Future Generation Art Prize 2019
February 9 – April 7, 2019
PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) presents an exhibition from the 21 shortlisted artists for the 5th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize. Running from 9 February – 7 April 2019, the exhibition reveals a breadth of contemporary art practices from a judicious selection of artists and artist collectives spanning five continents. Established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in 2009, 2019 marks the 10th anniversary of the prize's founding.
Featuring new and recent works, the exhibition explores two recurring themes through a variety of media. The first considers an 'archeology of the future', exploring the past and present through the eyes of tomorrow. Using cutting-edge technologies, the works question the possibilities of interpreting knowledge in today's world.
Investigating ideas of the self, the second theme of the exhibition draws from individual socio-cultural values and traditions, whilst also exploring more poetic considerations of the psychological journey. Here, artists similarly reflect on a discrepancy between those traditions and shifting realities in a globalised world.
Björn Geldhof
Artistic director of the PinchukArtCentre
Through its truly global and democratic format, the prize has been empowering artists from all over the world for over 10 years, with growing support from institutions and artist communities alike. Its unique concept guarantees each edition presents a fresh perspective on "a future generation of artists" – and we are proud knowing that these cutting-edge artists work to challenge our world views, whilst proposing new models for tomorrow.
The exhibition is curated by Björn Geldhof, Artistic director of the PinchukArtCentre, and Tatiana Kochubinska, Curator of the Research Platform at the PinchukArtCentre.
Monira Al Qadiri
(35 – Kuwait)
Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. In 2010, she received a Ph.D. in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle-East stemming from poetry, music, art and religious practices. Her work explores unconventional gender identities, petro-cultures and their possible futures, as well as the legacies of corruption. In 2017, she presented her first live theatre performance "Feeling Dubbing" at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. Monira is currently living and working between Beirut and Berlin.
Monira Al Qadiri's recent projects investigate the implication of the oil industry for the countries of the Arabian Gulf region, and the precarity of their imminent future. The artist enquires what is left to commemorate when this transient petroleum interval is over. There are several of her works combined for the installation within the Future Generation Art Prize such as large scale sculpture Empire Dye, miniature objects Wonder 1, 2, 3 and the latest video Diver. In the Wonder series, and video Diver, Al Qadiri refers to the historical and cultural legacy of pearl diving and trade practices which were swept away with the emergence of the oil economy. The artist creates the shapes of oil drill bits carved from natural pearls in order to concoct an aesthetic relationship between oil and pearls, where originally none exists. In the video Diver this context is autobiographical. Al Qadiri's grandfather was a singer on a pearling ship. The music used for with synchronised swimmers' performance is one of the traditional pearl diving songs. Empire Dye is shaped like a giant seashell and covered in purple. The purple dye has shifting connotations. It is the colour of bad luck in the oil industry, and at the same time an ancient precious pigment extracted from thousands of Murex seashells, symbolic of the power of emperors and kings. The form of the shell, with its tentacles expanding in every direction, signifies both the political and economic ambitions of the fossil fuel industry.
Yu Araki
(33 – Japan)
Yu Araki was born 1985 in Yamagata City, Japan. Araki received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis, U.S.A. in 2007, and completed his Master of Film and New Media Studies from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. In 2013, he was selected to participate in Tacita Dean Workshop hosted by Fundación Botín in Santander, Spain. During 2017-8, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea as well as Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Recent exhibitions include the National Museum of Art, Osaka, MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; and Okayama Art Summit, Okayama. His films have been programmed in international festivals such as BFI London Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he won the Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award in 2018. Since 2016, Araki has been a member of Art Translator's Collective and ARTISTS' GUILD. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. http://www.yuaraki.com/
The current focus of Yu Araki's artistic practice deals with personal confrontation with extreme sense of loss. With his new multimedia installation Bivalvia, Yu Araki invites a viewer inside a shipping container, a contemporary metaphor of a portal to various places, cultures, contexts, and eras. The first part of the container refers to the original karaoke boxes, a Japanese innovation in which utilized actual containers. He is expanding the idea of karaoke, which literally means kara (emptiness) + oke (orchestra) in Japanese language, while kara is also homonymous to shell. Araki was particularly interested in the idea of a song being covered as a way of rebirth in different time and place, analogous to reincarnation. The video Bivalvia: Act I is an unscripted, patchwork narration combining a real-life story about a young couple who committed suicide in the sea between Japan and Korea, with the legend of St. Jacob, with French phonetics lesson, with various representations of oysters. In the second part of the container, Araki showcases the glimpse of his fluid filmmaking process through video sculpture Exercise in Silence (Scenes for Bivalvia: Act II). It consists of a series of improvised screen tests in which an actress is assigned to communicate nonverbally, alluding to a passage from Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). Combined with a fragment from Disney cartoon Alice in Wonderland (1951), these raw footages are filmed as a prelude to Bivalvia: Act II. The image of oysters interweaves the whole project, as a classical symbol of vanitas.
