In addition to the Grand Prize worth BRL 75000 in cash (gross) and nine residency prizes, the 19th Festival will see the launch of a special award: the SP-Arte Prize. Eligible artists include the 53 artists selected to participate in an exhibition and in film programs set to run at Sesc Pompeia and Galpão_VB, in São Paulo, Brazil from October 6 to December 6, 2015. The winners will be announced on October 10.

Nominated through a simple yet effective strategy to heighten their chances of becoming a part of the global arts scenario, the awarded artists will be picked out by an international Award Jury composed of: Hoor Al-Qasimi (UAE), curator and president of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which holds the Sharjah Biennial; N’Goné Fall (Senegal), photography curator for the Bamako Biennale (2001) and the Dakar Biennale (2002), art critic, and former Revue Noir editorial director; Priscila Arantes (Brazil), curator, art critic, and director of Paço das Artes (São Paulo); the duo Sam Bardaouil (Lebanon) and Till Fellrath (Germany), curators and founding partners of the Art Reoriented multidisciplinary curatorial platform; and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy (Mexico), curator of contemporary art for Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

To Solange Farkas, Videobrasil’s director and the Festival’s chief curator, the Residency Prizes help usher in a new artistic and cultural cartography: “The prizes support Global South artists through displacement experiences, allowing them to enrich their practices through interaction and exchange with new interlocutors and new surroundings.” The selected artists will undertake two-month residencies at Videobrasil Residency Program‘s partner organizations around the world. Thanks to a vast network of collaborators, the program already spans all five continents; for the 19th Festival, it will cover Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, bringing together the South-South and South-North axes. Following a discussion involving delegates from Videobrasil Residency Program partner organizations, the artists will be assigned to the residencies that best match their lines of inquiry and poetics. This year’s Residency Prizes are:

A-I-R Laboratory Residency Prize at A-I-R Laboratory, Warsaw

Arquetopia_Videobrasil Residency Prize at Arquetopia, Puebla, Mexico

China Art Foundation Residency Prize at Red Gate Residency, Beijing

Delfina_Videobrasil Residency Prize at Delfina Foundation, London

Residence Vila Sul – Goethe-Institut Residency Prize at Residence Vila Sul, Salvador, Brazil

Res Artis Residency Prize at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, USA

Res Artis Residency Prize at Kooshk Residency, Tehran

Res Artis Residency Prize at Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto

Wexner Center for the Arts Residency Prize at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA

For the first time, the Festival will award the SP-Arte Prize, designed to encourage and publicize the work of young artists whose lines of research focus on the debate surrounding the Global South. The initiative is part of SP-Arte’s program, in partnership with Videobrasil, to provide incentive to artists and foster up-and-coming talent. The winner will be featured in a solo exhibit at Galpão_VB during the SP-Arte fair (April 7 to 10, 2016), a time when São Paulo takes to the global stage as it hosts the most relevant art market event in the Southern Hemisphere.

The winning artists will be awarded an artwork by Efrain Almeida (Ceará/Brazil) which sees him pay tribute to the visual arts by putting a current spin on a recurring symbol from his own production: a pair of eyes, a reference to Saint Lucy, the protector of sight. His sculpture will be exhibited alongside the selected artists’ works at Sesc Pompeia.

19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil | Southern Panoramas 
October 6–December 6, 2015
Sesc Pompeia, Galpão_VB (São Paulo, Brazil)

www.videobrasil.org.br