists work today,' says director of Tate Britain Alex Farquharson, referring to the bursaries as ‘a vote of confidence in that work and offer some much-deserved support in challenging times'.

The selected artist span disciplines, from ceramics (Oxford's Shawanda Corbett) to moving image (London's Oreet Ashery), to political arts organisation (Edinburgh's Arika). Liz Johnson Artur, Ghanaian-Russian photographer based in London, recently shot an exciting series for Wallpaper*, which will be featured in our upcoming September 2020 Issue, and digitally in August.

The decision to split the award follows on from last year's attention-grabbing decision, where the four nominees (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani) came together to request that the jury consider awarding the Prize to them as a collective – a request the judges agreed to unanimously.

This year, the judging panel met virtually, chaired by Farquharson. Richard Birkett, curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts; Sarah Munro, director of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Duro Olowu, designer and curator; and Fatoş Üstek, director of Liverpool Biennial, spent 12 months visiting hundreds of exhibitions in preparation for selecting the nominees. Together, they chose the winning artists from this pool, for their significant contributions to new developments in British contemporary art.

INFORMATION

tate.org.uk/art/turner-prize

Samuel Ross of A-COLD-WALL* was one of the first industry leaders to make a concrete commitment in response to the current civil rights movement sweeping the globe, with his grant series announced in early June. Now, Ross has been joined by Daniel Arsham in a further round of grant giving. In the first of their series of joint initiatives, Ross and Arsham have pledged 10 grants totalling £25,000 ($30,000) to support black artists, industrial designers and architects.

‘Beyond my financial support for Black Lives Matter and other organisations, I have been actively looking for additional ways to support Black creatives directly,' Arsham says. ‘Police reform and social justice are just one part of the puzzle towards dismantling systemic racism in the United States. I reached out to Samuel Ross to enquire about his own initiatives in this area. As a result, I have matched the initial $30,000 that A-COLD-WALL* has given to black entrepreneurs for a new round of grants to black artists and architects. This is just one of many initiatives we are pursuing.'

‘Aplicants from West Africa, South Africa, North America and the United Kingdom formed the majority,’ says Ross, who’s DMs filled rapidly as soon as the grants were announced. He explains the works submitted were ‘less outsider art than expected – the majority of applicants are practitioners and well-versed, mature students exhibiting or in proto stages.’ Ross says the grants are essential in bringing recognition to the work of under-represented creatives. ‘The artists selected are exceptionally talented and incredibly proficient within their practises and yet have not accrued the visibility deserved. We need more visibility and collaboration between the arts and design institution and black artists, the design industry must engage.’

The 10 grant recipients selected by Ross and Arsham include Kusheda Mensah (a furniture designer from the UK); Jarret Key (a painter and sculptor from USA); Nifemi Marcus-Bello (an industrial designer from Nigeria); Ronan Mckenzie (a photographer and gallerist from the UK); Limbo Accra (an experimental architect from Ghana); Kumbirai Makumbe (a digital artist from the UK); Jeffrey Meris (a painter and sculptor from USA); Kobby Adi (an installation and photography artist the UK); LUWA (architectural designers from the UK); and Fumani Khumalo (a painter from South Africa).

It took three methodical but urgent days for Ross and Arsham to narrow down the many applicants. ‘Though speed was a focus, the arts and design community need access to such funds now,’ emphasises Ross. What drew him to particular creatives? ‘The works find you – they pull on emotional chords, or offer a rationale; a well-considered solution to a self-researched brief sensitive to local happenings,’ he says. ‘It’s essential to outline where you stand in the midst of a pandemic and civil rights movement – individuals and companies alike. The primary purpose of having a platform is communication – we’re simply utilising the tools we have, moved by the realities at hand,’ says Ross. 

For its 35th edition, the Hyères International Festival Fashion and Photography has announced a line-up of renowned judges and its chosen finalists who are creating new styles and narratives in the industry. Hyéres founder Jean-Pierre Blanc has consistently provided a platform of support through awards and exhibitions, and the festival is regarded as the oldest competition for young international photographers and designers.

This year, revered photographer Paolo Roversi is the guest of honour in Hyéres’ photography jury. Best known for his striking, intimate portraiture and classical visual language – from fashion editorials to portraits of Hollywood actors and photojournalism – Roversi is one of the industry’s preeminent image-makers. 

The jury – which also includes Vogue Italia photography editor Chiara Bardelli Nonino and Dior’s director of publishing Jérôme Gautier – met in Paris, at studio Luce in January, in order to chose the ten finalists of the competition, from 700 entries across 50 nationalities.

The finalists of the 2020 photography competition are...

• Clémence Elman – France
• Alina Maria Frieske – Germany
• Kata Geibl – Hungary
• Laurence Kubski – Switzerland
• Andras Ladosci – Hungary
• Chase Middleton – Australia
• Stefanie Moshammer – Austia
• Andrew Phelps & Paul Kranzler – USA / Austria
• Dustin Thierry – Curaçao / The Netherlands
• Guanyu Xu – China

Hyéres also offers a Grand Prix prize worth €20,000, and the Wallpaper* New Generation Prize. The winner of the latter gets the opportunity to shoot a fashion editorial for the magazine’s print edition, as well as receiving a digital profile here on Wallpaper.com. Last year’s winner Alice Mann turned her lens to performance art group Stasis, who took to the floor in frills, frocks and florid hues in our January 2020 Next Generation Issue.

On top of supporting rising photographers, Hyéres has a range of fashion-based awards championing burgeoning talent in the competitive industry, with a stellar jury presided over by Jonathan Anderson. The 2020 Hyéres International Festival of Fashion and Photography will take place between 23 -27 April, with exhibitions of the work continuing until 24 May.

INFORMATION

villanoailles-hyeres.com

It's all very British. The train is delayed from London to Margate, the sky is a special kind of UK-grey, and the horizon has been impressionistically smudged by drizzle. On Margate beachfront, the red plastic flames of Flamingo's Amusements lick up the walls near the shelter where, in 1921, TS Eliot sat to write part III of The Waste Land. A seagull drops a briny chip on my umbrella.

There are no better circumstances to view the best of contemporary British art at this year's Turner Prize exhibition. Since 2007, the prize has left its home at Tate Britain to be hosted by a location across the UK. 2019 marks the first time the award has been exhibited at the David Chipperfield-designed Turner Contemporary in Margate – but despite this, it feels like it has come home. JMW Turner (the Prize’s namesake) came to Margate frequently, inspired by the expanse of sea and sky that frames this pocket of Kent.

This year's shortlisted artists – Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani – present a diverse and varied snapshot of contemporary British art, in all its multiplicity. Each display, though unique in medium and method, shares a sense of difficulty. It's not easy viewing, with themes of injustice, violence, and silencing, common to each. ‘The Turner Prize exhibition has traditionally created debate and even controversy,' says Turner Contemporary director Victoria Pomery. ‘This year, we hope that conversations around the Turner Prize exhibition will enrich, challenge and create a legacy.'

Three of the four shortlisted artists' presentations share an interest in language. Self-titled ‘private ear’, musician and artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan (our tip for the win) presents an audio-visual juggernaut, drawing on research undertaken as part of an investigation commissioned by Amnesty International, into ‘ear-witness’ accounts from six survivors of the Syrian regime prison of Saydnaya. The prison’s architecture was designed to funnel the sounds of each cell to a central point, subjecting inmates to constant auditory surveillance and torture.

In the installation, poignant written testimony appears on a screen in a blackened room, to a soundtrack of audio cues made by Abu Hamdan, alongside the Saydnaya survivors, and research agency Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths University, London. Together, they recreated the sounds the prisoners remember hearing (from doors locking, to bread being dropped onto cell floors, to the sound of JCB diggers outside). Often, Abu Hamdan would use found sounds – from popcorn makers to a Nokia ringtone – and digital manipulation to jog the survivor’s audial memory. The resultantly eery score reverberates around the room, and a packed audience is hooked, as if in the cinema – a rare sight in an art gallery, where more often that not, work is looked at by many, but only truly seen by few.

