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.