A prize for the future

The exhibit displays the works of 21 artists nominated for the international Future Generation Art Prize 2010. The authors, aged 27 to 35, come from 15 countries, mostly in Europe. They were selected from among more than 6,000 applications.

Truly versatile artists are vying for Ukraine’s first international art prize. We would like to single out some of the most talented participants.

One of the most impressive video works is a puppet animation by Nathalie Djurberg from Sweden. Created in a coarse manner, on purpose, these films will be remembered by a well-thought-out direction and a creative application of the tradition of surrealism, where violence, sex and sarcasm dangerously mix. Plasticine-made characters (people of various social strata and races, as well as animals) do incredible and even wild things, with the author always sending a tough, clear-cut, and easy-to-read message. It is quite probable that Djurberg will overstep gallery limits and become a full-fledged filmmaker.

The video of Brazil’s Cinthia Marcelle is interesting, not so much because of cinematic technique as because of what was filmed: it is a documented account of the author’s performances. The two films present land art works on location: a tractor is drawing, with its wheels, a thick eight on the red Brazilian soil, and a fire engine is making a circle on the same land, painting the middle of it white with a hose. Finally, the film Fonte is a witty musical production: four groups of musicians playing brass instruments (tubas and trombones) and the percussion (drums and cymbals) converge at the same intersection from different sides. Each group is wearing its own color. Never ceasing to play, they carry out symmetrical evolutions and then go their own ways. All the three performances are visually rewarding, for they are full of local colors, well-calculated, and use the landscape as a canvas of sorts, on which the master paints by means of machines or an orchestra.

The Dutchman Guido van der Werve is a broadly gifted person who does performances in the most unexpected places, such as the North Pole, and also composes music and makes films. Thus, he comes up with professionally-shot and timeless video clips to his own music. The ideas the author puts into the films get lost behind a dense flow of self-expression.

Although the award is intended for young people, Future Generation Art Prize 2010 has gathered quite experienced authors. Nico Vascellari is standing good chances for victory. A resident of Venice, he was awarded a special prize at the 2007 Biennale. In Kyiv, Vascellari built a multi-element installation, turning a big hall into sort of a natural-cum-industrial cave. The video footage of a forest is projected onto the wooden walls and the mirrors attached to them. A dozen of powerful loudspeakers on the floor produce an intricate acoustic composition — the sounds of the woods, the singing of birds, noises, and rumble — over 30 tracks in total, and a large glazed-over picture is hanging on the wall. To make this picture, Vascellari took down a bird’s nest and stuck all the straws and little branches on the paper. This resulted in a birdlike cuneiform of sorts. By using video and mirror reflections, loudspeaker dodecaphony, and an avian ABC on the wall, the Italian artist managed to create his own both formidable and brilliant reality. Vascellari deepened the overall impression by repeating his 2007 performance. The artist would run about with a mike in hand, and his cries, distorted and amplified by the equipment, came down on the audience like a real avalanche of sound, while he, in the best traditions of a punk rock gig, would pounce on the audience that ran away from him in all directions.

Cao Fei (China) used video, computer-assisted animation, sculpture, furniture, and everyday-life items to build the futuristic city of Yuan. Yet this brilliant, chimerical, and sometimes witty utopia leaves the sensation of some lack of imagination, for such installations from Far Eastern artists have long been an attraction at international exhibits.

As for installations without cine- or video-projection, the existence of certain contrasts or duets was interesting. For example, the works of Clemens Hollerer and the Mexican Hector Zamora look like a single entity: the blue and red scaffolding built into the art centre’s space by the former lead to the wooden mockup of a ship made the latter. It looked good, albeit like a designer’s applied ploy.

The set of installations by Gareth Moore (Canada) and Jorinde Voigt (Germany) was a contrasting set of sorts. Moore used the most common household items to construct a special microworld in which things suddenly assume a nature of their own, but on the whole resembling a strange picture of an entire human life. On her part, Voigt works with a minimalistic number of elements: a few black propellers on the wall are spinning at a variable speed, and a two-dimensional response to this movement is large abstract graphic pictures that resemble either the maps of an unknown locality or the super-complicated topological charts or perhaps the fixation of the above-mentioned propellers. One can carry out a dialog with, reject or accept Moore’s and Voigt’s works, but in any case they are original.

However, if a prize for originality existed, South Africa’s Nicholas Hlobo would be the recipient. His compositions, made of fabrics, rubber, metal carcasses and colored threads, resemble chimerical forms of life, moreover, adorned with traditional embroidery: you feel like peeking into an ocean where such art organisms might live.

Katerina Seda (Czech Republic) has in fact presented a social project titled “A Hill of Mirrors.” She attracted the community of a small Hungarian town: both adults and children painted some fragments of houses, and then all the pictures were multiplied, bound into albums, and handed out to people. The one who could guess most of the painted places received a prize. Albums, pencils, and individual pictures make up this part of the exposition. What is interesting here is not so much the art techniques as implementation of a noble intention in a highly democratic way.

What the American Ruben Ochoa shows also has a certain social shade. His abstract sculptures are made of concrete and rusty reinforcements. Ochoa managed to impart agility and wit to these industrial materials.

On the whole, the exhibit showed that the Kyiv contest had been widely acclaimed in the world of art. The international jury will announce the grand prix winner at the award ceremony to be held on December 10, 2010, in Kyiv.