Previously shown at the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev, the 5th Future Generation Art Prize exhibition opened in Venice as a collateral event of the 58th Venice Biennale in May 2019. Presented by the PinchukArtCentre and Victor Pinchuk Foundation, the 2019 edition marks the 10th anniversary of the prize’s founding. The global contemporary art prize, dedicated to artists aged 35 or younger, was launched in 2009 by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, and was created to discover, recognise and give long-term support to a future generation of artists. A distinguished Board oversees the Future Generation Art Prize, including Victor Pinchuk as its Chairman, four patron artists – Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami – the collectors Eli Broad, Dakis Joannou, Elton John, Miuccia Prada and museum directors Richard Armstrong (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum), Glenn D. Lowry (The Museum of Modern Art) and Alfred Pacquement (former director of Musée nationale d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou).
This year’s exhibition features a shortlist of 21 artists from 17 countries, selected from among 5800 entries. The Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice 2019 exhibition is curated by Björn Geldhof, Artistic Director of the PinchukArtCentre and Tatiana Kochubinska, Curator of the Research Platform at the PinchukArtCentre.
The winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2019 is the Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė, and the winners of the Special Prize are Gabrielle Goliath (South Africa) and Cooking Sections (UK). The main prize winner received USD100,000 split between a USD60,000 cash prize and a USD40,000 investment in her practice. USD20,000 was awarded as a special prize to the other two artists to support projects that will develop their artistic practice. The winners were announced at the exhibition at PinchukArtCentre, which opened in February 2019, chosen from the shortlist by a distinguished international jury consisting of Pablo León de la Barra,Curator at Large, Latin America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation (New York); Björn Geldhof, Artistic Director, PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv); Gabi Ngcobo, curator, 10th Berlin Biennale; Tim Marlow, Artistic Director, Royal Academy of Arts (London); and Hoor Al Qasimi, President, Sharjah Art Foundation and International Biennial Association.
The Venice show features existing as well as new site-specific works by the shortlisted artists that engage with Palazzo Ca’ Tron, the exhibition space, and its history. The questions posed by the artists resonate even louder in Palazzo Ca’ Tron, dating back to the end of the sixteenth century as the palazzo of one of Venice’s most noble and powerful families, and owned by the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia since 1972. It is thus an important hub for learning and teaching, with the same mission of the prize to form and empower new generations. The press release expands on the concepts of the show:
Many of the works on show question the interpretation of knowledge, leading us towards a suggested model of a future archaeology or an archaeology of the future. How will the present day be perceived 100 or 1000 years from now? What might humanity look like? How will the world be experienced? Where many of those questions project concerns and proposals for tomorrow, other works engage with urgent unresolved dilemmas of today’s world. What place do local cultural traditions have in a globalized world? How do values survive in a technological age that sweeps away our sense of tradition? How does one identify in an age where nationalistic models seem to be at odds with globalised communities?
ASIA highlights the winners’ works as well as some shortlisted entries from Asia-Pacific.
Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė is the winner of the 2019 main prize, with her video installation entitled t 1/2, which continues her investigation of a post-human mythology, from the perspective of a future archaeology. Through her work, she investigates the shifting boundaries between documentary and fiction, between ecological and cosmic forces, exploring all kinds of non-human and post-human scales throughout the dimensions of time and space. In t 1/2, the artist meditates on contemporary science, and specifically on themes surrounding notions of radioactivity and nuclear power. The title of the work refers to the symbol of “half-life”, a term that is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe radioactive decay.
The work shows architectural sites envisioned by the artist through remote-sensing 3D scans and a mirrored ceiling. Škarnulytė performs in it as a siren, traversing an epic landscape that links the past and the future by exploring disparate sites. The locations she travels through include Etruscan cemeteries, a nuclear power plant in Lithuania that is the twin sister of the ChernobylAES, the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan, the Antimatter Factory, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Duga radar and a Cold-War submarine base above the Arctic Circle. In her voyage, the artist exposes the memory of locations that stand for something larger than us and life, and brings attention to events that have left or could still leave scars on our planet, like climate catastrophes and natural phenomena, ideological constructions, massive scientific structures, recent geopolitical processes, and even what we know as human knowledge.
Škarnulytė’s work is the result of extensive research, and the artist created an installation that offers a multi-dimensional experience, as the Jury commented:
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.
Gabrielle Goliath from South Africa is one of the two winners of the Special Prize, with her work This song is for… exploring the popular convention of the dedication song. Goliath’s practice engages with notions of colonialism, apartheid, patriarchal power and rape-culture. Her work is situated within such contexts and their resulting traces, disparities and unreconciled traumas. She tries to resist the violence through which black, brown, feminine, queer and vulnerable bodies are routinely represented.
