Contemporary Art Society has announced the four museums and artists in the running for its Annual Award 2015, the £40,000 prize which supports a UK-based museum or public gallery to work with an artist of its choice to commission a new work that, once completed, will remain within the museum’s permanent collection.
Exercise and debate
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) has been shortlisted for its proposal to work with Mexican, New York-based artist and writer Pablo Helguera. The project would redesign mima’s third floor gallery as an interconnecting series of rooms called The Gymnasium. Described as a place where visitors would engage in ‘a bespoke learning and physical activity programme that connects mind and body’, the work would honour the role played by the gymnasium as a hub for both exercise and debate in the ancient world.
A joint venture between National Museum Wales and Artes Mundi would see Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson produce an ambitious performance and film installation involving a number of elements including the museum itself, the local music scene from opera to pop, and a 1774 chamber-organ from the collection of the National Museum Cardiff. The project would combine the prize fund with an award from the Derek Williams Trust, a purchase prize already presented to the artist during the Artes Mundi 6 exhibition earlier this year.
Popular and contemporary culture
Museum of the Year winner The Whitworth in Manchester has proposed working with Glasgow based artist Stephen Sutcliffe and theatre maker Graham Eatough. Their collaborative film, produced in partnership with LUX, would combine Sutcliffe’s interests in British literary and popular culture of the 1960s and ’70s with Eatough’s ongoing exploration of theatricality in the creation of meaning in contemporary culture.
The shortlist is completed by The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery at University of Leeds, working in collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute, which has proposed commissioning artist Katrina Palmer to create an audio work focusing on the university’s public art collection. The work would be delivered digitally, online and through mobile technology, with Palmer specifically seeking out works by women artists as a way to address a gender imbalance within the collection and connect with the Feminist Archive North, which is also housed at the university.
The winner will be announced at a special ceremony at the Barbican Centre, London on 23 November 2015. This year’s panel includes: Annie Fletcher (Chief Curator, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven); Polly Staple (Director, Chisenhale Gallery); Michael Archer (Critic and Professor of Art, Goldsmiths College); and Haroon Mirza (Artist).
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