Language appears again in Helen Cammock’s practise. Her film The Long Note is a collage of voices conveying the largely hidden power of women in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. She incorporates different types of text – prose, song, journalism, philosophy – questioning ‘who is representing who, and for whom?’. Cementing this interest in language as a representational tool, a table strewn with books on Irish history tempts guests to sit down and read, and a series of colourful prints convey simple and profound messages.

The pink extravaganza of Tai Shani's installation may trick the senses into a feeling of relative safety. We're in easy Instagrammable territory, but her feminist sci-fi installation lingers longer than a double tap. Dense with references, it takes as its starting point Christine de Pizan’s 1405 work The Book of the City of Ladies, in which the author creates an allegorical city made up of virtuous women, both real and mythical, from the past, present and future, who shape the structures of the city itself. Accompanying the giant pink swathes of fabric, swinging udders and suggestive balloons, is a film and audio element that narrates obscure passages from the book.

Stepping momentarily away from literature, and into art history, Oscar Murillo is the first Turner Prize artist to present the work of someone else as part of their exhibition. Surrounding John Watson Nicol’s 1883 oil painting Lochaber No Morepresents, Murillo creates a display of curtain-like sculptures that reference Monet’s water lillies, and wrap around the room, blotting out the view. Inside, pews of papier-mâché human figures sit surreally. The life-size effigies are inspired by the Colombian tradition of making models to be burnt at New Year, exploring themes of labour and migration.

Born in Yorkshire, Abu Hamdan acknowledges that – as a kid growing up outside of London – the Turner Prize was his first interaction with contemporary art. He says, ‘It is one of a few, very rare moments in which contemporary art briefly expands out of its industry bubble.’ The inherent ‘Britishness’ of the award is showcased here in its country-wide level of engagement, and its apparent commitment to diversity, and different definitions of what ‘art’ is. We jump from song to score to sculpture, from Ireland to Columbia to somewhere deep in feminist outer-space – and it's still only an hour outside of London (if the trains run on time).

INFORMATION
turnercontemporary.org

The winner of the £30,000 biennial Hepworth Prize for Sculpture 2018 has been named as Cerith Wyn Evans: Welsh conceptual artist, filmmaker and contemporary sculpture’s golden child.

There’s no doubt that Wyn Evans has been basking in his element in recent years. Many will recall his electric intervention in the White Cube’s Bermondsey gallery earlier this year, or his highly Instagramable neon occupation of Tate Britain in 2017. Rewind further to the 1980s when he produced two music videos for The Smiths and the short film Degrees of Blindness (starring Tilda Swinton) and it becomes apparent that this is an artist with fingers in most creative pies.

Now he’s rooted in sculpture, a discipline he admits he ‘used to hate’. ‘I’ve got to try and bring my best into a situation which inspires whoever has the patience to look at it. If those people are youngsters then glory be to God!’ he exclaims.

His levitating, site-specific work at the Hepworth Wakefield, Composition for 37 Flutes (in two parts), first coaxes the viewer through sound. Two intersecting glass arcs hold pipes emitting musical notation wavering between harmony and dissonance. A pair of mechanical lungs inhale, exhale and coordinate the instruments through a precisely programmed algorithm. An unnerving, biological timbre evokes the rasp and rhythm of the human respiratory system.

What sets this work apart is its bond with the building. It breathes – not just through Wyn Evans’ intricately crafted organism – but also through the pumps and pipes of architect David Chipperfield’s cacophonous concrete museum. This is a piece that occupies the eyes, ears and personal space of consenting viewers alongside the arteries of the building itself.

‘It [the prize] means nothing, but I’m a buddhist you see,’ he said shortly after collecting his award. ‘Raising awareness is a different issue. I want to show people that I have a certain compassion for the world, but the world is empty and meaningless and the universe doesn’t give a shit about us.’

The other nominated artists – Michael Dean, Mona Hatoum, Philip Lai and Magali Reus – have each generated distinctive and compelling work, carving out their own corner of sculptural territory.

Dean’s Of Or for LOL is meticulously organised chaos. The perimeter of the space is lined with drooping incident tape that reads simply: ‘sorry’. Within the main composition, the artist channels ‘moments of intensity’ through building materials, litter and a mound of pennies totalling a three-day emergency food bank allowance for a family of four. In any case, there doesn’t appear to be a great deal to ‘laugh out loud’ about.

Hatoum offers up the breadth of her deft material ability, marrying mundane objectivity, juxtaposition and upsurges of violence. Her globe Hot Spot, perched on a head height pedestal, outlines the continents in pulsating red neon, accompanied by a piercing electrical hum. In a modestly sized steel cabinet, the artist’s Murano glassblown sculptures – delicate and regal – first appear to be perfume bottles but are in fact casts of hand grenades; a sculpture both exquisite and ferocious.

Meanwhile, Lai stages domesticity and mass production as poetry, or as he puts, it, of an ‘absurd expenditure of labour’. His new untitled work comprising wall-mounted washing up bowls soiled with concrete appear as both tools to create and the creation itself. His 2016 Guest loves host in a way like no other, further conveys themes of ‘home’ in a seemingly functional and precise brushed aluminium kitchen island.

Dutch artist Reus presents new works from her complex Sentinel series. Sculptures reminiscent of the whimsical contraptions of Heath Robinson are twisted into contemporary contexts through objects resembling fire hoses, hospital equipment and metal appendages. These articles on the cusp of functionality are warped until rendered obsolete. Another body of new work, Dearest explores romantic narratives through ‘ladders’ personified through props like hats and bottles.

The 2018 judging panel comprised Sarah Brown, Leeds Art Gallery senior curator; Martin Clark, Camden Arts Centre director; Margot Heller OBE, South London Gallery director; and Helen Legg, Tate Liverpool director. The prize was chaired by The Hepworth Wakefield director Simon Wallis OBE. The winner was picked from a shortlist of UK-based artists of different ages, at different stages of their careers. Wyn Evans follows inaugural recipient Helen Marten in 2016.

Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to vote for their own best in show, with the winner announced online in January. All five artists will exhibit at The Hepworth Wakefield until 20 January 2019.

INFORMATION

The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture exhibition is on view until 20 January 2019. For more information, visit the Hepworth Wakefield website

ADDRESS

The Hepworth Wakefield
Gallery Walk
Wakefield WF1 5AW

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Iraq-born artist Mehdi Moutashar and Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum have been announced as joint winners of the Jameel Prize 5. It is the first time two finalists have been awarded the prize, which is aimed at artists and designers who have been inspired by Islamic tradition. Fady Jameel, president of Art Jameel, presented Moutashar and Tabassum with the £25,000 prize during a ceremony at the V&A in London.

Tabassum won the judging panel over with her expressive design for the Bait ur Rouf mosque, built in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2012. Inspired by Sultanate mosque architecture, the mosque ‘breathes’ through perforated brick walls, keeping the prayer hall ventilated and cool while also creating entrancing patterns in light. ‘Light is a beautiful material to work with,’ says Tabassum. ‘If you can use it properly – how you bring in the light, the openings and apertures – I think it can make it spiritual and very contemplative.’

Moutashar, meanwhile, received the award for his minimalist abstract works, which have roots in Islamic geometry. Now based in Arles, the artist left Iraq in the late 1960s and settled in Paris, where he encountered forms of minimalism, including geometric abstraction, which he integrated with the Islamic traditions of his homeland.

Established in 2009 after the renovation of the V&A’s Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, the Jameel Prize is awarded every two years in partnership with Art Jameel. Previous winners include Turkish fashion label Dice Kayek, Pakistani artist Ghulam Mohammad, Algerian sculptor Rachid Koraïchi, and Iran-born artist Afruz Amighi.

