Nástio Mosquito (Angola) and Carlos Motta (Colombia) are the winners of the Main Prize of the 3rd edition of the Future Generation Art Prize, that was announced by the international jury at the award ceremony in the PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine on December 6, 2014. The two artists will split the award of $100,000.

Future Generation Art Prize is the first global art prize for artists up to 35 founded by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in 2009 with the aim of acknowledging and giving long-term support to a future generation of artists wherever they live and work.

The winners were chosen by the respected international jury consisting of Francesco Bonami – Curator, Director of the 50th Biennale di Venezia (Italy); Jan Fabre – Artist (Belgium); Doris Salcedo – Artist (Colombia); Eckhard Schneider – General Director of the PinchukArtCentre (Ukraine); Bisi Silva – Independent curator, Director for the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (Nigeria); Adam Szymczyk – Artistic director of documenta 14 (Poland) and Philip Tinari – Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (China).

Carlos Motta and Nástio Mosquito, as the Winners of the Main Prize, both will present their solo shows in the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv in autumn 2015.

Introducing Nástio Mosquito, the Main Prize Winner, the jury stated: “Combining text, performance, video and installation in a distinctly original manner, Mosquito re-invents storytelling for our current moment. In complex vignettes that evoke a long tradition of spoken word poetry and musical improvisation, he brings an alternative dimension to the way in which we experience art, as well as the fraught realities of our global society. His seemingly playful performativity becomes a framework for addressing themes that range from colonial history to changing geopolitical dynamics to human relationships. To achieve this, technology as well as popular culture plays an important role through his integration of the tools of DJ’s, VJ’s, TV-shows, youtube, and other devices characteristic of our media-saturated age. Mosquito’s powerful personal presence, adept sense of spatial dynamics, and sharp humor combine to challenge our perceptions of what we consider comfortably familiar.”

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In their comments about Carlos Motta, who shared the Main Prize in 2014, the jury stated: “The presentation of Carlos Motta was consistent, complex and with well articulated ideas. In addition to that it displayed imagination and poetry in using narratives, fictional and otherwise, to structure a meditation on a set of urgent themes. Using the language of a historical museum display and fabricating cultural material, Motta constructs a context that allows him to take the pre-colonial heritage and colonial history of Latin America as a starting point for a deeply personal exploration. This discourse has been extended to the local Ukrainian context, through the work ‘Brief history of homosexual repression in Ukraine’, a broadsheet that continues a project of the artist’s local researches in different countries into the history of LGBT rights. The jury was profoundly impressed by his ability to parlay formal precision, historical research and social commitment into work that offers new insights into how art can address fragile marginalized histories and advocate their importance.”

In addition to the main prize, the three artists Aslan Gaisumov (Russia) and Nikita Kadan, and Zhanna Kadyrova (both Ukraine) have been awarded with the “Special Prize” to fund artist-in-residency program.

Nástio Mosquito was born in 1981 in Angola. A multimedia artist, he creates performances, videos, music, and poetry. Mosquito’s work was first exhibited in 2006 and has been shown in many exhibitions since. Important group shows involving Mosquito’s work include Venice Biennale (2007), ARCO Madrid (2009), the 29th Biennial of São Paulo (2010), Gwangju Biennial (2012), and exhibition at Tate Modern (2012).

Carlos Motta was born in 1978 in Bogotá, Colombia. He lives and works in New York. Motta obtained his MFA from Bard College, New York in 2003. He was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2008, and received grants from Art Matters (2008), New York State Council on the Art (2010), and the Kindle Project (2012). He is part of the faculty at Parsons The New School of Design and The School of Visual Arts. Motta’s work has been presented internationally including at Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum, MoMA/PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens and other venues.

http://futuregenerationartprize.org/en