Biennial Exhibition for Tenth Anniversary Edition

20 October 2023 – 25 February 2024

With presenting partner the Bagri Foundation, Artes Mundi 10 (AM10), the UK’s leading biennial exhibition and international contemporary art prize, will for the first time present seven international contemporary visual artists across five venue partners in Wales for its tenth anniversary edition. Taking place from 20 October 2023 to 25 February 2024, the winner of the prestigious £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize – the UK’s largest contemporary art prize – will be announced during the exhibition run.

AM10 will see each artist present a major solo project, including new productions, unseen works and several UK premieres. Some artists are presenting across multiple venues, whilst every artist will have work at a location in Cardiff.

The artist exhibition locations for AM10 are: Mounira Al Solh, Rushdi Anwar and Alia Farid at National Museum Cardiff (one of the Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales family of museums); Nguyễn Trinh Thi at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and Chapter, Cardiff; Taloi Havini at Mostyn, Llandudno and Chapter, Cardiff; Carolina Caycedo at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown and Chapter, Cardiff; and Naomi Rincón Gallardo at Chapter, Cardiff.

Nigel Prince, Director of Artes Mundi, said: “AM10 promises to be a stimulating and thoughtful series of presentations. Working with each artist and our venue partners, we are able to present a series of in-depth shows that collectively address issues surrounding land use, territory and displacement through histories of environmental change, conflict and enforced migration, conditions that that speak to us all today.”

As an important arbiter of cultural exchange between the UK and international communities, Artes Mundi has built a reputation for bringing together art by some of the most relevant artistic voices engaging with urgent topics of our time. Past editions have seen Artes Mundi work with artists at crucial stages of their careers, often being their first introduction to UK audiences, with many now established figures on the world stage, including Dineo Seshee Bopape, Prabhakar Pachpute, Ragnar Kjartansson, Theaster Gates, John Akomfrah, Teresa Margolles, Xu Bing, and Tania Bruguera.

AM10 artist exhibition details and locations

Mounira Al Solh at National Museum Cardiff

Born Lebanon. Lives and works in Lebanon and The Netherlands.

Mounira Al Solh produces paintings, works on paper, video installations, embroidery and performative gestures that explore migration, memory, trauma and loss. Informed by her own Lebanese-Syrian heritage, her work considers the importance of oral histories, language, and storytelling as a record of the lived experiences of those displaced from the continued impact of conflict in the Middle East region. For her presentation at The National Museum Cardiff, Mounira will produce a major new sculpture, recalling the traditional ceremonial tents used by Middle Eastern and Arabic communities. Its textile panels will be intricately embroidered with patterns that see Mounira working with groups of women in the Lebanon and the Netherlands. Suspended in the gallery, the sculpture will also form part of a performance on the opening day working with Oasis One World Choir, a supportive network of singing and musical volunteers who come from both local Cardiff and refugee and asylum-seeking communities. Al Solh will also present a new series of drawings that act as records or testimonies of refugees, exiled individuals and families from Syria and the Middle East in Cardiff as part of the ongoing series of over 500 portraits, I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2012-ongoing).

Rushdi Anwar at National Museum Cardiff

Born Kurdistan. Lives and works between Thailand and Australia.

Rushdi Anwar is a visual artist, researcher, silent activist, community engager, and social equity seeker. Originally from Halabja, Kurdistan (Kurdistan-Iraq), his work often reflects on the socio-political issues of Kurdistan, Iraq, and The Middle East. He draws from personal experiences and memories, poetically reflecting on contemporary issues of displacement, identity, conflict, and trauma endured under colonial and ideological regimes. At National Museum Cardiff, Anwar will present an overview of existing and new pieces, including works linked to Bashiqa, his familial town located in northeast Mosul, a disputed territory between Kurdish and Iraqi governments, formerly a site dominated by British and French colonial rule and more recently, destroyed and looted by ISIS. We have found in the ashes what we lost in the fire (2018) comprises 12 boxes containing burnt photographs, images from a destroyed church Anwar visited in Bashiqa. Their glazed tops are printed with geometric Islamic patterns referring to a particular historical period during the Muslim conquest of Spain (Al-Andalus) (711-1492), arguably the first time when East met West in the context of religion and culture. Works presented will collectively explore unsettling similarities between the destruction, transience and renewal faced by displaced and uprooted communities globally and the built environments they are forced to leave.

Carolina Caycedo at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown and Chapter, Cardiff

Born UK to Colombian parents. Lives and works in USA.

