A total of 20 participants present 16 different countries. Overall more than 4,000 applications for the award were submitted from 134 countries. Mykyta Kadan, winner of the past year’s PinchukArtCentre award for young artists, became the 21st nominee.
The Future Generation Art Prize short list includes: Jonathas de Andrade, 30 years old (Brazil), Meris Angioletti, 34 (Italy), Marwa Arsanios, 33 (Lebanon), Micol Assael, 33 (Italy), Abigail DeVille, 30 (United States), Mykyta Kadan, 29 (Ukraine), Meiro Koizumi, 35 (Japan), Andre Komatsu, 33 (Brazil), Eva Kotatkova, 29 (the Czech Republic), Yan Xing, 26 (China), Basim Magdy, 34 (Egypt), Tala Madani, 30 (Iran), Ahmet Ogut, 30 (Turkey), Amalia Pica, 33 (Argentina), Agnieszka Polska, 27 (Poland), Emily Roysdon, 34 (United States), Rayyane Tabet, 28 (Lebanon), Aurelien Froment, 35 (France), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 34 (United Kingdom), and two groups: Joao Maria Gusmao, 33 and Pedro Paiva, 34 (Portugal), and R.E.P. (Ukraine), led among others by Kadan.
This year’s exhibit resembles the one for the Future Generation Art Prize of 2010 in many ways. Young artists tend to experiment with motion of forms and objects again, and there are many video works and straightforward social slogans. Purely genre differences pertain to the direct effect of the performance elements. For example, three different authors use live presence of an artist or an actor in their installations.
Thus, Amalia Pica constructed a large Acoustic Radar out of the cardboard (a long curved tube that expands at one end), and placed a young performer girl near the tube’s narrow end. Yan Xing separated his installation with a piece of glass, poured sand in there, hung an obscene photo, and seated a smartly dressed young man who was reading a book by Hemingway. A work by Marwa Arsanios (Did You Ever Kill a Bear?) turned out to be the most dynamic one: the artist herself sits in a room filled with carelessly placed objects (painted wooden boards and printed pictures) and reads radical texts aloud.
Each of these sections is a success, since living human presence, even when a performer does not do anything, always attracts attention. Other artists are trying to win by introducing the machine movement or automatic animation: working mechanisms are fascinating in their own way.
Andre Komatsu created an installation made of four working fans and stacks of A4 paper sheets with photocopies of dictionary entries (with meanings of words “language,” “system,” “control”) and black and white photographs. It would be just fine, a nice composition in a state of self-development and self-destruction at the same time. If not for the famous Cuban conceptualist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who exhibited stacks of copies of his own and others’ images for the viewers to take them home. Eva Kotatkova created a whole Theater of Talking Objects: a beam of light in a dark room falls on something like a huge cooking pan or a cabinet, and the object delivers a speech. The Portuguese duo of Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva created the best art machine of all. They placed a continuously running 16-mm film projector in a glass box. It projected various short sketches on the wall, which looked as if they were captured in art studios (a nude model goes to bed, a blind African eats a papaya), or resembled screen tests of the first surrealist artists of the early 20th century (rotating of wheels, a working watermill).
One can watch a working machine endlessly, especially if it is a film projector. But the standard video art by other participants (Basim Magdy, Ahmet Ogut, Micol Assael, Aurelien Froment, and Meiro Koizumi) looked more like labored self-expression. It is clear that these are different works, they are nicely shot and cut, their authors tried to tell something important to the world, and they considered video to be the best way to do it. But with very rare exceptions, video art has long ago become a commonplace for any contemporary art exhibit, a kind of “under-cinematography.” The genre is going through a crisis, the way out of which is yet to be found, but as for today, an artist with a video camera seems to raise doubts. Perhaps, a more diverse work with exhibit space is required: Agnieszka Polska and her Five Short Videos stood out in the crowd, because she organized the display as a single piece: a viewer ends up in a room with all five films being projected on the walls and continuously replayed to loud and somewhat macabre music, and this does make an impression.
Object installations sometimes contrasted with one another. For example, Jonathas de Andrade and Abigail DeVille turned out to be opponents. If the first one created Nostalgia, Class Sentiments, a set of bright plastic geometric elements attached to walls with critical texts written over them, the second one presented Street Life: the Vortex, a chaotic interior made of old things, broken mannequins, and just garbage. However, it seems that class sentiments are inherent in both of them, as well as in the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Her portraits of black people are not to be viewed from anthropologic or ethnographic perspective, but they are rather a political statement embedded into realistic paintings.
As for Ukrainian participants of the exhibit, social commitment is just as important for them. Mykyta Kadan designed a strange House of Giants, which, on the one hand, looks like a model of a supermodern office building, and on the other, is a dirty and rusty trailer in which builders, who usually construct this glass beauty, live. And R.E.P. exhibited a very witty European-style Renovation: a brand new fashionably decorated wall with a huge breach in the middle, a few more similar-looking walls with holes behind it, and in the very back – a bare ugly wall. The piece is a felicitous metaphor for the vulgar vanity.
There are no obvious leaders among the nominees. Almost everyone has interesting ideas which are more or less convincingly implemented in works. Two tendencies generally dominate, regardless of the participants’ country of origin or used art techniques: it is either a piece with pure forms, or creation as a means of delivering a social message. So, it will be interesting to see if the jury chooses an “esthete” or a “socialist.”
The winner of the main prize, who will receive 60,000 dollars in cash and 40,000 dollars in the form of a grant for the creation of new works, will be announced at the Awards Ceremony, which will be held on December 7 in Kyiv. Besides, extra 20,000 dollars will be spent on training programs for Special Prize winners (up to five people). The exhibit will be open until January 6, 2013.