An exhibition of work by the Jameel Prize 5 winners and six other shortlisted artists and designers – including Kamrooz Aram, Hayv Kahraman, Hala Kaiksow, Naqsh Collective, Younes Rahmoun and Wardha Shabbir – runs until 25 November at the V&A. The show has been curated by Tim Stanley, senior curator of the V&A’s great historical collection from the Islamic Middle East, with Salma Tuqan, the V&A’s curator of contemporary art and design from the region.

INFORMATION

An exhibition of work by the Jameel Prize 5 finalists is on view until 25 November. For more information, visit the V&A website

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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Luxury brands are entering the crowded world of the art award at a rate of knots, offering intelligent cultural prizes with great intent, thoughtful outreach, and high profiles. Max Mara’s Art Prize for Women is in its seventh edition; the Loewe Craft Prize has just turned two; and Swarovski has been crowning ‘designers of the future’ since 2015. Now in its 27th edition, the Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award was ahead of the curve.

In its 109 year history, the heritage pen purveyor, accessories master and latterly, haute horologist, has positioned itself firmly in the art world. If you go to the Montblanc HQ in Hamburg, there’s art everywhere, from the minute you enter the building. ‘And it’s not art that’s been bought from a museum, or loaned from somewhere – it’s art that they’ve commissioned,’ explain co-chairmen of the Montblanc Cultural Foundation Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. Art filters down into its very make-up. ‘A writing pen is so personal,’ Fellrath adds. ‘It allows you to make a direct connection to something visual, to something that is actually really in you. I think the arts have the same philosophy.’

Each one of Montblanc’s highly crafted pens is an artistic expression. Take its latest elaborate collection, which pays homage to Ludwig II, the so-called ‘mad swan king’ of Bavaria, and devoted patron of the composer Richard Wagner. Each pen is embellished with an arching swans neck clasp.

This year, the German branch of the prize (which is annually given to patrons of particular local and international note in 17 locations around the world) was awarded to Jürgen Wesseler. Founder and director of a small German exhibition space called Bremerhavener Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst, he has curated exhibitions with international contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter, Sol Le Witt, Sigmar Polke, and Joseph Beuys, and is credited with bringing many important works to Germany for the first time.

‘This award is very timely for Jürgen,’ explains Fellrath. ‘Not only did he just turn 80, but Bremerhavener Kabinett has been around for an incredible 50 years – not that you’d know it, talking to him. He has always been so humble. He’s one of those genius people without realising it – he followed his own conviction. There was no advertising, and he still doesn’t really have a website for the organisation. It was always done for the pure passion.’

Sought-after curatorial duo Fellrath and Bardaouil took the reigns of the award two years ago, and have played a part in its transference from a broad, cultural award (which honoured patrons in the realms of art, dance, theatre and music) into one dedicated to the visual arts. Working hand in hand with Montblanc, they have keenly and cleverly fine-tuned the award’s brief, emphasising its global, inter-connective nature. Fellrath, explains, ‘We want to create a best practice model for patrons globally; a network of pioneering people who enable art making in the most inspiring and innovative ways.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Montblanc website

A recent, major exhibition at the ICA brought the work of Forensic Architecture to a wider audience; and today’s 2018 Turner Prize shortlist announcement confirmed it – Eyal Weizman and his team are onto something big. From their academic base at Goldsmiths, University of London, Forensic Architecture brings together a captivating mix of research, spatial studies, design and politics that made it to the shortlist of one of the world’s most coveted art accolades.

A 15-strong collective, the Forensic Architecture team consists of architects, artists and a variety of other disciplines, such as filmmakers, software developers, archaeologists, lawyers, journalists. Their investigations delve into how a building, or a space, can reveal clues that can be uncovered; in the same way a criminal pathologist examines a body to determine cause of death. Their innovative ways of design and image reading and analysis allow for a different way of documenting and preserving buildings and history. The practice’s explorations reach far and wide, including sites and events in Germany, Greece and Israel. 

‘The jury praised Forensic Architecture for developing highly innovative methods for sourcing and visualising evidence relating to human rights abuses around the world, used in courts of law as well as exhibitions of art and architecture’, explains Tate Britain, in an earlier announcement.

This is not the first time the Turner Prize turns its attentions to architecture; Assemble’s 2015 win was the first similar case, paving the way for further nominations from the field.

The ICA show, ‘Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture’, preceded by a participation at the prestigious Documenta 14 art exhibition in Athens, gave the Turner jury enough reason to nominate the ground-breaking team, but their work is far from over. Coming up this September, Forensic Architecture will represent the UK in the second edition of London’s Design Biennale at Somerset House. The team ‘will support and train members of the Yazidi people to collect, document and preserve evidence of destruction, genocide and enslavement perpetrated by Daesh (Islamic State) against the Yazda’, explain the organisers.

The 2018 Turner Prize winner will be announced during a dedicated ceremony in December. 'Exhibitions are important forums for making public crucial evidence of human rights violations and their production is an opportunity to support cases and causes', says Weizman. 'While it is an honour to have been chosen by such an important cultural institution as the V&A to represent the UK at the London Design Biennale, and to be recognised as a nominee for the 2018 Turner Prize, it is also a great responsibility to use these opportunities to best serve our investigations and those most affected by the human rights issues therein.'

INFORMATION
For more information visit the Forensic Architecture website

For 25 years, The Arts Foundation has given opportunities to artists, designers, poets and choreographers at the start of their careers. Wayne McGregor, writer Ali Smith, poet Alice Oswald and artist Alex Hartley have all benefited from the annual award, which is known as London’s ‘honest’ art prize, because of its unassuming nature. ‘It asks and expects nothing of its winners’, says Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre and winner of an Arts Foundation bursary in 2002. ‘It just says “go out and enjoy”.’

This year, two awards (each worth £10,000) were made possible by The David Collins Foundation, which was set up in 2016 to honour the legacy of late architect and designer David Collins. The David Collins Foundation who began supporting the awards last year, sponsoring Max Frommeld as the winner of the Furniture Design category. As a special tribute to the awards 25th year, Frommeld has been invited back (along with 15 previous winners) to nominate their favourite applicant – an apt way of celebrating the awards’ quarter-century.

Each nominee will receive £1,000, while five of the most promising are selected as the overall winners, as chosen by a panel of expert judges, including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alice Rawsthorn and Julian Isaacs. It was announced that the two fellowships supported by The David Collins Foundation went to glass blower Jochen Holz (nominated by Max Frommeld), and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (nominated by illustrator Slawa Harasymovicz).

We caught up with Holz and Baczynski-Jenkins to find out what the Arts Foundation grants will mean to them...

Jochen Holz, glass artist

In another life, London-based Glass artist Holz was a scientific lamp worker making glass apparatus. ‘It was all about precision and functionality,’ he says. ‘I only really developed a style during my time at the RCA, after years of following more traditional approach.’

‘The fellowship will give me the freedom to experiment,’ he adds. ‘I would like to undertake a range of colour experiments using enamels and lustres to expand on the limited commercially available existing colour palette tubes. I’d also like to experiment with coloured glass neons, exploring the full range of possibilities, including filling bigger pieces.’

Bridging art, design and installation, his elegant work has ‘the potential to push to a different creative level with the Foundation’s help’, says Frommeld. Indeed, Holz believes awards like this are of the upmost importance. ‘It’s very hard for most artists to be fully engaged in their work and to square this with making a living, so giving creatives supported breathing space can be a really vital contribution.’
  
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, choreographer

‘The great thing about this type of award is that it’s not a commission. Its important to have time for researching and not thinking immediately about the outcome,’ says Baczynski-Jenkins, whose choreography draws attention to the structures of desire, empathy and queer pleasure. ‘There is a paradoxical relation between inefficiency and efficiency in making art work – having time for non-productive research gives the work more volume and texture in the long term.’

His work, which has been displayed at (and is a perfect fit for) London’s Chisenhale Gallery, was praised by nominator Slawa Harasymovicz as ‘strong, contemporary yet timeless’. Particularly impressive is his eight-minute performance piece Federico, which focuses solely on the hands of two performers. Baczynski-Jenkins describes as ‘a sort of micro-archive of intimate touch’.