Korakrit Arunanondchai
(31 – Thailand)
Born in 1986 in Bangkok, Korakrit Arunanondchai received his BA in Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design and MA in Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York. He uses video, painting and performance to engage with subjects such as history, self-representation, and cultural dislocation. Through a variety of styles and media, his work seeks to find common ground between Western and Thai cultural narratives, belief systems and artistic practices. His work has been widely exhibited and has been acquired by numerous collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art; SMAK, Ghent, BE Museion, Bolzano, IT Fondation Louis Vuitton; K11, Hong Kong/Shanghai/Beijing.
Korakrit Arunanondchai creates serialized video-installations within a loose series titled Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names. In his latest work (made in collaboration with Alex Gvojic and boychild) for Future Generation Art Prize 2019 he transforms the title to No History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names, where No History refers to a shifty way in which unrecorded histories shape reality. The stories of ghosts and spirits are examples of these shadow histories, which affect society in the present time. The video takes the rescue mission of 13 kids that were stuck in a flooded cave in Northern Thailand last year, as a central focus to examine how the force of propaganda, spirituality, Royal History storytelling, Cold War politics in Southeast Asia and localized beliefs come together to create a new myth of representation for everyone to believe and take part in.
Kasper Bosmans
(28 – Belgium)
Rooted in historical research, Kasper Bosmans disentangles the intersection of signs that create cultural meaning in both micro and macro registers. His interdisciplinary works include institutional intervention, installation, sculpture, and painting that parse and restructure the objects and symbols from varied political, artistic, ecological and social orders. Bosmans investigates diverse cultural relics—taken from the realms of government, folk art, and technology—in order to establish new modes of reading the history of power and knowledge that linger in spaces between concept and material.
In his interdisciplinary and often playful works Kasper Bosmans investigates histories of traditions and objects creating new narratives to offer a critical view on cultural and political relics.
Leaning on his research into European political and cultural history, in Amber Room and Star Chamber Bosmans implicitly critiques the mechanisms of authority and power by rendering them as aesthetic objects. By superimposing an aesthetic rendering of the Amber Room, (a room panelled by wrought amber, gifted by Frederic II of Prussia to Peter the Great of Russia in 1717 to forge an alliance against Sweden) on top of the decorative scheme of the Star Chamber (A room in Westminster palace, London that housed a court of law that punished politically and socially prominent figures from the 15th until the 17th century which currently stands as a symbol of power abuse and absolutism). The small stork skull disrupts the quiet authority of the room, mechanically clapping its bill at irregular intervals. The fact that these birds don't have vocal chords seem to be a significant fact in this context. 'Triumphal Arch (Bowels)' with its combination of the digestive tract going through a crown and the ruined state of the arc starts to play a significant role under these circumstances. The series of four so-called Legend paintings are a visual guide to divulge nuances and details of the anecdotes used to make the installation.
Madison Bycroft
(31 – Australia)
Madison Bycroft (b. 1987) is an artist born in Adelaide/Kaurna Yarta, Australia, who is currently based between Paris and Rotterdam. Bycroft is a graduate from the University of South Australia, and the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, NL which was supported by the Anne and Gordon Samstag Scholarship. Bycroft is a co-founder of facilitative platform, 'GHOST'. Bycroft's work has recently been included in Les Atelier de Rennes, France, Second Triennale of Beetsterzwag, Netherlands, Liveworks Performance Act Award, Italy, Sharjah Biennale, Beirut, Lebanon, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Singapore, CAC Brétigny, Paris, France, Westfälischer Kunstverein Muenster, Germany, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (Primavera 2014), and The Australian Experimental Art Foundation. Notable residencies include Triangle France, ISCP in NYC and the Cité International Des Arts, in Paris.
In their works, Madison Bycroft creates systematic disfunctionalities. Recognizable forms are brought into relation with things which cannot be determined. Breaking comfortable and predictable patterns, Bycroft combines strange costumes, surreal scripts and awkward forms. The viewer gets an estranging experience, which might provoke reflection with aesthetic norms; or ways of looking at the world, where values and models of viewing are radically questioned. Bycroft is interested in displacing the self in order to make space for empathy.
The work for Future Generation Art Prize is reflective on Bycroft's recent practice and is related to how different forms of expression might come into conflict: how do surfaces perform? Disguise, distraction, adornment, legibility and solidarity across difference are all considered. The body of work, placed in a decorative fresco atmosphere of old Roman wall paintings, consists of film, sculptures, chalk drawings and trombones concreted into plinths, which can be activated through a performance that is necessarily active and passive at the same time. In the film Jolly Roger and Friends, which is an anti-portrait of two 18th century pirates Anne Bony and Mary Read, Bycroft uses an associative methodology to pull together the fragments of difference that might conceal as much as they reveal.
