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Culture: Bouchra Khalili of Morocco among 2014 Abraaj Group Art Prize winners

Five young artists from Morocco to India have been named the winners of the sixth annual Abraaj Group Art Prize. Daily Star

Five young artists from Morocco to India are winners of 6th annual Abraaj Group Art Prize. Daily Star

*6th annual Abraaj Group Art Prize exhibition will debut at Art Dubai 2014 and feature artists from Iran, India, Morocco, and Egypt.*

AhramOnline and The Daily Star, by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie (Beruit, Lebanon, June 12, 2013) — Five young artists from Morocco to India have been named the winners of the sixth annual Abraaj Group Art Prize, organizers announced Tuesday. The works will be unveiled in an exhibition at Art Dubai 2014.

Funded by the Abraaj Group, a leading private equity investor, the Art Prize seeks to support and showcase exceptional talent emerging from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. It is awarded annually to five artists from the region, who are selected based on their proposals for new projects. Each artist receives handsome sum of $100,000 to realize their project. The artworks, which receive financial and curatorial sponsorship by the Abraaj Group, are traditionally shown at Art Dubai, an annual international art fair.

Abraaj is unique in its self-styled emphasis on a region defined as MENASA (the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia). That description may keep the award focused on the biographies and personal histories of its chosen artists, yet all of this year’s winners span far more complex geographies in their day-to-day lives, to say nothing of the lines of thought emanating from their works, which more often than not question, challenge and double back on precisely these same categories.

Out of a large pool of applicants from the region, five artists were chosen to participate in this sixth edition of the Art Prize: Bouchra Khalili from Morocco, Abbas Akhavan and Kamrooz Aram from Iran, Anup Mathew Thoma from India, and Basim Magdy from Egypt.

“The 2014 winners are an internationally-acclaimed and diverse group combining outstanding artistic ability with a desire to engage and champion the arts throughout the region,” according to the Abraaj Group.

Bouchra Khalili from Morocco

Bouchra Khalili from Morocco

Bouchra Khalili, for example, is a Casablanca-born, Berlin-based artist whose videos, installations and formalist works on paper delve into the often-clandestine migrations of bodies (and with them stories, ideas, arguments and beliefs) across numerous seas, cities and territories.

Her most-recent projects, including the video installation “Words on Streets” (2013) for the main exhibition at the current Venice Biennale, explore the voices of migrants, whether telling their own stories or reciting the speeches of famous liberation movements.

Basim Magdy from Egypt

Basim Magdy from Egypt

Basim Magdy, meanwhile, is an Egyptian artist living in Switzerland whose films and drawings play with the elusive yet humorous relationships that can be forged between words, images and associations in between.

Two of his videos were featured in Beirut’s recent Home Works Forum.

Kamrooz Aram from Iran

Kamrooz Aram from Iran

Kamrooz Aram is a New York-based painter from Iran whose bold, large-scale canvases delve into histories of abstraction, modernity, ornament and décor.

Abbas Akhavan from Iran

Abbas Akhavan from Iran

Abbas Akhavan, also from Iran, is currently based in Toronto and specializes in installations that twine monumental gestures around an impressive simplicity of means (planting a forest in the grand hall of a former state-run printing press, for example).

Anup Mathew Thomas, who lives and works in Bangalore, gave the inaugural Kochi-Muziris Biennale one its most enduring projects – a series of riveting photographs paired with Borges-esque stories all grappling, in one way or another, with death.

The five artists will start to work with Pakistani guest curator Nada Raza on their respective art projects, which will be unveiled in March at Art Dubai 2014.  “I’m really pleased with the list,” said Raza.  Following the efforts of Murtaza Vali in 2013, and Nat Muller in 2012, Raza was appointed to the position in May. “Each project is very well thought out and shows real maturity in their practice. Each of the artists in their practice is highly evolved.”

Nada Raza, guest curator

Nada Raza, guest curator

“What’s interesting,” she added, ducking out a meeting during her day job at Tate Modern in London, “is the sheer ambition of each project. I think that’s what has come to distinguish the prize, the incredible opportunity for the production of works that artists wouldn’t be able to realize on their own. The challenge for me is to make these works accessible without diluting them.”

Abraaj is famously secretive about the nine-month process, when the winning projects are works in progress. This allows the prize to build suspense (and expectations) ahead of the unveiling, which occurs every year in the form of an exhibition housed within the art fair Art Dubai. That said, Raza was willing to make a few claims for the group.

As to whether or not she intended to introduce any major structural changes to the way the prize-winning works will be presented, Raza was firm without giving anything away.

“It will be totally different,” she said, “but I don’t have anything nailed down to speak about yet. The process of this particular prize is so interesting and unlike other curatorial projects where you go out and select the artists. I want to make the curatorial process much more transparent, because it’s much more about translating ideas. You play that role very actively. I want to make that apparent.”

For more information about the Abraaj Group Art Prize, please see www.abraajgroupartprize.com

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