The contemporary artists in running for £40,000 prize
The biennial Artes Mundi award is the UK’s largest for contemporary art and sees the winner scoop £40,000. Rachel Mainwaring reveals this year’s shortlist
AN AMERICAN artist who launched a piece of artwork into orbit around Earth is among five people who have been shortlisted for a major arts accolade.
Trevor Paglen is joined by Anna Boghiguian (Canada/Egypt), Bouchra Khalili (Morocco/France), Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand) on the shortlist for the prestigious Artes Mundi Prize.
The award is the UK’s largest for contemporary art and sees the winner scoop £40,000.
The winner will be announced in January 2019 following a four-month exhibition of works by the shortlisted artists.
Paglen launched a piece of art into distant orbit around Earth in 2012 and recently announced that he will be the first artist in the world to send a sculpture into space.
The shortlist was selected from more than 450 nominations spanning 86 countries and includes five of world’s most celebrated contemporary artists, whose works explore what it means to be human.
The Artes Mundi 8 shortlist will take part in a major exhibition which will run from October 27, 2018, to February 24, 2019, at National Muse- um Cardiff.
Artes Mundi 8 selectors Nick Aikens, a curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Daniela Pérez, an independent curator based in Mexico City, and Alia Swastika, a Jakartabased curator and writer, looked for artists who directly engage with everyday life through their practice and explore contemporary social issues across the globe.
Selector Nick Aikens said: “Artistic practice, at its most compelling and enriching, allows us to see the world and our place within it from new perspectives. Each of the five shortlisted artists has consistently done this by pushing the varied media within which they work. I’m delighted we could put together a set of practices from very different contexts but one that shows the myriad, sophisticated ways artists are articulating and responding to some of the most pressing questions of our time.”
Karen MacKinnon, Artes Mundi’s director and curator, said: “Artes Mundi’s unique focus on the human condition enables us to bring together artists from all over the world whose art can inspire and challenge the way we see and inhabit our world. Through their diverse practices they consider urgent themes, such as political minorities and strategies of resistance in the work of Bouchra Khalili, Trevor Paglen’s investigations of mass surveillance and data collection, explorations of landscape, nature, language and displacement run through the work of Otobong Nkanga.
“The deeply personal and political studies of everyday life are captured in the work of Anna Boghiguian, and the psychologically charged and dreamlike works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films explore sexuality, the unconscious and the natural world. The ebb and flow of their ideas, the different perspectives and terms of engagement, suggest we are in for an extraordinary Artes Mundi 8.”