Alia Farid
(33 – Kuwait)
Alia Farid (b. 1985) lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico, countries she is both from and whose complex colonial histories she reveals through drawings, objects, spatial installations and film. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from la Escuela de Arts Plasticas de Puerto Rico (San Juan), a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Visual Arts Program at MIT (Cambridge, MA), and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the MACBA's Programa d'Estudis Independents (Barcelona). Farid has completed residencies at Beta Local (San Juan), Casa Árabe in conjunction with Delfina Foundation (Córdoba, Spain), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha), Davidoff Art Initiative (La Romana), The Serpentine Galleries (London), La Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and marra,tein (Beirut). Recent and upcoming shows include participation in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, the 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, the 12th Gwangju Biennale, and Sharjah Biennial 14. Recent and upcoming shows of her work have been presented at NC-arte (Bogotá), Galerie Imane Farès (Paris) and Sultan Gallery (Kuwait). She is a recipient of the 2018 Art Jameel Commission (Dubai), the Arab Fund for Culture and Arts' Visual Arts Production Grant, and is shortlisted for the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize.
Alia Farid's installation for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019 is a continuation of her investigations into the function of museums in the aniconic Arabian Gulf. The work is a response to the failed attempts at mirroring Western constructs through a modernization project, and issues surrounding representation. The fragmented display combines symbols from the past and present that speak to the dissipation of Arab polytheism with the advent of Islam, and the rise of a new materialism with the advent of an oil centered economy. Among the objects on display are a garish neon street sign and ceramic replicas of artifacts kept from view in the storage basement of the incomplete Kuwait National Museum: Greek palmettes, a Nabatean sculpture of a dolphin with a broken tail, a stone censer, and stela. The vault-like architecture of the space also alludes to the inside of the Kaaba, which once functioned as a pagan pantheon filled with hundreds of venerated sculptures. Through this spatial encounter, Farid presents a world of hidden vulnerabilities charged with conflicting views on the role and production of images.
Gabrielle Goliath
(34 – South Africa)
Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983 South Africa) situates her practice within contexts marked by the traces, disparities and as-of-yet unreconciled traumas of colonialism and apartheid, as well as socially entrenched structures of patriarchal power and rape-culture. Enabling opportunities for affective, relational encounters, ste seeks to resist the violence through which black, brown, feminine, queer and vulnerable bodies are routinely fixed through forms of representation. Goliath recently participated in the Verbo Performance Art Festival (2018), Sгo Paulo; the Palais de Tokyo's Do Disturb Festival (2018), Paris; the National Arts Festival (2018), Makhanda; as well as the 11th Bamako Encounters Biennale (2017), Mali. She has won a number of awards including the Institut Franзais, Afrique en Crйations Prize (Bamako Biennale). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including the Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery and Wits Art Museum. Goliath is currently a Ph.D. candidate with the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. www.gabriellegoliath.com
Winner of the Special Prize
We admired her handling of such difficult and important subject matter in a touching yet sharp manner in the work "This song is for...". It speaks directly and emotionally to the viewer while generating a powerful sense of discomfort. The work leaves room for personal reflection and maintains respect for the six individual testimonies.
In her recent works Gabrielle Goliath creates immersive sound installations, mainly produced in collaboration with musicians and DJs. She focuses on the trauma of violence within the social-political concerns, particularly in regard to the experience of women. In This song is for… she re-performs the popular convention of the dedication song in collaboration with a group of women-led musical ensembles. Goliath creates an immersive filmic and auditory environment engaging viewer in a visual and physical sense. She presents a series of dedicated songs chosen by survivors of rape, which are performed as a newly produced cover version. Those songs remind them of a traumatic experience and bring them back to a particular time and place, evoke a sensory world of memory. In each song Goliath inserts a sonic disruption, a recurring musical rupture recalling the 'broken record' effect of a repetition. It gives an emotional response for the listeners in connection with the texts displayed on the walls – a genuine confessions about violence of rape and painful effects of living after the tragedy.
Rodrigo Hernández
(34 – Mexico)
Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, Mexico, 1983) lives and works between Lisbon and Mexico City. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe with Silvia Bächli in 2010-2012, and at Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2013-2014. In the last years he has been awarded with a residency at Laurenz-Haus Stiftung in Basel in 2015 and at Cité International des Arts in Paris in 2016. His recent solo exhibitions include: he real world does not take flight, Pivô, Sao Paulo, 2018; Shadow of a Tank, Art Basel Statements, 2018; The Gourd and the Fish, SALTS Basel, 2018; Stelo, P420, Bologna, 2017; J'aime Eva, ChertLüdde, Berlin, 2017; Plasma, Madragoa, Lisbon, 2017; The Shakiest of Things, Kim?, Riga, 2017; I am nothing, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, 2016; Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2016; El pequeño centro, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, 2015; What is the moon?, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2015; Go, gentle scorpio, Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca, 2014; A Sense of Possibility, Weingrüll, Karlsruhe, 2014. His recent group exhibitions have taken place at Lulu, Mexico City, Sadie Coles HQ, London; ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, 2019; Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo; Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; MendesWoodDM, Brussels, 2017; Bienal Femsa Monterrey, Monterrey; Hyperconected – 5th Moscow Bienal for Young Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; Queer Thoughts, New York, 2016; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2016. Upcoming solo and group exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Winterthur; Gamec, Bergamo; Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City. www.rodrigo-hernandez.net
Rodrigo Hernández is interested in the constitutive process of art and image making. In his practice he deconstructs and merges ancient iconography, art history as well as everyday imagery to develop his own formal vocabulary. Driven by the idea of the ambiguity of images, the artist proceeds by following his imagination and personal associations, suggesting that these can be crucial instincts to navigate in today's world.
