Kandinsky Prize for contemporary art awarded

Last night saw the announcement of the winners of the Kandinsky Prize, one of Russia’s biggest contemporary art prizes. The Project of the Year award was picked up by conceptual artist Irina Nakhova for her project Untitled. The work, combining her family’s personal photo archives and new photographs that cover almost a century, represents the artist’s attempt at understanding the history of her country by dealing with memory and celebrating private lives that would be otherwise lost in the flux of history.

There were two winners in the Young Artist category: Tim Parchikov for Times New Roman, Episode 3: Moscow and Evgeny Granilshikov with his project Line.

Considered the Russian equivalent of the British Turner Prize, the Kandinsky prize fund awarded this year a total of €50,000, of which €10,000 went to the winner of Young Artist Project of the Year, while the remaining €40,000 were awarded to the winner of Project of the Year.

Also shortlisted for Project of the Year were artist Anya Zholud with the project Exercise and artistic group Recycle, authors of Letter F, a giant sculptural installation of the Facebook logo.

The 2013 jury included Evgeny Barabanov, Ute Meta Bauer, Ekaterina Bobrinskaya, Alla Rosenfeld, Olga Sviblova, David Thorp and Vassily Tsereteli. The Kandinsky Prize was established in 2007 by Shalva Breus, publisher of ArtChronica, with the aim of raising the prestige of Russian contemporary art internationally.