Winning the award compelled Baczynski-Jenkins to offer advice to other aspiring artistic talents: ‘Be honest in your practice and take risks. Remember that art is about offering an experience, and trying to make the world a better place, even through the smallest gestures.’ 

It’s a thought that seems to sum up the attitude of The Art Foundation and its simple, understated – yet utterly life-changing – award ceremony. It concludes by looking forwards, to the possible futures of its nominees and winners. Rufus Norris mutters, ‘Now the fun starts. Let’s do this.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit The Arts Foundation website and the David Collins Studio website

Bulbous ceramic jugs hang upside down in the darkened Whitechapel Gallery. Sickly yellow light pours from each, casting cartoonish speech-bubble shaped shadows across the floor and walls.

‘They're not just jugs – they are decapitated heads, chopped open below the nose,’ says their creator, Emma Hart – the sixth recipient of the biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women. This pioneering award, in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti, offers a female artist the luxury of time, space and funding to create a significant body of work.

Hart used the six month, bespoke residency offered by the Prize to travel around Italy. Joined by her young daughter and partner, Hart immersed herself in Italian culture, meeting with artists in Milan, ceramicists in Faenza and researchers in Rome.

Installation view of 'Mamma Mia!,' by Emma Hart.

Issues surrounding family dynamics preoccupied Hart on her travels, reflected in the finished work, which she refers to as ‘a family of jugs’. Each is interconnected in literal ‘family ties’ by reems of red rope, curled around the ceiling beams.

Notably, Hart observed family therapy sessions while she was in Milan. Shadowing psychotherapist Matteo Selvini, she learnt about the Milan Systems Approach – a constructivist method of therapy, that emphasises the importance (and power) of non-verbal communication.

And so the skulls are mouthless; their colourful ‘brains’ fall out of their open, gaping necks, with no lips to speak of. Their stark black and white exterior walls conceal vibrant underbellys. ‘The interior patterns reflect my state of mind while I was in Italy, and the things that I saw,’ Hart explains. ‘One design features a green lady. She might be me, I don’t know. She’s trapped in a jealousy plant and she can’t get out. She’s constantly looking over her shoulder to see the person next to her.’

Another sees a tessellation of heads, each crying speech-bubble shaped tears. A third pattern features a tangle of arms with their thumbs up or down, depending on which way you look at it. It's the first time Hart has attempted illustration, and the drawings’ childlike nature belies their ulterior, difficult subject matter.

More grown-up, violent symbology comes courtesy of the swinging ‘cutlery’ ceiling fans, that skim dangerously close to the base of the skulls. Each rung features a knife, fork or spoon, flinging elongated shadows across the floor. The flying cutlery recalls tea-time traumas, and tantrums around the kitchen table.

It's uncomfortable viewing. Many gallery-goers skirt the edges of the installation, hesitant to walk into the jugs’ bright spotlights; or scared to be clonked by a swinging spoon. ‘Awkwardness has been an ongoing theme in my work,’ Hart says. ‘By using the light in this way, I was really trying to think of how the sculptures could affect a viewer. There’s trepidation when you’re forced to step into its projection. The light shouts on you, it spits on you – or it just talks to you. You choose.’

INFORMATION

’Emma Hart: Mamma Mia!’ is on view till 3 September. For more information, visit the Max Mara Fashion Group website, and the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX

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There's a genuine community feeling at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Young artists are nurtured there, and more established ones return to exhibit there time after time. What’s more, the same familiar faces of gallery-goers can be seen on every visit. Perhaps this neighbourly spirit stems from Baltic's Gateshead location, where it monopolises the contemporary art scene in the area, puncturing the grey skyline like a great temple of culture.

More likely, it’s down to how the place is run. Since she took the reigns in 2015, director Sarah Munro has been on a mission to put practitioners at the heart of everything that Baltic does. No wonder the likes of Monica Bonvicini, Mike Nelson, Lorna Simpson and Pedro Cabrita Reis return to exhibit again and again. It's because of their longstanding relationship with the centre that these four, internationally esteemed artists were chosen as judges for the inaugural Artists' Award – the first award in the UK to fill the judging panel with only artists. They were each tasked with nominating an art star of the future, who would receive £25,000 to create a significant body of work, along with a £5,000 artist commission. The results now spill over two floors of Baltic.

Unlike many award exhibitions, the work of winners Shen Xin (picked by Nelson), Eric N. Mack (Simpson), Toni Schmale (Bonvicini) and Jose Dávila (Cabrita Reis) intertwine, conceptually and physically. In Baltic's triple-height, warehouse-like top floor, Dávila's architectural assemblage of building-site RSJs and sandstone boulders (sourced from the Gateshead area) frame Mack's sweeping textile sculptures, installed directly behind.

Downstairs, the moodier, low-ceilinged third floor gallery houses the BDSM-inspired works of German sculptor Toni Schmale. They set the tone for Chinese, London-based artist Shen Xin's powerful video installation, which unpicks themes of power-play, femininity and intimacy. Four screens, arranged in a square, play videos on a loop, interrupting each other and overlapping – a purposefully frustrating, disorientating watch.

They're a very diverse bunch of artists, with contrasting perspecitves. But Baltic's friendly, welcoming feel seems to have swept the four nominees up with it, aided by the fact that there will be no standout winner of the award. ‘It was important for us not to pit the artists against each other,' explains chief curator Laurence Sillars. 'These guys are the future! Without them, Baltic, and importantly, contemporary art in general, will be consigned to history.’ In this sense, the award is a guardianship for future talent. It promotes cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, cross-generational cooperation – and the team behind it should be applauded as much as the nominees.

INFORMATION

’Baltic Artists’ Award 2017’  on show until 1 October. For more information, visit the Baltic website

ADDRESS

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
S Shore Rd, Gateshead
NE8 3BA

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The indefatigable husband and wife team behind Candlestar art and education consultancy, Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, are particularly busy in the spring. It’s when Photo London, one of their most ambitious projects, launches in the grounds of Somerset House and in participating spaces across the city. But this year, it just so happens that the duo’s other flagship project, the international photography and sustainability award Prix Pictet, fell in the same month. On 4 May, this prestigious prize was awarded to Richard Mosse, whose pioneering ‘Heat Maps’ series can be seen at the V&A until the end of the month.

In the run-up to Photo London, Benson and Farshad took time out of their frankly terrifying schedule to talk to us...

Wallpaper*: Logistically, how do you pull something like Photo London together?
Fariba Farshad: It helps that we have a long, long history in the photography world.
Michael Benson: The planning starts almost as the last photographs leave the site in May. We take a short break – five days maybe – and even then we're thinking about what we might do for next year. It takes a year to plan everything. People tease us when they see us sending out a ‘save the date’ in September for the following May.

W*: Sounds exhausting!
MB: In a way its kind of exhilarating. Hopefully we've had a good fair and the exhibitors have gone away happy. You begin to think: ‘what do we do now?’ At the end of each fair, our emails just fall off a cliff. Suddenly, the caravans have moved on and you’re left with an empty inbox!

W*: During the busy planning stage, how do you manage the needs of the public, the exhibitors, the dealers and the collectors?
MB: It’s quite the balancing act. We’re trying to make London an international hub of photography, so the dealers and the collectors are a strong priority for us. We held a big event at the ICA in New York, which was designed to encourage New Yorkers come to London, and we visited Art Dubai in March. These large scale connections with collectors are important. As for the dealers, it’s more about having one-on-one conversations with them. Also, during the course of the year, we have talks for the public. Our job is to engage and educate the public over a 12-month period rather than just the five-day fair.

W*: How does London react to the fair each year?
FF: When we started Photo London in 2015, local dealers told us there were no collectors in town. They said Paris was the place to go. So we took nothing for granted. We started an education programme that brought a whole new group of people to photography. We had 33 talks last year during the fair, and more than 3,000 people attended. This year, we started thinking, ‘Where are the gaps? Where are the areas we haven’t touched in the last two years?’ So this year we are going to see a different, extended approach.