Nothing is solid. Nothing can be held in my hand for long is an installation consisting of hand-hammered brass panels depicting fleeting moments of closeness and self awareness. In the difficulty to get hold of them, one could project a case in which they are constantly escaping the need to take a concrete form. A hand attempting to grasp is therefore the image Rodrigo Hernández uses for this installation to grow around. The viewer is invited to infer the work's reference to monumental reliefs and the enduring quality of the materials and techniques traditionally used to fabricate it. The artist uses metal's potential to gift images with a longer life with a preference for the personal, the intimate and the momentary, giving shape to a work where the gap between its formal and conceptual considerations is barely recognisable.
Laura Huertas Millán
(35 – Colombia)
Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian artist and filmmaker. Entwining ethnography, ecology, fiction and historical enquiries, her moving image work engages with strategies of survival, resistance and resilience against violence. Building complex visual and sonic worlds infused by the real, her cinematographic practice circulates between contemporary art venues and international film festivals. Part of the official selections of the Viennale (Vienna), the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, La Habana or Cinéma du Réel (Paris), her films have earned prizes in Locarno, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. She has participated in screenings and exhibitions in institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris), Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Les Laboratories d´Aubervilliers, Western Front (Vancouver) and Instituto de Visión (Bogotá). Retrospectives of her films have been held at the ICA (London), Mar del Plata Film festival, Toronto´s Cinematheque (TIFF Lightbox) and the Flaherty Seminar. Her works are part of public and private collections as the Kadist Foundation (Paris-San Francisco), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami). She is currently preparing her first feature film, after completing in 2017 a PhD between PSL University (SACRe program) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University).
Laura Huertas Millán's films circulate between contemporary art and cinema. Entwining anthropology, ecology and historical enquiries, her moving image practice engages with strategies of survival, resistance, and resilience against violence. For the past years, she has created a series of "ethnographic fictions", which are accompanied by a thorough research around that cinematographic concept.
For the Future Generation Art Prize Huertas Millán created a new work Let My People Go, an expanded cinema piece presented as a five-channel installation. The main character of the narrative is the coca plant, which in the Colombian Amazon is the highest sacred entity for the Muina-Muruí indigenous community, and it is venerated as a feminine being source of power and wisdom. Huertas Millán new immersive work plunges us into the ritualistic elaboration of the mambe, the green powder used for its worship. By representing an emancipatory use of this psychotropic substance, far from the mainstream stereotypes of cocaïne and violence, Let my people go stages an embodied dialogue with a natural being.
Marguerite Humeau
(31 – France)
Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986, FR) lives and works in London, UK. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2011. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Tate Britain, London, UK; Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, CH; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, DE; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; and C L E A R I N G, New York, USA. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the High Line, New York, USA; Château de Versailles, FR; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, DK; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, Sculpture Gallery, London, UK; and FRAC Midi- Pyrénées,Toulouse, FR. Humeau's solo exhibition, Birth Canal, is currently on display at the New Museum in New York. In 2019, she will have solo exhibitions at the Museion in Bolzano, IT and at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, DE. Marguerite Humeau's work is part of the collections of MoMA, New York, USA; Tate Britain, London, UK, Aishti Foundation, Beirut, LB; Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; Modern Forms, London, UK. Humeau's work stages the crossing of great distances in time and space, transitions between animal and mineral, and encounters between personal desires and natural forces. The work explores the possibility of communication between worlds and the means by which knowledge is generated in the absence of evidence or through the impossibility of reaching the object of investigation. Humeau weaves factual events into speculative narratives, therefore enabling unknown, invisible, extinct forms of life to erupt in grandiose splendour. Combining prehistory, occult biology and science fiction in a disconcerting spectacle – the works resuscitate the past, conflate subterranean and subcutaneous, all the while updating the quest genre for the information age.
In her artistic practice Marguerite Humeau traverses different fields such as paleontology, media theory, and biology to find a basis for her interdisciplinary works. To create works the artist systemically mixes scientific facts, conspiracy theories, and artistic speculations. Humeau narrates fictional events such as the re-emergence of extinct, prehistoric creatures or otherworldly beings etc.
For her exhibition, within the framework of the Future Generation Art Prize, Humeau prepared a project which is speaking the language of future archeology or alternative history. The new project continues the themes raised last year at the personal museum exhibition Birth Canal in the United States. The artist carries unscaled ambition, for the first time in her practice connecting sound and drawing. She uses sound and drawing to connect both the past and the future, and the sky with the earth. Due to the connection of visual and sound sensations, the work creates new knowledge and reorients one's understanding of the world around.
Eli Lundgaard
(28 – Norway)
Eli Maria Lundgaard (b. 1989, Trondheim, Norway) Lundgaard is a Norwegian artist, currently based in Malmö, Sweden. She holds a master in fine art from Malmö Art Academy (2018), and a bachelor in fine art from Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2015). She works in different media, mainly video and sculpture.
