TAMAR GUIMARÃES AND KASPER AKHØJ WIN $75,000 FAENA PRIZE FOR THE ARTS

The international nonprofit Faena Art announced today that Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj have been named the winners of the organization’s $75,000 Faena Prize for the Arts, which celebrates artistic experimentation. This year’s biennial juried prize invited artists to create proposals for projects that would explore the concept of time and duration, and engage with the Faena Art Center in Buenos Aires.

The Copenhagen-based artists’ winning proposal referenced the tradition of the libretto. They designed an immersive theater experience for a micro-musical in which the stage would become an inclined terrain. Up to $50,000 of the artists’ prize money will fund the project, which will debut at the Faena Art Center in 2019.

“Tamar and Kasper’s practice is interdisciplinary at its core, based on rigorous research and combines elements of theater, music, architecture and politics in a highly participatory manner,” the jury said in a joint statement. “It is a post-disciplinary, post-colonial practice that retains the kind of reflection on its own process that belongs to the very tradition of modern art.”

Chaired by Ximena Caminos, Faena Art’s artistic director, the jury comprised Carlos Basualdo, Keith the senior curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Anita Dube, the curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018; Pablo León de la Barra, the former Latin America curator for the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative; and Franklin Sirmans, the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Jesús Fuenmayor, curator of the XIV Bienal de Cuenca, also served as an advisor.

Former Faena Prize winners include Roger Hiorns (2016), Cayetano Ferrer (2015), Fundación Vairoletto (2013), and Martín Sastre (2012).

See Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj’s exhibiton I blew on Mr.Greenhill’s main joints with a very ‘hot’ breath  in the Ground floor gallery until Sunday 3 June.