2023 Audain Prize
Image: Dana Claxton, The Mustang Suite: Daddy’s Gotta New Ride, 2008.
ART
Dana Claxton
Audain Prize
Dana Claxton received this year’s Audain Prize, one of Canada’s most coveted arts awards. Claxton, a Vancouver-based artist whose work spans film, photography, video and multi-channel installation, is a member of the Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in Southwest Saskatchewan. Her practice investigates Indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual and has been widely exhibited across Canada and internationally. She is also a professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and head of its department of art history, visual art and theory.
Nasher Prize
Image: Installation view of Otobong Nkanga at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2021.
Unearthed – Sunlight, 2021, woven textile, remembrance plants, 137 4/5 x 236 1/5 inches (350 x 600 cm). Unearthed installation on 4 floors, 3rd floor: scorched tree-trunk, landscape of rammed earth with pools. Photo: Markus Tretter
ART
Otobong Nkanga
Nasher Prize
The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas has awarded Antwerp-based artist Otobong Nkanga its Nasher Prize. Working across various mediums and drawing on deep research she has conducted, Nkanga is best-known for large-scale installations and performances that look at humans’ relationships to the earth’s resources and how, through systems of capital and consumption, these ties are fragile, tenuous, and extractive. In a statement, Nasher Sculpture Center director Jeremy Strick said, "The work of Otobong Nkanga makes manifest the myriad connections—historical, sociological, economic, cultural, and spiritual— that we have to the materials that comprise our lives. Delving deeply into the variegated meanings these materials take on, Nkanga’s work makes clear the essential place of sculpture in contemporary life."
2023 IWPA Award
Image: Lee-Ann Olwage, The Right to Play.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Lee-Ann Olwage
Professional Photographer
The International Women In Photo Association has named Lee-Ann Olwage the winner of the Professional Photographer Award with her series The Right to Play. The Right To Play creates a playful world where girls are shown in an empowered and affirming way. This project was created with the girls from Kakenya’s Dream, a nonprofit organization that leverages education to empower girls, end harmful traditional practices including female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage, and transform communities in rural Kenya. Their goal is to invest in girls from rural communities through educational, health, and leadership initiatives to create agents of change and to create a world where African women and girls are valued and respected as leaders and equal in every way.
Image: Sara Bennet, Looking Inside.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Sara Bennet
Emerging Photographer
Sara Bennet is this year's IWPA Emerging Photographer Award winner with her series Looking Inside. After 18 years as a public defender, Sara Bennet turned her attention to photographing women serving life sentences. A young woman imprisoned from the age of 15, another aged 70 speaking of their fear of dying behind bars, over the course of their encounters, the American photographer composes a mosaic of sensitive representations. "Every woman depicted is worth more than the decision that sent her to prison for life. They are all hardworking, resilient, dignified, introspective and remorseful. They strive to lead a meaningful life, to be worthy of compassion," says Sara Bennet.
Moving Image Commission 2023
Image: Hao Jingban, Opus One, 2020. Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Barcelona.
© Hao Jingban.
ART
Hao Jingban
Moving Image Commission
Beijing based artist Hao Jingban has been chosen as the winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+ Hong Kong and Singapore Art Museum – Moving Image Commission 2023. Against a sea of ever-changing images and rapid development, Hao is adept at finding new spaces to discover narratives and images from the past and present. She often sustains a long period of research on a subject or theme over a number of years, and slowly from this process constructs and interweaves different narratives and perspectives to create a cycle of interconnected works. Her interests focus on the language of images that have impact on a collective consciousness and the questions of how individual subjectivities can be articulated from within the structures.
About the Moving Image Commission
Prix Liliane Bettencourt pour
l'Intelligence de la Main 2023
Image: "Laissez entrer le soleil" by Pascal Oudet. © Julie Limont
CRAFT
Pascal Oudet
Talents d'exception
Pascal Oudet is the winner of the Prix Liliane Bettencourt pour l'Intelligence de la Main 2023 in the section Talents d'exception with "Laissez entrer le soleil". One of his most accomplished pieces, "Laissez entrer le soleil" is the result of a technical exploration perfected over nearly twenty years around the transparency of wood. Starting from a 70-year-old oak trunk, Pascal Oudet patiently removed the material until he obtained a diaphanous sculpture. To do this, he first created the shape of the work by turning, before drying it naturally, thus letting nature decide its ultimate form. Last decisive step: removal by sanding of the softest spring rings, preserving the densest structure of the summer wood. In the light, an organic lace appears, made of alternating summer rings and the typical mesh of oak wood that binds them.
Image: "Pêche cristalline" by Aurélia Leblanc and Lucile Viaud, hand-woven tapestry in linen and Glaz sea glass thread. © Julie Limont
CRAFT | DESIGN
Aurélia Leblanc and Lucile Viaud
Dialogues
Aurélia Leblanc, weaver and Lucile Viaud, designer, are the winners of the Prix Liliane Bettencourt pour l'Intelligence de la Main 2023 in the section Dialogues with "Pêche cristalline". In response to a commission for the restaurant in Brittany of chef Nicolas Conraux, Aurélia Leblanc and Lucile Viaud combined their know-how to give life to a glass fabric with changing reflections. Glaz sea glass, the raw material used to create "Pêche cristalline", was created by Lucile Viaud from abalone shells and micro-algae, melted and then worked hot until the result was real glass filaments several kilometers long. The duo then hand-woven them with linen in a pattern to achieve a striking evocation of a fishing net pulled from the water.
Image: © Julie Limont
CRAFT
Lainamac
Parcours
Lainamac, an association of the French wool industry, created in 2009 in Felletin in Creuse, is the winner of the Prix Liliane Bettencourt pour l'Intelligence de la Main in the section Parcours. In a few years, it managed to bring together the essential players in local wool processing, from the breeder to the artisan-creator or the art factory, giving new life to the Creuse network. Lainamac quickly expanded its activity nationally in favor of French creative companies and handmade products using French wool. It now has a training center, shared textile workshops and offers business support, in the spirit of a virtuous and responsible economy.
About the Prix Liliane Bettencourt pour l'Intelligence de la Main
Prix Fondation Azzedine Alaïa x Orveda
Image: UNI FORM by Luke Radloff, creative direction: Bee Diamondhead and Luke Radloff, photography: Aart Verrips.
FASHION
Luke Radloff
Prix Fondation Azzedine Alaïa x Orveda
Luke Radloff founder of UNI FORM from South Africa, is the first laureate of the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa x Orveda residency program. There are to be two prizes a year offered to two young fashion designers. The talent selection is based on a designer's atypical and aspirational profile. Luke Radloff and subsequent winners are to be granted a one-month training program and access to the foundation's archives. Each will have a reference tutor linked to Parsons in Paris and will create a mini-collection inspired by the collections of Azzedine Alaïa. Luke Radloff's UNI FORM brand creates modular, trans-seasonal garments referencing South Africa. They are made with his country values, craftmanship and sustainability in mind.