Her work has been presented at The Moscow International Biennale for Young Artists (2016 and 2018), the onboard program at The 1st Antarctic Biennale (2017), as well as at several exhibitions and screenings in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe. In her work Lundgaard's aim is to manipulate, deconstruct and reconstruct the world around her, and to erase or blur common definitions and concepts. She is interested in the uncertainty of narratives, situations, and phenomena, those which can neither be confirmed nor dismissed. In the space between fact and fiction, she turns the seemingly familiar into something strange and foreign.
In her artistic practice Eli Maria Lundgaard delves into human's psyche and its understanding.
She researches how we produce meanings, and how we make connections and relations between our inner and the outer world. She questions interaction and mutual influence between the subject and its surroundings. Lundgaard is interested in the way a body is being shaped by the environment and vice versa.
In her new work for the Future Generation Art Prize, Lundgaard creates a hermetic poetic environment, in which she is mixing one's perception of the inside and the outside. Lundgaard is appealed by uncontrollable nature and situations or experiences that exist outside the rational, and visualizes this through her contemplative video and biomorphic sculptures, kept inside boxes. The piece interrogates the self and functions as a set of associations that question the boundaries between visible and invisible, living and inanimate, mental world and the external.
Taus Makhacheva
(35 – Russia)
Taus Makhacheva (b. 1983 Moscow, Russia) is known predominantly for her performance and video works that critically examine what happens when different cultures and traditions come into contact with one another. Having grown up in Moscow with cultural origins in the Caucasus region of Dagestan, her artistic practice is informed by this personal connection with the co-existing worlds of pre and post Sovietisation. Oftentimes humorous, her works attempt to test the resilience of images, objects and bodies in today's world.
The practice of Taus Makhacheva embraces a wide range of media including performance, video, and installations, which critically examine the results of different cultures and traditions meeting. Having grown up in Moscow with cultural origins in the Caucasus region of Dagestan, her artistic practice is informed by this personal connection with the co-existing worlds of pre- and post-Sovietisation. Often humorous, her works attempt to test the resilience of images, objects and bodies in today's world.
In her new work Quantitative Infinity of the Objective, the artist transforms the gallery space into a gym where the exercise machines appear in non-standardized shapes and sizes. The audio component announces a series of authoritative clichés used in institutional and private spaces. Removed from their familiar context the obsessive and traumatic aspect of the language is amplified revealing crippling communicative models loaded with passive aggression. Resilience to this intergenerational use of language is in question here as the performers circulate through the space exhibiting anxiety, doubt and finally the perfecting of their skills. The experience of the piece provokes a reflection on a possibility of detaching, healing and resisting current social patterns.
Toyin Ojih Odutola
(33 – Nigeria)
Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985, Ife, Nigeria) creates drawings utilizing diverse mediums and surfaces to investigate the potential in the striated terrain of an image, to further question its formulaic representations. Ojih Odutola has participated in exhibitions at various institutions, including Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2015); Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2015, 2012); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2013); and Menil Collection, Houston, (2012). Current solo exhibitions include Scenes of Exchange, 12th Manifesta Biennial, Palermo, Italy, through November 4, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: The Firmament, Hood Museum of Art (Hood Downtown), New Hampshire, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: Testing the Name, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, 2018; Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017-2018; and A Matter of Fact: Toyin Ojih Odutola, Museum of African Diaspora, California, 2016-2017. Permanent collections include Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, and the National Museum of African Art (Smithsonian). She earned her BA from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Ojih Odutola lives and works in New York.
Toyin Ojih Odutola in her artistic practice focuses on the sociopolitical construct of skin colour and depicts an alternative reality, where colonial past never happened and where depicted characters can live without any colonial and cultural guilt. What is to be rich without that? What would be their attitude if the racial oppression had never happened?
For her exhibition within the Future Generation Art Prize 2019, she presents a series of paintings that depict scene from an unpublished book, written by the artist. Her works reference an aristocratic European tradition of commissioned portraits that she uses to manifest black figure identity. The artist offers an alternative point of seeing black history declining the dramatic component of postcolonial discourse. It is not a story about struggle and oppression, rather a story about wealthy and aristocratic folk.
Sondra Perry
(31 – United States)
Sondra Perry makes videos and performances that foreground the tools of digital production as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and to remobilize their potential. Perry has had multiple solo exhibitions, including at THE KITCHEN, for the installation "Resident Evil", and in 2015, the artist's work appeared in the fourth iteration of the Greater New York exhibition at MoMA/PS1. In 2017 Sondra was awarded the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize for a solo show at the Seattle Art Museum. Perry holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Alfred University. She lives and works in her hometown of Perth Amboy, New Jersey.
Sondra Perry in her practice explores themes of race, identity, family history, femininity, and technology. Perry makes works that revolve specifically around African American struggle and the ways in which technology and identities have entangled. She often takes her personal history as a point of departure. She uses the tools of digital production as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and to remobilize their potential.