W*: Do you think having an international photography fair in London is particularly important, during these times of political upheaval?
MB: For starters, London is the international capital of culture, so if we didn’t have an international photography fair, it would be lacking something.
FF: In certain countries at certain times, art has been the only boundary-crossing thing that’s kept us open. It’s precious and important to keep these channels open. Which is one of the reasons we chose this year’s Prix Pictet theme: ‘Space’.

W*: It does seem like a prevalent theme. How did you come up with it?
MB: It was a group effort, including out partners. Each year, we make a list of suggestions and ask ourselves, ‘Does that work? Does that have the breadth?’ The theme can’t be narrow, or it precludes potential submissions, but it shouldn’t be too broad to encompass anything. Saying that, ‘Space’ is a pretty broad theme – it allows for all kinds of different interpretations.

W*: The entries were incredibly diverse. Did you have any personal favourites?
FF: Honestly, they were all great. We had over 600 submissions this year, and had to whittle this in half before sending to the judges to make the final shortlist of 12.

W*: That in itself is a huge amont of work. How was it balancing both Prix Pictet and Photo London falling in the same month?
MB: It’s just been great fun. Excitement drives us. Plus we have a phenomenal team – they are key to our success.

INFORMATION

Photo London runs from 18-21 May. For more information, visist the Photo London website, and the Prix Pictet website

ADDRESS

Somerset House
Strand
London WC2R 1LA

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The Scottish artist Peter Doig, whose disorientating figurative works have garnered global artistic acclaim, has become the fourth recipient of the Whitechapel Gallery's Art Icon award. Supported by Swarovski, the lifetime achievement award recognises an artist's notable contribution to their chosen medium. Recipients include painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin (2014), land artist Richard Long (2015) and video art pioneer Joan Jonas (2016).

A committee of internationally prominent figures – including Max Mara's Luigi Maramotti, art consultancy Nine AM founder Bettina von Hase and Swarovski executive board member Nadja Swarovski – made the decision to honour Doig, who Swarovski describes as a 'truly visionary talent'.

Praising the artist, Swarovski picks up on his work's 'celebration of the natural environment', which she describes as 'something that speaks to us all'. Indeed, Doig's humbly rendered landscapes, which are influenced by formative years spent in Canada and Trinidad, depict an artist who has a deep appreciation of and respect for nature's beauty – something, it seems, that's increasingly important to memorialise.

Co-hosted by Nadja Swarovski and Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, a luxurious gala dinner and award ceremony held at the gallery ensured that affairs were conducted in appropriately high style. The event also saw a charity auction led by Henry Highley of Phillips, in which an impressive catalogue of works donated by leading contemporary artists (including Cecily Brown and Enrico David) went under the gavel. All funds raised will go towards the Whitechapel Gallery’s outreach programmes, in particular its work with thousands of children and young people each year.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website and the Swarovski website

Visually, the work of the four artists nominated for the first Hepworth Sculpture Prize couldn't be more different. Under the surface, the eclectic group share a progressive attitude, a desire to interrogate their materials and a penchant for audience interaction. Just a few reasons they've been chosen for this pioneering award – the first of its kind in the UK to focus on innovation in contemporary sculpture.

David Chipperfield's commanding architecture creates a natural gravitas around exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield. This one feels more important and timely than ever thanks to the prize's high stakes. The £30,000 award will be judged by a panel including Chipperfield himself and announced on 17 November. What's more, the winner will be forever linked to the esteemed mother of contemporary British sculpture, Barbara Hepworth. Accolade indeed.

As well as innovation, diversity is key to the award, aided by its limitless age parameters. A good job, because apparently no one knows the eldest entrant David Medalla's exact age. It's in the region of 80, his assistant informs. Still sketching with veracity (even during the press walk through), the Filipino-born artist could be mistaken for someone much younger. His enthusiasm is reflected in the effervescent sculpture Cloud Canyons, a kinetic work comprising a muddle of transparent tubes that emit torrents of soap bubbles. Kept sensibly away from these is his other offering, A Stitch in Time – a room full of hanging linens that visitors are invited to thread messages into, in a sewing box of colours. It's just as entertaining today as when we reviewed it earlier this year.

Medalla, his celebrated career unspooling before us in this two-part display, is an early tip for the 'people's choice award', to be announced at the end of the show's run. On the other hand, Dalston-based Steven Claydon is seen by some as the left-field critics' choice. His probing work is essential to the award's premise of innovation. Fittingly, his space in the Hepworth is entered through a curtain of plastic orange sheets imbued with citronella – 'a pernicious membrane' – providing a refreshing, if pungent, redefinition of what sculpture is.

Moving past the wall of Claydon's fluorescent blue lights and through another orange curtain, we enter Helen Marten's space. It's been a great year for the 31-year-old from Macclesfield. Her imposing works slide from 2D to 3D with an elegance fit, appropriately, for the Turner Prize 2016 shortlist – the winner of which will be announced in December. Like Claydon, her work hits the prize's progressive brief. 'Marten is truly interrogating sculpture,' chief curator Andrew Bonacina explains. 'From the words, ideas and thoughts that go into her months of research, into the 2D silkscreens, which push out into space through sculptural "appendages", as she calls them, it's a material journey.'

Bonacina has saved the most arresting work until last. Phyllida Barlow 'takes over the architecture' with a reconstruction of her monumental 2013 work screestage, created for Des Moines Art Center. 'The idea of re-installing a work I'd already created some years ago was exciting,' she explains. 'This space has a completely different dynamic; conflicting angles, which of course, I love.' Her room is entered through a door positioned directly under the abstract, architectural work, and visitors must duck under tiles of cardboard and polystyrene, not seeing the decorative, colourful roof until they're deeply immersed. 'I wanted it to be a surprise,' the artist smiles.

It's all too easy to pick a favourite based on the works on show at The Hepworth, but it's important to remember that the award will be judged on life-time achievement and contribution to sculpture, as well as what we see in the galleries. With this in mind, we're sensibly hedging our bets as to who will clinch the prize. To a certain extent, it doesn't seem like the most important thing. That the prize exists at all is cause for celebration, and we hope it returns next year with even more bubbles, citronella, material interrogation and surprises.

INFORMATION
’The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture’ is on view until 22 January 2017. For more information, visit the Hepworth Wakefield website

ADDRESS

The Hepworth Wakefield
Gallery Walk
Wakefield WF1 5AW

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Hugo Boss chairman and CEO Mark Langer and Guggenheim Museum director Richard Armstrong named artist Anicka Yi as the recipient of the biennial Hugo Boss Prize in New York last night.

'The Hugo Boss Prize marks a highlight in our partnership with the Guggenheim Museum and we are proud that it has now been at the core of our arts program for twenty years,' said Langer. 'We would like to extend our sincerest congratulations to the winner and express our gratitude to the jury and the Guggenheim Museum for their dedication and support.'

Yi will receive the prize, which awards the winner $100,000, administered by the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, and a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim that will open April 2017. The New York-based conceptual artist often involves the themes of scent and tactility in her work, working with fragrance and creating sculptures out of scented soap.

She has created soap paintings that comment on luxury consumer culture, and she has also boiled shredded Teva sandals, recalled powdered milk, thermal clay, a steeped Swatch, and a cell phone jammer, among other things as a commentary on, according to Yi, 'industries that constitute our identity.' Yi beat out a shortlist of five other finalists, who included Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera, British artist Mark Lecky, American artist Ralph Lemon, American painter Laura Owens and Egyptian artist Wael Shawky.

