Articulate Potential: The Abraaj Capital Art Prize - May/June 2009
By Jonathan Thompson
The Abraaj Capital Prize is awarded not on the basis of an exhibition or an existing work of art, but for a project proposal and its potential. The application is not made by an artist, but by a curator who makes the application with the consent of an artist. The curator is required to submit brief details on the artist, but the actual decision as to who is awarded the prize is made on the basis of three articles written by the curator and the quality of their curatorial proposal for the work of the artist in the submission, and the reasons why they wish to work with the nominated artist.
Three winners of the prize are each awarded $200,000 to cover production costs, installation costs, catalogue, shipping and travel for both curator and artist. The prize includes a fixed fee of $15,000 for the curator. Applicants must be recognized curators of any nationality but the artists with whom they work must be currently living and working in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) region. The winning works, once made, become the property of Abraaj Capital.
In a very real sense, the work of the curator is finished when the prize is won, when the decision to award the production budget to the three finalists is made. Their job is to articulate the potential of a particular proposal to achieve an outcome. The money is awarded irrespective of whether or not the actual work lives up to its promise and is a success or a failure. Of course the curator has a vested interest in helping to ensure that the artist actually realizes the work successfully and may work very closely with the artist during the whole production process. In the final analysis, however, it is the ability of the artists to realize their own concepts that will determine whether or not the works are considered a success.
For 2009, the prize was awarded to curator Carol Solomon working with artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah, curator Leyla Fakhr working with artist Nazgol Ansarinia, and curator Cristiana Perrella working with artist Kutlug Ataman. For Zoulikha Bouabdellah working with Carol Solomon, most of the hard work was done in the development of the application, while for Solomon, there continued to be a close association through the fabrication process, acting as a sounding board whenever the artist encountered practical issues that required different technical solutions. Their application was the result of a long period of close association.
Solomon first became aware of Bouabdellah’s work at an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and then included two of her videos in an exhibition that she curated at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Their relationship deepened when Bouabdellah was subsequently invited to be artist in residence at Amherst College. For both of them this personal relationship was crucial for their mutual understanding of the work and its successful presentation in the competition.
The prize was awarded in October 2008 with the winning works being unveiled at Art Dubai in 2009. Bouabdellah presented a work entitled Walk on the Night Sky. This work comprises a six-meter-square, three-meter-high pavilion with a mirrored floor and a polished-aluminum ceiling studded with light-emitting diodes. The illusion of walking on the sky is heightened by the fact that the polish of the ceiling reflects the floor and vice versa ad infinitum.
Nazgol Ansarinia’s winning work Rhyme and Reason was a fine-woven Persian carpet in traditional design but with contemporary motifs. Kutlug Ataman’s winning work was the video Strange Space that depicts him blindfolded and with bare feet walking gingerly across a vast salt pan with mountains in the far distance. The work is intended “as a metaphor for the encounter between modernity and tradition,” but the artist’s tentative steps with outstretched hands appear contrived. After all, in such a vast open featureless space, what can he possibly bump into?
Reprinted with kind permission of Asian Art News. Copyright (c) Asian Art Press (International) Limited 2009.