In Lineage for a Multiple Monitor Workstation: Number One, Perry casts various members of her family to play themselves in a fragmented multithreaded narrative that centers on both real and imagined familial lore. She invites the viewer to look into the process of creating the video—the construction of the narrative—but never showing the final result. Unfolding across two screens, with multiple windows open, one on top of the other, the 2-channel video performance digs through the messy and complicated way that images function in constructing identity. The artist is presenting home-made video raising political questions of racism and social struggle that African-American community faces in daily life.
Gala Porras-Kim
(33 – Colombia)
Gala Porras-Kim (Bogotá, 1984), received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She has had recent solo shows at Commonwealth and Council, LABOR, and Headlands, and has been included in exhibitions at LACMA and Whitney Museum in 2017, Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles Public Art Biennial, The 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Colombia and at the FRAC Pays de la Loire, France in 2016. She received awards from Artadia and Rema Hort Mann in 2017, the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2016, Creative Capital and Tiffany Foundation in 2015, and the California Community Foundation in 2013.
Gala Porras-Kim uses the social and political contexts that influence the representation of language and history to make art objects through the learning process. Her work comes from research-based practice, including different methodologies in the fields of linguistics, history, and conservation.
The new body of works she created for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019 consists of drawings, sculptures and sound installation. Porras-Kim, working with the National Institute of Archaeology and History in Mexico, created official replicas of two plain monoliths that were recently found inside the top of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan and extracted. She proposes to put them back to reconstitute the elements for rituals which might have taken place at the site. The works also include a large drawing of their original setting within the monument and the sound of a year-long cycle of the sun mixed with pyramid interior ambient sound. Two final works address mediated sunlight, one filtered through the eyelids and a brass work that is waiting for direct sunlight to be activated.
Emilija Škarnulytė
(31 – Lithuania)
Emilija Škarnulytė has been making films and videos for the last ten years mostly in places where contemporary political issues are staged. Škarnulytė investigates the shifting boundaries between documentary and fiction, between ecological and cosmic forces: feeling out all kinds of nonhuman and posthuman scales, in the depths of space and time. Emilija's large scale video installations are vast, indicative meditations on our current ecological discourse. Her films traverse an epic landscape of geography — bringing to life the indiscernible 'hyperobjects' that increasingly define our political and ecological crises. She has an MA from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, Norway. Recent group exhibitions and screenings include Hyperobjects at Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Moving Stones at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; and the first Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art; On Earth, Structure and Sadness, Serpentine Galleries, UK; as well as a new commission for Bold Tendencies, London and a solo show at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for 16mm analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway.
Winner of the Main Prize
Emilija Škarnulytė's work "t 1 ⁄ 2" stems from deep and extensive research which has been translated in a coherent and confident way. The jury found its scale, rhythm and pace mesmerising alongside its capacity to deal with vast expanses of time in a precise manner.
Her use of video expands into a multi-dimentional experience, confronting many of the major issues facing humanity which are often left unspoken. Without being overtly didactic, the work stays open-ended and poetic while raising fundamental questions about where we come from, who we are and where we might end-up.
In her films, Emilija Škarnulytė investigates the shifting boundaries between documentary and fiction. She works primarily with deep time, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political: feeling out all kinds of nonhuman and posthuman scales, in the depths of space and time.
"t1⁄2" continues the topic of post-human mythology and fictional visual meditation about contemporary science from the future archeology perspective. "t1⁄2" is also called 'half-life", a term commonly used in nuclear physics to describe radioactive decay. "t1⁄2", shown as a large-scale video installation that consists of architecture envisioned by the artist through remote sensing 3D scans and the mirrored ceiling, traverse an epic landscape of geography.
Škarnulytė, performing as a siren herself, links the past and future by exploring the memory of the Etruscan Cemeteries, Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania — a Twin sister of Chernobyl AES, Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan, the Antimatter Factory, The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Duga radar and Cold-War submarine base above the arctic circle. "t1⁄2" encounters all that is larger than us and larger than life — a looming climate catastrophe, natural phenomena, ideological constructions, massive scientific structures, recent geopolitical processes and what we know as human knowledge. All have left scars on planet Earth.
Jakob Steensen
(31 – Denmark)
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist based in New York. He is concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. To make his work, Steensen ventures on intense photographic excursions and then converts the collected material into digital worlds by the use of 3D scanners, photogrammetry, satellite data and computer game software. Inspired by ecology-oriented science fiction and conversations with biologists and ethnographers, his projects are ultimately virtual simulations populated by mythical beings existing in radical ecological scenarios. Jakob Kudsk has recently exhibited internationally at Jepson Center for the Arts, Time Square's Midnight Moment, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Serpentine Galleries, MAXXI in Rome, FRIEZE London, Podium in Oslo, and Ok Corral Copenhagen. In 2018, Steensen's work as an art director won him a Telly award and a Games for Change Award. His work has been featured in MOUSSE Magazine, artnet News, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Politiken, Information, VICE, and the New York Times, among other publications. He has also received awards from the Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation, and the Lumen Arts Prize. He has been the artist in residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, AADK, Centra Negra, MASS MoCA, BRIC and Mana Contemporary. Steensen is an alumni of NEW INC, a technology and culture incubator by The NEW MUSEUM, in NYC.