Several of the past winners — who include Matthew Barney (1996), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), Danh Võ (2012) and Paul Chan (2014) — have gone on to have major careers in art.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Hugo Boss website

Every two years since 2002, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative has conducted an experiment in creative fusion, flinging some of the best-known creators in the world together with talented young artists at or near the start of their careers. The roll call of past mentors features an astonishing selection of illustrious names, including Margaret Atwood, Peter Zumthor, Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown, David Hockney, Martin Scorsese, Brian Eno and Sir Anish Kapoor. Each mentor spends a minimum of 30 working days with their protégé, but in practice, many invest far more time than that; how they structure the partnership is up to each pair to decide.

Run from Rolex’s gleaming green-glass HQ in Geneva – which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Emerald City in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz – the programme has an intriguing modus vivendi. For each iteration of the scheme, a special advisory board is appointed that suggests mentors for each discipline – currently architecture, dance, film, literature, music, theatre and visual arts. Once the mentors have been appointed, separate panels for each discipline identify a shortlist of potential protégés, although the final selection is left to the mentors themselves.

You can’t apply to take part: in fact, protégés-to-be don’t know they have been chosen until they receive an email inviting them to participate in the scheme. Given that this year’s mentors include Sir David Chipperfield, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, Alfonso Cuarón and Robert Lepage, we suspect that few, if any, potential protégés turn the opportunity down. It probably also helps that they are each given a grant of CHF25,000 (€23,000) and their travel expenses for the year, plus the same amount again at the end of the scheme towards the creation of a new piece of work. The mentors, for their part, receive CHF75,000 (€69,000) each for their time and advice. 

When we meet in Geneva, this year’s protégés have just been introduced to each other, although most of them have already spent some time with their mentor. They are a typically diverse bunch, both in terms of their interests and their backgrounds. Architecture protégé Simon Kretz is the only local: based in Zurich, he has co-founded two practices and has a special interest in ideas of urbanism, which he is exploring with his mentor, Chipperfield. By contrast, South African dancer Londiwe Khoza was born in Soweto and started dance lessons at the age of five. A soloist at the Cape Dance Company by the age of 22, she will spend her year studying and dancing with Israeli dancer and choreographer Ohad Naharin.

Born and raised in Mumbai, film protégé Chaitanya Tamhane has already spent time on set with the director of Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón. Tamhane’s first feature film, Court, premiered at the 2014 Venice Film Festival and has gone on to win numerous awards. São Paulo-based writer Julián Fuks is planning to write a metafictional novel under the watchful eye of Mozambican novelist Mia Couto, winner of the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Pauchi Sasaki is a Peruvian sound artist and performer, creator of (among other things) a musical dress; she has already been touring Japan and Europe with her mentor, American composer Philip Glass. 

Legendary stage and film director Robert Lepage, for his part, will be mentoring young Argentinean playwright and director Matías Umpierrez, whose work has included simultaneous international performances. Meanwhile, artist Thao-Nguyen Phan, who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but now works in her native Vietnam, will be working with great American performance artist Joan Jonas. As Rebecca Irvin, head of philanthropy at Rolex, says: ‘The chance to benefit from the experience of one of the world’s greatest exponents in their discipline is an unparalleled opportunity for these young artists.’ They must be very glad that email didn’t go into their spam folder.

As originally featured in the November 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*212)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative website

The London-based architecture and design collective Assemble have won this year's Turner Prize. 

The prestigious award – previously bestowed upon Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst, among others – celebrates and champions artists under the age of 50 working in the UK. This year's winners were revealed at Glasgow's Tramway last night, the announcement made by artist Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon. 

Assemble, known for their community-based projects and architectural approach, scooped the prize for their work with residents of the Granby Four Street in Liverpool — a group of terraced houses built around 1900, which residents have been fighting to save from demolition for the past decade. Other notable projects of the 18-strong collective include 'Underline', Transport for London's contemporary art initiative which will see them unleash their creativity on Seven Sisters tube station in 2016, and the popular Brutalist Playground at the RIBA.

The top accolade earns the group £25,000, while fellow nominees – British multimedia artist Bonnie Camplin, Canadian audio and performance artist Janice Kerbel; and German sculptor, installation, and collage artist Nicole Wermers – receive £5,000 each. All will feature in a group exhibition that will be on view until 17 January, 2016 at the Tate.

Artist Vanessa Baird might just be Norway’s answer to Grayson Perry. Her latest work, a room of provocative wall drawings entitled I don’t want to be anywhere, but here I am, is a technicolour tapestry of smut and gore, with subject matter and scenery running the gamut of entrails and furniture to refugees lost at sea. It’s intriguing and repulsive all at once – and the judges of the 2015 Lorck Schive Art Prize seem to agree, having just awarded Baird this year’s NOK 500,000 ($60,000) award.

Currently on show at the Trondheim Kunstmuseum, the Lorck Schive Art Prize exhibition includes works by Baird and fellow finalists Ane Hjort Guttu, Jana Winderen and Snorre Ytterstad. Although still in its relative infancy – this year is only the second edition – the Lorck Schive Art Prize is nonetheless Norway’s biggest contemporary art award.

Among the finalists’ works, Winderen presented an immersive (if not particularly gripping) sound installation, The Wanderer, made from hydrophone recordings taken in the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Guttu’s film, Time Passes, traces a student who opts to sit next to a beggar as part of an art project – a biting commentary on the role of art and the artist within political systems – while Ytterstad’s installation Wires and Strings comments on Europe’s refugee crisis.

But it was Baird’s frenetic mural that prevailed, its grotesqueness defiling the pristine gallery space while at the same time serving as the perfect companion piece to Gustav Vigeland’s monumental plaster relief Hell, permanently installed in the same room.

One portion of the mural contains bears an uncanny resemblance to a widely circulated photograph of a drowned Syrian child – entirely coincidental, Baird explains, as the work was created before the tragic image went viral, but poignant nonetheless. Scenes of the sea, which the artist created first, eventually give way to eerie domestic situations. Here, demented fairytale motifs echo her previous works, which have touched on everything from lycanthropy to the Brothers Grimm.

Held biennially, the Lorck Schive Art Prize comprises a shortlist of four finalists whittled down from ten artists, compiled by the Arts Council Norway, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, the Norwegian Curator’s Association and the Norwegian Critics Association. This year’s international jury – Lithuanian curator Raimundas Malašauskas, Norwegian artist Eline Mugaas and Ikon Gallery director Jonathan Watkins – tapped Baird for the top prize, citing her unabashed frankness as a factor, although all four finalists received a substantial stipend towards creating the work for the exhibition.

INFORMATION

The Lorck Schive Art Prize 2015 exhibition is on view until 28 February 2016. For more information, visit Trondheim Kunstmuseum’s website

ADDRESS

Trondheim Kunstmuseum
Bispegata 7b
7013 Trondheim

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A London-based architecture, design and art collective has launched a range of furniture and household items as part of their creative transformation of a derelict Liverpool housing estate. The 15 members of Assemble set up the Granby Workshop as a social enterprise through their nomination for Turner Prize 2015. Hand-made products in the range include block-printed fabrics, ceramic tiles, furniture made from deliberately-burnt timber, marbled lampshades and cabinet handles.

The selection reflects pieces that were stripped out of Victorian terraced homes in Granby, when they were boarded up by the council in preparation for demolition. However, local campaign group Granby Four Streets, fought to save the few remaining properties. In 2011 the group secured ten empty houses for renovation into affordable homes. Assemble has since teamed up with these local campaigners not only to help them transform the remaining houses into homes, but to set up this social enterprise.

The Granby Workshop operates on a crowd-funding model, and trains and employs local people in experimental manufacturing processes, with profits going back into the business. Some of the most appealing designs are the Sawdust Ceramic Handles. These clay knobs are 'individually wrapped in tin foil, buried in a barbeque filled with sawdust, set alight and smoked for 12 hours,' according to Assemble.

Meanwhile the squat and sturdy Granby Rock Table has a table-top made of demolition and construction waste - red and yellow brick, slate and stone - polished smooth. The same process has even been used to make mantle pieces. The five block-printed fabrics, some of which have a subtle asymmetry, are also very pleasing. Pre-orders can be made during the Turner Prize exhibition, whose winner will be announced on 7 December. Production of the range will begin in early 2016.

