RIBA National Awards 2023
Image: Denizen Works, Hundred Acre Wood house overlooking Loch Awe, Argyll and Bute, Scotland. Completion: 2021. Image © Gilbert McCarragher
ARCHITECTURE
RIBA National Awards
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the 30 winners of the 2023 RIBA National Awards for Architecture, providing an insight into the country’s architecture, design, and social trends. Among the key themes observed this year, the need to rebuild communities and to find sustainable ways of practicing stand out as the main concerns of the participant architects. The response to these themes is varied, ranging from buildings that aim to offer opportunities for collaboration for students to creating stimulating social spaces for the elderly or providing creative programs at a neighborhood scale.
About the RIBA National Awards
Prix HCB 2023
Image: Haute Kabylie, 2023 © Karim Kal
PHOTOGRAPHY
Karim Kal
Prix HCB
Karim Kal is the winner of the Prix HCB 2023 for his project Haute Kabylie, which will be exhibited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in the spring of 2025 alongside the publication of a book. Haute Kabylie explores the nights of this mountainous region located south of Tizi Ouzou, the regional capital of eastern Algiers. A territory marked by centuries of rebellion against the invader and a symbol of resistance within Algeria. Karim Kal offers a new reading of the region and its past. By choosing the night, the photographs of Karim Kal are situated between darkening and unveiling: the viewer must make an effort to analyze the image and detect its details – like an invitation to reflect on this history mixed with conflicts and reconstructions.
London Design Biennale 2023
Image: Turkey, OpenWork I Açık Yapıta. Photo by Taran Wilkhu
DESIGN
Turkey
Public Medal
Turkey was announced as the winner of London Design Biennale 2023 Public Medal as the exhibition enters its final weekend. Turkey’s Pavilion, OpenWork I Açık Yapıta, is a monumental arrangement of gateways, installed in the Somerset House courtyard. The installation explores and plays with the meaning of thresholds and gateways, which have been the representation of power, setting borders and social hierarchy throughout history. Turkey’s Pavilion intends to blur the lines between visitor, installation, ground, time, power and boundaries. These represent changing power dynamics and deconstruction of rigid structures in society. Through this experimental game, visitors can experience an unpredictable union and a new reality.
About the London Design Biennale
Talents contemporains
Image: Bilal Hamdad, Sans titre, 2022. Huile sur toile, 160 × 200 × 4,5 cm.
ART
Talents contemporains
Talents contemporains has announced the six winners of its 12th edition. Ulysse Bordarias presents a multitude of storms in a large graphite drawing, Il pleuvait sur l’agora. Bilal Hamdad presents Sans titre, the first painting in his ongoing series L’Horizon. Manon Lanjouère recreates an abyssal atmosphere by presenting our waste in the form of underwater species in Les particules, le conte humain d’une eau qui meurt. In Les Possessions, Aurélien Mauplot brings together maps of all the countries in the world based on Jules Verne’s Tour du monde en 80 jours. Ugo Schiavi presents Léviathan, a fountain-creature created from abandoned objects and a host of other materials. Noémi Sjöberg explores the issues of mass tourism with her music box One euro to jump now.
Frieze Seoul Artist Award
Image: WOO Hannah, Milk and Honey 5, 2023. To be shown as part of ‘The Great Ballroom’. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by LEE Seungheon
ART
WOO Hannah
Frieze Seoul Artist Award
Korean artist, WOO Hannah, is the winner of the Inaugural Frieze Seoul Artist Award. WOO’s winning commission, titled The Great Ballroom, is a large-scale installation that continues her new series Milk and Honey(2023–ongoing). Suspended from the ceiling, the installation’s draped fabrics bring to mind the shape of women’s breasts and are reminiscent of hanging curtains in a ballroom, or a bat spreading its wings in mid-air. WOO’s installation embraces the inevitability of decay and the process of aging and bodily change, rather than rejecting or lamenting it.
About the Frieze Seoul Artist Award
Thomas Burberry Prize
Image: Christine Wilkinson, WASHING MACHINE II.
ART
Christine Wilkinson
Thomas Burberry Prize
A close partnership has linked Burberry to the Royal Academy of Arts since 2005. A key event on the London artistic calendar, the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, has been an opportunity for Burberry, for the past 2 years, to reveal the winner of its prize which rewards the realization of a print, on any medium. This year it is the British artist Christine Wilkinson who wins the Thomas Burberry Prize, with her print WASHING MACHINE II, presented in response to the theme of the Summer Exhibition: 'Only Connect'.
About the Thomas Burberry Prize
S+T+ARTS Prize 2023
Image: Richard Mosse, Broken Spectre, 2022, Film still © Richard Mosse, Jack Shainman and Carlier Gebauer
ART
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Richard Mosse
S+T+ARTS Prize
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Richard Mosse are the two winners of the S+T+ARTS Prize, a yearly competition rewarding innovative projects at the nexus of science, technology and the arts, that have what it takes to make a significant impact on economic and social innovation. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker is attempting to create the largest climate-positive work of art in the world. The online platform helps to create an "empathetic" planting plan that favors the greatest possible diversity of pollinator species. Broken Spectre, Richard Mosse's immersive video, is the portrait of an intentional environmental catastrophe that unfolds along the 4,000-kilometer-long Trans-Amazonian Highway.
2023 Prix Ars Electronica
Image: Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer's Sphere © Ayoung Kim
ART
Ayoung Kim
Atractor Estudio + Semantica Productions
Winnie Soon
Sonja Höglinger
Golden Nica
The Prix Ars Electronica awarded annually to artists working at the intersection of technology, art and society, has announced this year’s Golden Nicas recipients. Korean artist Ayoung Kim is the winner for New Animation Art, selected for her work Delivery Dancer’s Sphere; Colombian based collective Atractor Estudio and UK artist group Semantica Productions receives the Golden Nica for Digital Musics & Sound Arts for their sound installation A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains; Hong Kong artist Winnie Soon’s Unerasable Characters Series wins the Golden Nica for AI & Life Art; and Austrian artist Sonja Höglinger’s Verblassende Stimmen (Fading Voices) wins the prize’s 'u19 – create your world' unit, awarded to a young professional.
