Coco Fusco and Renata Lucas. Photo: Mons Dohns
Renata Lucas and Coco Fusco have each won a 2013 Absolut Art Award for, respectively, art work and art writing. Both will receive approximately $27,000 in cash, as well as a budget for an upcoming project. Lucas’s budget of $135,000 will be used to develop and produce a new work that will be donated to an Absolut partner institution, while Fusco has up to $34,000 to publish and distribute a new book in collaboration with an art publisher.
For her latest project, Ontem, areias movediças (Yesterday, quicksands), 2012, Brazilian-born Lucas created a giant, largely invisible concrete pyramid for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. She inserted the pyramid’s corners into the basements of four of the city’s existing structures, leaving viewers to imagine the rest of the building.
Her winning proposal is for a new museum with a similarly fragmented nature. According to a press release, “she will subtly alter ordinary locations, so that her participants will encounter modified spaces and enter into altered states of understanding.”
Fusco, based in New York, is the director of intermedia initiatives at Parsons The New School for Design. Her art combines electronic media and performance, and she has written and edited books about such topics as race, gender, performance art and cultural fusion. Fusco’s proposal is a book that will analyze recent politically charged performance art practices in Cuba.
The jury, made up of artist Susan Hiller and curators Beatrix Ruf, Chus Martinez and Maria Lind, was lead by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artistic director of Documenta 13. The award, which is unrestricted by age or geography, was established in 2009 and has previously been presented to Albanian artist Anri Sala (2011), Thailand’s Rirkrit Tiravanija (2010) and Israel’s Keren Cytter (2009). This is the first year that the award has been split into two categories.