INFORMATION

Photography: Assemble

About five years ago artist Anila Quayyum Agha visited the Alhambra, the Moorish palace and fortress in Granada, Spain built in 889 AD and expanded in the 11th century by emir Mohammed ben Al-Ahmar. Agha noticed how visitors responded to the beautiful, intricate Moorish patterns within the structure. 'I was fascinated by the awe that people were showing me on their faces and I thought, "I'd like to make this thing happen in the US,"' says Agha.

Agha took her idea and layered it with her own experience as a woman of being denied access to the mosques in her native Pakistan. 'It was my experience of being excluded that made me think, "how do you make people realise that when you exclude somebody it causes issues?"' she says. Agha returned to her studio in Indianapolis, where she teaches drawing at the Herron School of Art and Design, and began to cut patterns like the ones she had seen at the Alhambra. What she created was 'Intersections', a large-scale shadow box comprised of Moorish patterns, suspended in the middle of a room. A light in the centre of the cube casts the patterns' shadows across the space.

'Intersections' went on to win $300,000 for both the public and jury prize at the ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan last autumn. The installation made its debut this week at Dallas Contemporary in conjunction with Dallas Arts Week, and is on view until 23 August to mark the inaugural ArtPrize competition in Dallas next year.

'Intersections' touches on several issues - gender, religion and authenticity - and the result is a beautiful and thought-provoking piece. Judging by the looks on people's faces, Agha has discovered a way to recreate that same wonder and awe she saw at the Alhambra.

ADDRESS

161 Glass St
Dallas
TX 75207
United States

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Despite the chilly -9°C early winter freeze in Kiev there was a consistent queue of trendy young people waiting eagerly outside the Pinchuk Art Centre throughout the weekend to see the Future Generation Art Prize exhibition. Given recent events in Ukraine, there’s more interest than ever in the Victor Pinchuk Foundation’s biennial art prize, both locally and internationally.

Now in its third year, the $100,000 prize awarded by billionaire philanthropist Victor Pinchuk is the most generous international art award open for application to all artists under 35; it’s also attracted high profile judges in previous years, Nicholas Serota and Ai Weiwei included – little wonder the Foundation received 5,586 applications from 148 countries this year.

An international committee whittled that tally down to a 21-strong shortlist with, for the first time, two artists from the Ukraine. Meanwhile, China, the UK, and the US were also well represented with two artists each. In his award speech Pinchuk emphasized the importance of providing a platform for voices of discontent in a political crisis. 'Art is linked to freedom and openness,' he said.

When we asked him if he thought Ukrainian artists had been silenced or crippled by revolution and political crisis this year, Pinchuk shook his head. 'Artists respond faster and deeper than the rest of the world.' Pinchuk Art Centre curator Bjorn Geldhof said that the revolution which took place in February 'unites almost all the works in the show, whether it be in a direct or indirect way.'

Chilean artist Pilar Quinteros reconstructed a vanished fountain at Maidan - the site in Kiev of the main protest camp in February - out of paper, before asking people to destroy it; and collective performance art group Public Movement led a crowd symbolically through the city’s snow-laden streets, using dance, music and theatre to provoke cycles of friendship and strife among dozens of participants in major sites of in the city.

In the end the main prize was shared between Angolan installation artist Nástio Mosquito, now based in Ghent, and New-York based Colombian artist Carlos Motta. The panel of judges, including sculptor Doris Salcedo and curator Eckhard Schneider, awarded three Special Prizes (including a $20,000 residency programme) to two Ukrainian artists and a Russian artist. They insisted the decision was not politically motivated, and that the prize was judged purely on quality. 'That was a gift from God,' commented Pinchuk.

We spoke with both of the winning artists to find out more. Carlos Motta tells us about the the historical and cultural prejudices that fuel his artistic practice...

Wallpaper*: Your sculpture ‘Instrument’, a penis hand-carved in obsidian stone in a glass vitrine in the middle of the floor, is the first artwork one sees in this year’s Future Generation exhibition. Is it a challenge?
Carlos Motta: We still live a deeply homophobic world. It’s deeply engrained even in places where one thinks the law has put things in place. The situation in Ukraine is extreme - homosexuals and transsexuals are targets, literally. Yes, that’s something that needs to be challenged and tackled.

Almost all your work references historic objects and monuments from Colombian culture. Tell us about the homoerotic drawings of Aztec-style figurines.
CM: That work is about the ways in which pre-Hispanic objects were recontextualised under colonial rule. Eurocentric thinking and European epistemology was applied to specific objects that depicted same-sex relations. What those works meant back then we will never know because everything was erased, or made to be understood within the framework of religious and legal structures. I'm drawing on different sources to speak about that processes of erasure and reinterpretation form a specific perspective – a patriarchal, dominant perspective driven by morality and criminality.

This is your first time exhibiting in Ukraine. Did you specifically want to address the audience in Kiev?
CM: I made a new work called ‘The History of Homosexual Repression in Ukraine’. It consists of a city light outside the gallery, and a free publication for people take away. I’ve been working with a Ukrainian journalist, who helped research ways in which homosexuality has been repressed here. The publication lists 60 ways in which the body, homosexuality, and transsexualism have been criminalized, neglected, socially repressed, culturally segregated and so on, from the Middle Ages to today.

Fellow award winner Nástio Mosquito reflects on his audience and the importance of travel...

Wallpaper*: Your installation is complex. It features two films being simultaneously projected into opposite walls, with audience seating on either side. How do you know where to sit?
Nástio Mosquito: It’s easy for us as audiences to sit back and judge what we are experiencing. This was an attempt to avoid that, to provide an experience where you engage with the work. I want [to create] a sense of uncomfortableness because you’re watching something but at the same time you’re being seen. There’s constant interaction.

Have you noticed anything interesting while watching your audiences here in Kiev?
NM: Traveling is important. The possibility to travel, to interact with different human beings, keeps me satisfied with my main focus: the individual. My interest is in the individual and how the individual makes him/herself part of something. I want to be able to propose something to an individual understanding that that individual is part of something bigger.

The judges have praised works in the exhibition for challenging the status quo. When you installed, were you interested in what's been going on in Kiev?
NM: That’s not my problem. I’m not a slave to circumstance. I recognize that context is important, but the crucial thing is for me to express my perspective and hope that it’s useful for someone. I hope it’s useful for the Pinchuk Foundation, as I hope that it’s useful for Kiev society, as I hope that it’s useful for Bangladesh.

ADDRESS

Pinchuk Art Centre
1/3-2, А Block
Velyka Vasylkivska/Baseyna Street
Kiev
Ukraine

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The Glasgow-based artist Corin Sworn has been announced as the fifth winner of the bi-annual Max Mara Art Prize for Women. The prize, run in collaboration with London's Whitechapel Gallery, has become increasingly high profile with Laure Prouvost, who picked up Max Mara award in 2011, going on to win last year's Turner Prize.

For Sworn, apart from the press and glory, it means a six-month fully funded Italian residency. Unlike other art prizes, The Max Mara award is based an artist's submission about the work they would produce in Italy, if given the chance. A four-strong judging panel devises a short-list of three to five artists - who have to be UK-based and yet to have a solo survey exhibition - and Sworn out-paced rival presentations from Beatrice Gibson, Melanie Gilligan, Judith Goddard and Philomene Pirecki to pick up this year's award.

Sworn, who uses drawings, video and installation in her works, has an interest in how we construct stories and narratives from fragments of sometimes random information. Foxes, a film and installation, was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Sworn's Max Mara funded project will look at the relationship between Commedia dell'Arte and Italian cinema. She will spend three months in Rome, before moving to the newly restored Museo dell'Arte Contemporanea in Naples and on to the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, home to one of the oldest artist residency programmes in Europe. Which all sounds rather lovely. Sworn's piece will be shown at both the Whitechapel and Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia some time next year.