Goliath created This song is for… (2019) in collaboration with a group of women and gender-queer led musical ensembles. The installation’s audio-visual landscape features a unique collection of dedication songs, each chosen by a survivor of rape and performed as a newly produced cover-version. The songs all carry a personal significance for each survivor, and have the power to transport them to a time and place that evokes feelings and emotions of particular relevance to them. In each perfomance, the artist introduces a sonic disruption like the scratching of a vinyl LP record, breaking the stream of memory and peace by placing a rupture that recalls the trauma. The artist thus painfully brings together the violence of rape and its psychic afterlife with the personal and political claims to life, dignity, hope, faith, and even joy.
In Venice, she presents a similar work, entitled Elegy, a long-term commemorative performance project initiated in 2015 that responds to South Africa’s rape-culture. Each performance is staged in various locations and contexts and involves a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning. The durational performance is physically taxing, and sees each performer sustain a kind of sung cry that evokes the presence and identity of an absent individual. Each performance commemorates a specific woman or LGBTQI+ individual subjected to gendered and sexualised violence. Loss becomes a site for community, and for empathic, cross-cultural and cross-national encounters. The performances work in an in-between space, where mourning becomes a social and politically productive act, as a necessary and sustatined irresolution.
The other winners of the Special Prize are Cooking Sections, an artistic duo based in London, established in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe. The artists founded their collaboration on a desire to critically explore the systems that organise the world through food. Their multimedia, researched-based practice encompasses installation, performance, mapping and video, and explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. In line with the climate change issues we face in our times, the duo has been working since 2015 on multiple iterations of the long-term site-specific project CLIMAVORE, which explores the changing eating habits as climate changes and as we affect its change.
The artists say about the project:
For us, CLIMAVORE became quite an operative way to observe environmental degradation and the role of food systems in man-induced transformations. Over the years, several projects helped us develop a critical approach to the construction of spaces of food production and consumption. As our work evolves, we have become more and more interested in how critical thinking can also develop into critical propositions by exploring practices that enable alternative social, environmental and political platforms to emerge.
Alia Farid (b.1985) lives and works in her two home countries, Kuwait and Puerto Rico, whose complex colonial histories she reveals through drawings, objects, spatial installations and film. Her work at the Future Generation Art Prize exhibition is entitled Vault continues on her investigations into the function of museums in the aniconic Arabian Gulf. The work is an artistic response to the failed processes of modernisation that attempts to mirror Western constructs, and issues surrounding representation. The fragmented display combines symbols from the past and present, speaking of the dissipation of Arab polytheism with the advent of Islam, and the rise of a new materialism with the advent of the oil economy. A variety of obejcts are on display, including neon street signs (also in Venice) and ceramic replicas of artefacts kept from view in the storage basement of the incomplete Kuwait National Museum. At the PinchukArtCentre, the vault-like architecture of the space in which these objects were shown also alluded to the inside of the Kaaba, which once functioned as a pagan pantheon filled with hundreds of venerated sculptures. Through this work, Farid presents conflicting views on the role and production of images.
Based in Ramallah, Palestine, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. 1983) work as a duo, across a range of media, incluiding sound, image, text, installation and performance. Their research-based practice engages with the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. The contemporary landscape they explore in their work is in perpetual crisis, in an endless ‘present’ that is shaped by politics of desire and disaster. In their projects they create incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites that re-imagine the possibilities of the present. Their practice utilises both existing and self-authored materials, and investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.
In the exhibition, 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 three-channel video installation is structured around CCTV footage taken from an Israeli military surveillance camera on 19 March 2014, when 14 year-old Yusuf Shawamreh crossed the ‘separation fence’ erected by the Israeli military near Hebron. The young boy was going to pick Akub, an edible plant that is a delicacy in Palestinian cuisine, which blooms only for a short period of time 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 it was circulated online, only to be removed later.
The work combines a fragmented script taken from online recordings of everyday erasures of bodies, land and built structures, as well as their reappearance through ritual and performance. In the video, images build in density on top of each other to obscure what was there before, as a testament to the constant erasure of bodies, land and structures. The artists say about the work’s concept:
The erasure of entire communities is a violence enacted not just on the individual and communal body but also to places and things; lived structures, vegetation and land, not to mention lived history, community and memory. Ultimately, it is a violence enacted on our imaginary or any sense of futurity.
The single channel video At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other borrows its title from Edward Said’s After the Last Sky. The work takes fragments from Said’s work for the script, repurposed to reflect on what it means now to be constructed as an ‘illegal’ person, body or entity. The script, turned into a song, is sung by the artists as multiple avatars generated by a software that uses images of people who participated in the ’March of Return’, which continues to take place on the seamline in Gaza. The artists explore the relationship between fugitivity, fragility and futurity. Using low resolution images circulated online, the avatar software renders the missing data and information in the original image as scars, glitches and incomplete features on the characters faces. The work thus references the violence inherent in the circulation and construction of images, and reflects on the impossibilities of the Palestinian condition. It speaks, through Palestine’s situation, to a much wider condition of people and bodies around the world that are deemed illegal, disposable and invisible.
Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986, Bangkok) 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. Arunanondchai has created serialised video-installations within a loose series titled “Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names”. In his work for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019, made in collaboration with Alex Gvojic and boychild, and shown in Kiev, he transformed 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. The video focuses on the rescue mission of 13 kids that were stuck in a flooded cave in Northern Thailand last year, to examine how the force of propaganda, spirituality, Royal History storytelling, Cold War politics in Southeast Asia and localised beliefs come together to create a new myth of representation for everyone to believe and take part in.
In Venice, the title is yet again transformed, this time into With History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 4 (with objects made by my grandmother), made in collaboration with Tipyavarna Nitibhon, and presenting something more personal. Departing from his grandmother’s dementia, the artist created a video that opens with a close-up shot of the hands of his grandmother, following her in the rearrangement of objects that her memory does not recognise, turning theminto unfamiliar, meaningless objects. The installation also includes personal objects and family heirlooms. The artist explores the ephemeral nature of life and memory. He says:
The stable ground is at times gently vibrating and at other times abruptly exploding. The only stable thing left in a world could be the recognition of your own breath. I would like to think that this recognition will exist past the point where you could breathe, when your body no longer exists.
Australian artist Madison Bycroft (b. 1987) creates installations that she identifies as “systematic disfunctionalities”, weaving together recognisable forms with things that cannot be determined. She combines strange costumes and forms, surreal scripts and other awkward things, providing an estranging experience of a disrupted narrative that breaks comfortable and predictable associative patterns. Bycroft questions values which viewers are accustomed to, and the self becomes displaced in order to make space for empathy. The artist says about her methodology:
I work in an associative manner – this thing is like this thing which feels like this other thing. But I am interested in the forms of association in which it is not always easy to articulate a commonality – where a mutuality is illegible, outside language or logic. Following on from this, it is important to ask myself how to relate across difference, without homogenizing something into a comfort zone. Like an intransitive verb, how can I act in a way that does not take an object? ‘About’, here, does not pin something down or reveal it, but moves around it, is to the side of it, or in the key of pathos, invites it to move through me.
Her work for the Future Generation Art Prize reflects her recent practice, and explores how different forms of expression come into conflict. She examines notions of disguise, distraction, adornment, legibility and solidarity across difference. The body of work presented 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 – 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.
Beirut- and Berlin-based, Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri was born in Senegal and educated in Japan, where she received a PhD in Intermedia Art from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. Her research there focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle East, reflected in poetry, music, art and religious practices. Al Qadiri explores unconventional gender identities, petro-cultures and their possible futures, as well as the legacies of corruption. In her recent projects, she has been investigating the implication of the oil industry for the countries of the Arabian Gulf region, and the precarity of their imminent future. Through her work, Al Qadiri poses questions about what would be left to commemorate once the petroleum era is over. Recently, her video work probing into the parallel history of the pearling industry in the Gulf was shown at APT9 in Brisbane. The piece was included in the prize exhibition in Kiev, alongside some miniature objects and a giant shell sculpture.
In Venice, Al Qadiri presents an outdoor sculpture entitled Alien Technology. The work is a monumental sculpture of an iridescent oil drill, which alludes to both the underwater pearling industry that fed the region’s economy before the advent of oil, and simultaneously, the tool that is central to the current economy of oil – the drill. The pearling industry is invisible to most today, having lost is centrality in the region’s economy, and becoming a forgotten history after the discovery of oil. At the same time, the oil industry also has its own hidden aspects, with the nature of its extraction rarely seen. This monument to the oil drill makes the hidden element visible to all, and reveals the central symbol and the basis of the region’s wealth, and the motor that moves the economy.
Yu Araki (b. 1985, Yamagata City, Japan) studied sculpture, film and new media, developing a multimedia practice that currently focuses on investigating personal confrontation with extreme sense of loss. The three-channel video installation The Last Ball references a short story titled “The Ball” (1920) by renowned Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which was based on an account of a ball held in Edo/Tokyo, written by French naval officer and writer Pierre Loti (1850-1923) and published in his book Japoneries d’Automne (1889). The book is a travelogue of the French writer’s trip to Meiji-era Japan, during a period of rapid modernisation and westernisation, and features frequent praises to Japan for its natural beauty and the aesthetic sensibility of its people.
The account which inspired the video work talks about an 1885 ball held at the Rokumeikan from the perspective of the then 35-year-old Loti, which featured as its protagonist the budding 17-year-old Japanese woman with whom Loti danced. In Araki’s video work, two costumed actors playing the roles of Loti and his dance partner Akiko dance a waltz in an environment evoking the Rokumeikan building, demolished in 1941. For the work, Araki draws on sources from both East and West, weaving together an Occidental, colonialist gaze with the Orient. The two dancers both hold iPhones on selfie sticks while dancing, providing shots that are woven into the visual narrative and superimposed on other images of the ball. Araki thus merges history and memory, the personal and the collective, Western and Eastern perspectives into a melodramatic dance that recalls our contemporaneity and cultural coexistence today.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice 2019 runs from 11 May to 18 August 2019 as a Collateral Event of the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia at Palazzo Ca’ Tron.