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| Sheela Gowda, of all people, installation view at Rivington Place, Iniva, 2011 |
Artes Mundi is an international art prize - it is the UK's biggest art prize, but receives notably less media attention than the Turner Prize which has opened in the same week (see below).
The exhibition presents the work of 7 artists who explore social themes, telling stories of lived experience. The artists are: Miriam Bäckström (Sweden), Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Phil Collins (England), Sheela Gowda (India), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), Darius Mikšys (Lithuania) and Apolonija Šušteršič (Slovenia). Examples of their work appear below with brief biographies and descriptions of work taken from the National Museum website. The winner will be announced on 29 November. Read article by Mark Brown.
Miriam Bäckström (Sweden)
Many of Bäckström’s more recent works explore the documentary and the fictional, interweaving narratives that create new and uncertain realities and identities. She recently worked on a yearlong project with one of her students who assumed the role of the character ‘Miriam Bäckström’. This character performed public duties on behalf of the artist, selected the work for a retrospective of Bäckström’s work, all the while being the subject of a documentary made by the artist. In 2005 she represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale and collaborated with artist Carsten Höller.
Bäckström has increasingly turned to the moving image, theatre, and performance, working with actor-collaborators to script and shoot videos that expose the often confounding symbioses of fact and fiction, subjectivity and assumed persona.
(See article by Ronald Jones in Frieze)
Tania Bruguera (Cuba)
At the core of Bruguera’s practice is a collaborative impulse that opens up the possibilities made available to her to be shared by others. In 2003 she founded the alternative art school Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Art of Behaviour) in Havana to channel technological and intellectual resources unavailable in Cuba to emerging Cuban artists. This has been crucial in the development of a generation of Cuban artists now starting to show internationally. From 2010-15 Bruguera is focusing on her long-term project Immigrant Movement International, based in Queens, NY, which seeks to redefine the immigrant as a global citizen and stimulate artists to create work that can be actively implemented into social, political, and scientific issues. Bruguera recently presented Immigrant Movement International in The Tanks, Tate Modern, 30th July – 15th August 2012.
Phil Collins (England)
Collins was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2006.
Sheela Gowda (India)
Gowda’s use of unconventional materials is a highly evocative element of her practice, where the tactile qualities of thread, hair, traditional dyes, pattern and weaving, bring the viewer’s attention to a meaning that transposes these elements into social objects and practices located within a network of production and distribution, framed in relation to India’s socio-political legacy.
Her work is both sensual and unsettling, conjuring some of the darkest aspects of human experience, where poetically invested materials evoke what the artist refers to as “the insidious nature of violence, overt and inside us in our psychic makeup”. Gowda’s ongoing inquiry into the political and social intricacies of India, traditions of labour, inequity and oppression, creates a richness of meaning woven into a fabric of strength and reclaimed identity.
(See article by Zehra Jumbahoy in Frieze and profile by Skye Sherwin)
Teresa Margolles (Mexico)
For Margolles, sculptural installations and performance bring the physical reality, and materiality, of death to the fore. Typically activating the blind spots of our imagination, Margolles collapses the distinction between art and reality, as in her work for the Venice Biennale in 2009 where the floor of the exhibition space was mopped continuously with water from a morgue in Mexico. By means of artistic intervention, Margolles brings attention uncharacteristically close to our understanding and relationship with death.
(See article by Amanda Coulson in Frieze)
Darius Mikšys (Lithuania)
Social networks take on new forms within the framework of Mikšys’ curatorial interventions; as founder of the first Lithuanian cricket club Mikšys has built a reputation for introducing social networks, and through various Artists Parents Meetings he has approached and interacted with a wider community of parents of artists in a hybrid form of performance, therapy, and collective experience.
For the 54th Venice Biennale, Mikšys invited all Lithuanian artists who had received European grants to submit a work to his project Behind the White Curtain, 2011. Visitors were able to select from these works, enabling them to create their own displays of Lithuanian art, resulting in a continuously changing narrative of collective identity. Within the context of previous works we can understand Mikšys’ practice as one of re-inventing notions of representation, in terms of the deconstruction of concrete narratives.
Apolonija Šušteršič (Slovenia)
Typically, Šušteršič’s broad ranging interest starts with a phenomenological study of space and continues its investigation into the social and political nature of our living environment. Her critical analysis of space usually focuses on the processes and relationships between institutions, cultural politics, urban planning and architecture. Situated somewhere between art and public services, Šušteršič’s practice creates and integrates communities of users who develop scenarios of alternatives and spaces for hope.
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