'She is a vivid storyteller,' explains Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick, 'and the judges were swept away by her proposal inspired by the 16th century Commedia dell'Arte travelling theatre troupes woven together with oral histories. We can't wait to see the impact of the residency on her scripts and filmmaking.'

For Sworn, it means a level of support that most young artists, without the backing of one of the ‘mega’ galleries, can only dream of. 'One of the wonderful aspects to the Prize is all the people who are there to support the research with you,' says Sworn. 'I think this will allow me to surpass my usual ways of working. With young galleries, it still feels as though everyone is helping out and supporting you and your work, but the nature of what you can produce is very different.'

Fashion designers Ayşe and Ece Ege of Turkish label Dice Kayek (featured in W*176) have won the V&A's Jameel Prize 3 for their 'Istanbul Contrast' collection, a range that's also celebrated in a new limited-edition book of the same name. Awarded every two years, the Jameel Prize is an international art award aimed at contemporary creatives inspired by Islamic traditions of art, craft and design.

The sisters, based between Paris and Istanbul, are known for their unique ability to weave Istanbul's architectural and artistic heritage into a contemporary fashion context. In this collection they sensitively translate that crossroads into reworked Ottoman robes and crinoline-framed demi-couture minidresses reminiscent of lead domes in the city skyline. 'The aim was to reach a point beyond fashion, driven towards a work of art,' explains Ayşe Ege, 'so at the end, fashion merely became the medium to represent the artistic idea.'

Handing over the £25,000 prize money, Martin Roth, the V&A's director and chair of the panel of judges that also included Thomas Heatherwick, said, 'We were struck by the way that Dice Kayek's work uses Islamic inspiration in a completely secular context, taking it into a new world, that of contemporary fashion.'

Like the collection, the fabric-covered book is an ode to the sisters' transcontinental hometown. 'For us, Istanbul has always been an inspiring paradox, bridging East and West as well as tradition and modernity,' says Ege. The tome pictures Istanbul's architectural feats, Moorish textures and cityscapes opposite the pair's symbiotic fashions.

Having recently celebrated their 21st anniversary, the design duo is currently working on a project for the upcoming Istanbul Design Biennial, which promises to carry on their union of Eastern spirit and Western mindset. 'Twenty years ago, certain clients were reluctant to buy our garments, believing that the label 'Made in Turkey' did not have a good image in the eyes of their customers,' says Ege. 'Today we see that this reaction has changed and the label 'Made in Turkey' has become synonymous with quality and even prestige.'

The 'Chantilly' lace dress was inspired by Istanbul's Dolmabahçe Palace. 'We sought to deliver the most perfect engineering for each garment, focusing on the understructure using stay and crinoline frames and enveloping it using various techniques like draping, pleating, layering and embroidery,' says designer Ayşe Ege

This antique blown-glass beaded dress was inspired by Hagia Sophia - which was first a cathedral, then a mosque and now a museum in Istanbul. 'Producing in Turkey has always been a key instrument in building our brand,' Ege says. 'Since the beginning, it was crucial for us to represent the quality and capacity of Turkish production'

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Rd
London SW7 2RL

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The house of Perrier-Jouët has certainly been keeping itself busy this Spring; the French champagne marque has announced London-based ceramicist Hitomi Hosono as the winner of the inaugural Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize. The brand new contemporary craft award, officiated by a panel of thirteen judges, stems from Perrier-Jouët’s longstanding patronage of the arts, particularly its affinity towards the Art Nouveau movement.

Perrier-Jouët’s contemporary incarnation of the Parisian art salons from the 1700s will see a biannual meeting of the UK’s foremost creative minds and influencers. The founding members of the Perrier Jouët Arts Salon include milliner Stephen Jones, artist Kate MccGwire, product designer Tord Boonjte along with our own Editor-in-Chief Tony Chambers, who came together to select Hosono from a shortlist of 12 nominees.

The ceramicist edged out Giles Miller and Fabien Cappello among others to scoop a £10,000 grant to develop her career as well as a solo exhibition of her current work, which will open by appointment to the public at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel Chambers Club this coming summer. Svelte and feminine in form, Hosono's intricate ceramic pieces are inspired by botanical studies in her own garden as well as her recollection of landscape during her upbringing in Japan.

See 'The Enchanting Tree' by Tord Boonjte for Perrier-Jouët

The prize similarly coincided with the unveiling of ‘The Enchanting Tree’ at London’s Saatchi Gallery. Salon Arts member Boonjte created the bespoke art installation as a life-size version to accompany an limited-edition champagne flute tree for the bran. The large-scale artwork has since been moved to Perrier-Jouët’s mansion in Epernay, which houses the largest private collection of Art Nouveau works in Europe.

ADDRESS

St Pancras Renaissance Hotel
Euston Rd
London NW1 2AR

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When the V&A began to collect Islamic art in the 1850s, it broke ground as the first institution in the world to do so. The museum still faithfully champions this mission to this day, promoting – and also rethinking – traditional Islamic art in a contemporary framework, most notably with the conception of its biennial Jameel Prize.

The shortlist of artists and designers has now been revealed for the third edition of its £25,000 art grant, which is awarded to artists and designers examining Middle Eastern art, craft and design through a contemporary filter. First launched in 2009, the Jameel Prize explores the link between modern art practices and Islamic traditions as part of a wider dialogue on Islamic culture and the role it serves. 

A judging panel that included Thomas Heatherwick, Martin Roth and previous winner Rachid Koraïchi whittled down 270 entries from across the global to just ten finalists. But it will be some time before the victor is revealed: starchitect (and patron of the Jameel Prize) Zaha Hadid will present the hotly contested award to the overall winner on 10 December.

The nominees include textile designer Rahul Jain, who will showcase intricate Indo-Iranian textiles from his Varanasi drawloom workshop, and Parisian artist Laurent Mareschal, who works with ephemeral household materials to create site-specific installations. Florie Salnot is presenting jewellery pieces from her ongoing 'Plastic Gold' project, while calligrapher Nasser Al-Salem creates conceptual ink drawings based on the Arabic language. From furniture to fashion to typography, this year’s finalists work across disciplines as eclectic as their cultural backgrounds, which is what will make the exhibition of their shortlisted artworks all the more intriguing when it opens at the V&A in December.

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Rd
London SW7 2RL

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As Frieze Art Fair becomes more and more entrenched on London's art scene, emerging artists are benefiting from the art mania that descends on the city each autumn.

New Sensations is probably the most visible example of that trickle-down effect. Launched just six years ago, the showcase of emerging artists founded by the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4 is now the largest curated exhibition to take place during Frieze - partly due to joining forces with The Future Can Wait, a survey of young, progressive multidisciplinary artists set up by artist/patrons Zavier Ellis and Simon Rumley.

This week the combined show in the cavernous Victoria House in Bloomsbury Square includes the work of more than 50 artists, once again eclipsing all other exhibitions save for Frieze itself.

That it's free of charge has certainly helped garner attention. Anticipation is also building as to who will win the New Sensations 2012 prize - a career-propelling accolade last year won by Jonny Briggs. Judges, including artists John Stezaker and Richard Wilson, have already whittled down the vast number of entrants to a shortlist of 20, who make up the New Sensations section of the show. These include the four finalists: Nicolas Feldmeyer, Olivia Poppy Coles, Rafal Topolewski and Steven Allan.

A new partnership is also adding fresh intrigue to New Sensation 2012. The Saatchi Gallery has invited Absolut Vodka, longtime art patrons and collaborators with legends from Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst, to create a competition within the competition. The result, Absolut Blank, selected three artists from the New Sensations shortlist to undertake an original artwork using the Absolut bottle as a starting point.

The chosen artists, Jin Han Lee, Antonio Marguet and Natasha Peel, are displaying the end results this week; the winner will secure a funding for a studio space.

The joint show of young talent at Bloomsbury House runs until 14 October.