Launched by Russia’s Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography and Moscow’s National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) in 2006, the Art Innovation Prize celebrates achievement in Russian art. The awards go to projects completed in the past year in five categories: work of art; theory, criticism, or art history; curatorial project; regional project; and the New Generation prize for emerging artists.
The NCCA recently announced the nominees for the prize's seventh outing, Innovation 2011, but contenders will have a hard time matching the controversy caused when the 2010 award for best work of art went to the anarchist art collective Voina’s piece “A Dick Captured By the FSB,” the now-iconic giant penis painted on a St. Petersburg drawbridge in a guerrilla stunt. The crew received $14,000 for the award, which they said would go toward helping political prisoners.
Nominees for best art work made in 2011 include projects by performance artist Andrei Kuzkin — who was featured in Performa 11’s exhibition “33 Fragments of Russian Performance” — the collective MishMash Group, and Russian architect and sculptor Alexander Brodsky. Selections for best curatorial project include “Impossible Community,” a public-minded retrospective of the Escape collective by curator Victor Misiano, and Andrei Smirnov’s “Generation Z”, which explores the sound experiments of the 1910-1930′s, according to Baibakov Art Projects.
For the New Generation prize, the Innovation panel has chosen Alexey Buldakov and Anastasya Ryabova for “ATTENTIONWHORES,” a short video that turns mundane objects into dramatic events with a horror-movie soundtrack, as well as Valery Chtak, a painting, collage, and installation artist. Also nominated are Roman Mokrov, Alexander Gronsky, and Taus Makhacheva. (The full list of nominees is available here.)
The nominees will be shown in an exhibition at the NCCA in Moscow from March 29 through May 5. On April 2, the members of the prize jury, including Palais de Tokyo director Marc Olivier Wahler, Berlin Transmediale festival director Kristoffer Gansing, and Moscow Museum of Modern Art director Vassily Tsereteli, will choose a winner from each category. The awards will be presented in a ceremony on April 3. The political furor and attempted arrests that followed Voina’s previous victory, however, ensure that the results will likely be tamer.