The Artes Mundi 2 Prize (2006) was awarded to the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
Imagine standing between three huge video screens. For thirteen and a half minutes you are immersed in a world that is partly like your own, enough to fool you into considering what you see as possible – and partly radically different – enough to make you feel uneasy. The predominant colour is green. No music accompanies the single, female voice, which speaks without any evident emotion.
© Mieke Bal - writing for Artes Mundi 2 publication
The Artes Mundi 1 Prize (2004) was awarded to the Chinese artist Xu Bing.
Hauntingly simple, Xu Bing’s installation Where does the dust itself collect
? (2004) at Artes Mundi 1 brought together formal and thematic concerns that have informed his conceptually-based work for nearly twenty years. Viewers look down from an elevated catwalk onto a gallery floor strewn with white dust and punctuated by barren areas ‘printed’ with large Chinese characters forming two lines of verse “As there is nothing from the first / Where does the dust itself collect
?” by the founder of Zen Buddhism in China, Hiu-neng (638-713). On a wall hang five photographs, sequentially documenting the process by which this dust from the World Trade Center collapse was originally gathered, cast into a doll-shaped statuette for transport through customs, then broken into fragments and ground to powder again in Cardiff. History, technical skill and inventiveness, sly humour, transgression of borders, language play, the problem of spiritual fulfilment in contemporary secular circumstances – all are elements of Xu Bing’s work.
© Richard Vine - writing for Artes Mundi 2 publication