Commenting on Agata Ingarden as the winner of the Special Prize, the Jury said:
"The jury recognizes the inventive work of Agata Ingarden in this ambitious project that explores the tensions between the desire for freedom and the strict rigidity and control of daily life. She embraces risk in her exploration of new mediums. In her practice, the work becomes a complex network of sculptural materials, spatial interventions, sound, and performative video. Her work claims and transforms the architecture of the gallery beyond the conventional boundaries of an artwork by modifying the walls and the ceilings and bringing windows from the outside inside. There are spillovers from the digital to the real and then back, creating a circularity that results in a layered installation that invites us, participants, to imagine and rediscover our own relations to body, desire and the spaces we live and work in."
Commenting on Mire Lee as the winner of the Special Prize, the Jury said:
"The jury recognizes the rigorous and thoughtful work of the sculptor Mire Lee (South Korea) who is known for biomechanical masses, previously made of concrete, silicon, and steel. As if pulled from an alternate world, or science fiction narrative, they are both dreadful and transfixing. For her new large-scale installation House of Harlequins, 2020, commissioned by the PinchukArtCentre, Lee has built an elaborate structure composed of "formworks" – typical tools for modeling building facades – that is regenerative: the molds are removed once dry and then reused over and over. As viewers move through Lee's vessel, they feel enveloped in the churn of an organism, as it moves through successive half-lives in a continual state of obsolescence and reconstitution."
Commenting on Pedro Neves Marques as the winner of the Special Prize, the Jury said:
"In the jury's view, Pedro Neves Marques's film Middle Ages is a surprising and challenging reflection on an era of transition, marked by the rapid and constantly shifting evolution of our notions of body, gender, parenthood, reproduction and life itself. As in the previous works of theirs, Neves Marques addresses here, in a very direct but uncanny way, some of the most urgent and delicate issues raised by technological evolution and its effects on both interpersonal relations and the society as a whole."
All the shortlisted artists will take part in the Future Generation Art Prize 2021 @ Venice.
The exhibition of the 21 shortlisted artists for the 6th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize is on show at the PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine until 27 February 2022, curated by Björn Geldhof, Artistic director of the PinchukArtCentre and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak and Daria Shevtsova, Assistant curators. The show presents works by the following shortlisted artists and groups: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (UK), Wendimagegn Belete (Ethiopia), Minia Biabiany (Guadeloupe), Aziz Hazara (Afghanistan), Ho Rui An (Singapore), Agata Ingarden (Poland), Rindon Johnson (USA), Bronwyn Katz (South Africa), Lap-See Lam (Sweden), Mire Lee (South Korea), Paul Maheke (France), Lindsey Mendick (UK), Henrike Naumann (Germany), Pedro Neves Marques (Portugal), Frida Orupabo (Norway), Andres Pereira Paz (Bolivia), Teresa Solar (Spain), Trevor Yeung (China), and artist collectives Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff (USA), Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei (Ukraine), and Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings (UK).
20 shortlisted artists have been selected from over 11,700 entries from almost 200 countries by an international selection committee. The collective Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey were automatically nominated to the shortlist as the winner of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020 – a national contemporary art prize awarded to young Ukrainian artists up to the age of 35.