Carolina Caycedo is a multidisciplinary artist known for her videos, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. At Oriel Davies in Newtown, Caycedo will present a series of existing and new works including the premiere of the video, Fuel to Fire (2023). This brings the viewer into a pagamento, an indigenous ecological and economic fundamental protocol, that maintains the flow and balance of life cycles on earth based on reciprocity. Also presented will be the related Fuel to Fire: Mineral Intensive (2022 – ongoing), new large-scale coloured pencil drawings from an ongoing series that focus on extraction practices and their impact on the land. Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice – using embodied knowledge and indigenous and feminist frameworks she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity. In My Female Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018 to present), more than 100 portraits of female environmentalists from across the world, including women who took part in The Greenham Common march, are printed on a textile banner as part of the Genealogy of Struggle series that will sit alongside a selection of original Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp banners from UK collections. Connecting to the works at Oriel Davies, Caycedo will present a new work from her multimedia project Be Dammed (2012 – ongoing) at Chapter in Cardiff. Installed in the lightbox above the building’s entrance, the large-scale image and text work examines the impact of hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects on communities and the environment.

Alia Farid at National Museum Cardiff

Born Kuwait. Lives and works between Kuwait City and Puerto Rico.

Alia Farid is a filmmaker and sculptor whose practice centres on lesser-known histories that have often been deliberately erased. At National Museum Cardiff, Farid will present a series of large-scale sculptures shaped as various water vessels, each featuring a small sink built into the side of its resin surface, revealing the original purpose of the moulds as large public drinking fountains seen across Kuwaiti cities. These sculptures specifically address the mismanagement of natural resources and the impact of extractive industries on the land, ecology and the social fabric of southern Iraq and Kuwait. Farid’s second work will be the premiere of a new, two-part video installation which expands on a previous commission, Chibayish (2022) for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Returning to this location, filmed at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Farid revisits the original film recording her interactions with three young marshland residents: Riad Samir and Jassim and Qassim Mohammed.

Taloi Havini at Mostyn, Llandudno and Chapter, Cardiff

Born Bougainville, Nakas/Hakö tribe. Lives and works in Australia.

Taloi Havini is a multidisciplinary artist using a range of media including photography, audio–video, sculpture, immersive installation and print, to probe intersections of history, identity, and nation-building within the matrilineal social structures of her birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. At Mostyn in Llandudno, Havini will present a major immersive video installation, Habitat. Shown for the first time in the UK, the three-channel work continues her ongoing investigation into the legacy of resource extraction and Australia’s fraught relationship in the Pacific. Havini will also present a new work, Where the rivers flow, (Panguna, Jaba, Pangara, Konawiru), a series of forty prints extracted from the artist’s film archives following her journey through the centre of the tropical island of Bougainville. At Chapter in Cardiff Havini will present a further new photographic work comprising a mural and three lightboxes, entitled Hyena (day and night).

Naomi Rincón Gallardo at Chapter, Cardiff

Born USA. Lives and works in Mexico.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo is a visual artist and researcher. From a decolonial-cuir perspective, her work addresses the creation of counter-worlds in neo-colonial settings. In her work she integrates her interests in theatre games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer people of colour. At Chapter in Cardiff, Gallardo will premiere a trilogy of new video works in the UK – Verses of Filth (2021), Sonnet of Vermin (2022) and Eclipse (2023) – which explore Mesoamerican myths as alternatives to hegemonic ways of understanding reality, interweaving fact, fiction and friction in order to create a place between radical utopian experiences and surreal fantasy.  Alongside the video installation will be a series of watercolour sketches, costumes and sculptural props from the featured videos including masks, outfits and paraphernalia animated with light and animatronics.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and Chapter, Cardiff

Born and continues to live and work in Vietnam.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based filmmaker and artist. Traversing boundaries between film and video art, installation and performance, her practice currently focuses on the power of sound and listening, and the multiple relations between image, sound, and space. Her work explores history, memory, representation, ecology, and the unknown. At Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea, Trinh Thi will re-present the critically acclaimed And They Die a Natural Death (2022), originally shown as part of Documenta 15 in 2022, here newly reconfigured for a gallery setting. In making the work, Trin Thi was inspired by the auto-biographical novel Tale Told in the Year 2000 (2000) by Bùi Ngọc Tấn, currently censored in Vietnam. Referencing a scene from the book, the work comprises a wind and wi-fi system set up in Vietnam’s Vinh Quang-Tam Da area that triggers the sculptural installation of fans, audiovisual effects, sound, chilli plants and the haunting playing of the sáo ôi flute, an Indigenous musical instrument used by groups in the Northern mountainous areas. In real time, an immersive shadowy forest on the gallery surrounding walls connects the space in Swansea to the Vietnamese woodland. Alongside the installation at Glynn Vivian, Trinh Thi will present a screening of a series of films in the cinema at Chapter in Cardiff and also as a special event at Glynn Vivian.