In his artistic practice, Jakob Kudsk Steensen investigates future scenarios of hybridisation of technology and nature. His work RE-ANIMATED proposes a utopian response to a story of the last Hawaiian Kaua'i ʻōʻō bird, which died in 1987, marking the extinction of its species. In 2009, its mating call was uploaded to YouTube. Since then, the unreciprocated song of the last Kaua'i ʻōʻō bird has been played by users for more than half a million times. RE-ANIMATED is a digitalised spatial response to this mating call reconstructing the habitat of the bird, resurrecting itself and defending its right to life if not in the organic, but in the data world. As a digital gardener, the artist has collected and planted a myriad 3D scan copies of flora and fauna, which he, by the use of algorithms, has programmed to colonize the island. The sound of this virtual world is composed of algorithmic music and interactive environmental audio effects created by Michael Riesman, Musical Director for the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Daniel Turner
(35 – United States)
Daniel Turner was born in 1983 in Portsmouth, Virginia USA. He received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006 and currently lives and works in New York NY. Turner's work has been the subject of international exhibitions including; 'Daniel Turner' at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa TX; '2 220', Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, Belgium; 'Die Kräfte Hinter Den Formen', Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck Austria; 'Eclat Attraction de la Ruine', Université', Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France; '(IPN)', Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers France; 'L'expostion D'un Film', Centre d'Art Contemporain / Foundation Arditi, Geneva Switzerland; 'Die Kräfte Hinter Den Formen', Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Museen Haus Esters und Haus Lange, Krefeld Germany; Particle Processed Cafeteria, König Galerie, Berlin Germany; 'Freezer Burn', Hauser & Wirth, New York NY; 'you, your sun and shadow', Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; 'PM' Team Gallery New York NY; 'Clear', Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles CA; 'Four Rooms', Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; 'Expanded Painting', The Prague Biennale 5, Prague, Czech Republic; and 'Modern Talking', Muzeul de Arta Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania. Turner served as a visiting scholar at New York University from 2009-2010. Turner's work has been featured in several monographs and publications including; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Forbes Magazine, Architectural Digest, Interview Magazine, Art Forum, Modern Painters, Flash Art and The Brooklyn Rail. He was awarded The Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2018 and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Award from 2004-2009.
Daniel Turner works primarily in sculpture involving the manipulation of materials, objects, and environments into tactile or atmospheric forms. These works are characterized by a specific response to site under a controlled set of processes. This approach has enabled Turner to base form on transposition, preserving a sensory link to geographical locations, cultural associations and human contact.
For the current exhibition, Turner has produced three sculptures in response to the Vinnitsa Regional Psychoneurological Hospital recasting integral elements of the Ukrainian hospital into both solid and ephemeral forms. Founded in 1897, this hospital is an active medical and prophylactic institution specializing in polyclinic medical care for psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery. Through a calibrated processing of environment, the artist has identified, archived and recast one metric ton of the hospital's steel bedding into two concentrated forms. A related process has yielded a third sculpture, whereby additional material has been distilled into a steel byproduct—burnished directly into the gallery wall. For Turner, form is a process of transformation. His choice of materials speaks to familiar, yet constrained environments, preserving the physical affects which a place gathers to itself.
Anna Zvyagintseva
(32 – Ukraine)
Anna Zvyagintseva (b.1986) was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. She lives and works in Kyiv. She graduated from the National Academy for fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv, Easel Painting Section. Member of the Hudrada curator group she is also a co-editor of Prostory.net.ua, an online publication on art, letters and translation. She was a shortlisted artist of the MUHi 2010 young Ukrainian artists contest and the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2013. She was the winner of the special prize and of the Public Choice Prize under the PinchukArtCentre contest in 2015 and the Main Prize winner in 2017. In 2015 she also represented the National Ukrainian Pavilion at the 56th Biennale di Venezia as part of the group exhibition "Hope". Zviagintseva´s latest solo shows are "Misplaced touches", PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, 2017; "The radio behind the wall|", Closer, Kyiv, 2015; "Trusting movement", Scherbenko Art Center, Kyiv, 2013. Selected group exhibitions and projects are Mappe. Sguardi sui confine, Palazzo Litta Cultura, Milan, Italy, 2018; Sguardi sui confine, Triennale di Milano, Palazzo della Triennale, Milan, Italy, 2018; Exercises in the Dust, Tobacco 001 Cultural Centre, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2018.
