The shortlist for the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize has been announced by prize host Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, with artists who work in performance and video featuring strongly among the list of six finalists.
Included is British artist and 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, who is best known for producing multi-disciplinary works that combine sculpture, sound, film and performance, often using found footage to explore ideas of cultural allegiance, desire and transformation. His work Felix the Cat, a giant inflatable sculpture, was on show at this year’s Frieze London.
Shortlisted artist Tania Bruguera was earlier this year detained in her home country Cuba on charges of ‘resistance and disrupting the public order’. The charges were bought over an attempt to restage her 2009 work, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 – a performance that consists of a podium and an open mic where the public is invited to talk for one minute on a subject of their choice. Upon the return of her passport in July, Bruguera was announced as the first artist-in-residence for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
Continuing the performative vein are New York-based choreographer, writer, director and visual artist Ralph Lemon and Wael Shawky, an artist who works with film, performance, sculpture and drawing from his base in Egypt. LA-based painter Laura Owens and South Korea-born sculptor Anicka Yi, who now lives in New York, compete the list.
Established in 1996, the $100,000 award is made biennially to an artist who ‘embraces today’s most innovative and critically relevant cultural currents’ with no limitations on nationality, medium, or age. Previous British winners are Douglas Gordon (1998) and Tacita Dean (2006), while American artist Paul Chan picked up the award in 2014. The winner will be announced in spring 2016, and will also be the subject of a major exhibition at Guggenheim, New York in 2017.
More on a-n.co.uk:
Tania Bruguera to be first NY Immigrant Affairs artist-in-residence
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Turner Prize 2015 exhibition: from homely warmth to ice-cold installation