The artistic practice of Anna Zvyagintseva can be viewed through the exploration of a drawing as automatic and off-radar trace. In her video Declaration of Intent and Doubt Zvyagintseva continues her work with the essence of traces. In this new work the stage replaces a piece of paper. Proposing film-based experience artist underlines spatial interactions and conflicts between the characters and stresses on how the roles can shift. The viewer sees the woman washing the floor. But she is not. Only traces of water remain after her and flicker so fast recalling fleeting results of any efforts. An interplay of a woman and the ray shows an establishment of subordination between the leading and the driven, but at the same time reveals the figure of the doubt in such a process. Driven by a will of the ray, the woman acts there where it points, but later her emancipation changes the dynamic of her movements and she cut the knot of dependence.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b.1983) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice, largely research based, is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless 'present', one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new 'scripts'. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances. Solo presentations include Kunstverein Hamburg (Hamburg), Krannert Art Museum (Illinois), Alt Bomonti (Istanbul), ICA (Philadelphia), Office for Contemporary Art (Oslo), Carroll/Fletcher (London), Akademie Der Kuenste Der Welt (Cologne), New Art Exchange (Nottingham) and Delfina Foundation (London). Selected group exhibitions include Kunstgebaude Stuttgart (Stuttgart), Portikus (Frankfurt), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), SeMa Biennale (Seoul), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Museum Of Modern Art (Warsaw), ICA (London), the 12th Sharjah Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennial; the 10th Gwangju Biennale; the 13th Istanbul Biennial; the 6th Jerusalem Show; HomeWorks 5 (Beirut); and Palestine c/o Venice at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They were fellows at Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne in 2013 and artists in residence at the Delfina Foundation, London in 2009. They are recipients of the Sharjah Biennale Prize in 2015 and The Abraaj Prize in 2016. Their most recent publication 'And Yet Amy Mask Is Powerful' is published by Printed Matter in New York.
Oh shining star testify invites us to consider the forms of entanglement between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which these sames bodies and images might once again reappear.
The piece is structured around CCTV footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera. On March 19, 2014, 14 year-old Yusuf Shawamreh crossed the 'separation fence' erected by the Israeli military near Hebron. He was going to pick Akub an edible plant that is a delicacy in Palestinian cuisine, blooming only for only a short period of time and growing at high altitudes. After crossing the fence Israeli forces ambushed and shot him dead. A court injunction forced the military surveillance footage to be released and consequently circulated online only to be removed later. Oh shining star testify weaves together a fragmented script sampled from online recordings of everyday erasures of bodies, land and built structures but also their reappearance through ritual and performance. Moments from this material appear as moving layers with images building in density on top of each other, obscuring what came before in an accumulation of constant testament and constant erasure. Retrieving, in this unfolding accumulation and dissipation of testament, certain moments that have passed us by as noise, what we can not turn to see and what we can not turn away from. Uncounted bodies counter their own erasures, appearing on a street, on a link, on a feed.
Only the beloved keeps our secrets.
Eyes wide shut
she treats him with a kiss and he revives.
And if death arrives we wish her to be like you
red cheeks, like the waves of the sea.
She treats him with a kiss and he revives
Only the beloved keeps our secrets
Eyes wide shut
Give me your scarf, to wrap my wound, give me your scarf
Send my love to the land that raised me
Oh shining star, testify
If only the mountain between us could be ground to dust
Give me your scarf, to wrap my wound, give me your scarf
Land of the sweet soil even your fires are paradise
Cooking Sections
Cooking Sections (established in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Since 2015, they are working on multiple iterations of the long-term site-specific CLIMAVORE project exploring how to eat as climate changes. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop, a platform to critically speculate on implications of selling the remains of Empire today. Their first book about the project was recently published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at the 13th Sharjah Biennial; Manifesta12, Palermo; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Serpentine Galleries, London; Atlas Arts, Skye; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale; Brussels ParckDesign; and have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. Their work has been featured in a number of international publications: e-flux, Lars Müller, Sternberg Press, Volume, Frieze Magazine among others. They currently lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London.
Winner of the Special Prize
We have a deep respect for artistic practice that engages with serious issues. Through the work "CLIMAVORE: For the Rights of the Soil Not to be Exhausted", Cooking Sections proposes a better future and successfully engages a broader public to increase awareness of such issues.
Using the unifying potential of bio-activism Cooking Sections investigate the processes of production, preparation and consumption of food around the world and offer alternative scenarios as concepts for their works. Their long-term project CLIMAVORE sets out to envision seasons of food production and consumption that react to man-induced climatic events and landscape alterations.
In CLIMAVORE: For the Rights of the Soil Not to be Exhausted, artists problematise the predatory exploitation of Ukrainian chernozem soil, drawing attention to erroneous strategies of a state management of natural resources and omissions in defending of the soil fertility from consumption strategies of the private capital. For the project artists expand beyond the space of the PinchukArtCentre and revise local urban histories inviting the audience to the cellar of the Bessarabka market, which has a obscure controversial history. During the Holodomor, the refrigerator cellar was geared towards being a mortuary. Here surrounded by artefacts of soil management of different epochs, the ongoing public conversation on ecological issues of Ukraine starts. Each meeting is accompanied by public tastings of artists-developed site-responsive bread recipes. Furthermore, a cross-disciplinary approach of Cooking Sections involve a legislative imaginary and engages the Ukrainian lawyers to create a draft that instates the right of the soil not to be exhausted. This document has a mission to introduce the concept of the rights of the soil as the subject of any legal relations of other legal entities adjusting the plainly required respect of such rights.
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Photographs provided by the PinchukArtCentre © 2019. Photographed by Maksym Bilousov.
Award Ceremony
Vernissage
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When using photos, please, note copyright information.
Photographs provided by the PinchukArtCentre © 2019. Photographed by Sergei Illiin, Alexander Pilyugin.