Nástio Mosquito and Carlos Motta. Image courtesy Pinchuck Art Centre, photo by Sergey Illin.
Carlos Motta of Colombia and Nástio Mosquito of Angola have been awarded the main prize of the third edition of the Future Generation Art Prize, sharing $100,000. They beat out a shortlist of some 19 other artists.
The Future Generation Art Prize has been awarded biennially by the collector and business magnate Victor Pinchuk and his foundation in Kiev, Ukraine, since 2009. The prize, which consists of $60,000 in cash and $40,000 to produce new work, is awarded to artists up to the age of 35. This is the first time that the main prize has been split between two artists. Motta and Mosquito will each have a solo exhibition, slated for autumn 2015, at the Pinchuk Art Centre, also in Kiev.
Francesco Bonami, director of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and curator of the 50th Venice Biennale, led the international jury, which also included Jan Fabre, Belgian artist; Doris Salcedo, Colombian artist; Eckhard Schneider, director of the Pinchuk Art Centre; Bisi Silva, director of Center of Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria; Adam Szymczyk, director of dOCUMENTA 14 (to take place in 2017); and Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
At the award ceremony, Tinari discussed Mosquito’s work, saying, “Combing text, performance, video, and installation in a distinctly original manner, Mosquito re-invents storytelling for our current moment.” Tinari described Motta’s work as displaying “imagination and poetry in using narratives, fictional or otherwise, to structure a meditation on a set of urgent themes.”
For the competition, Motta submitted his video work Nefandus. Trilogy (2013), alongside series of drawings, prints, and sculpture. Mosquito submitted his 2014 work Let Me Kiss Your Butt Cheek!, an installation comprising video and sculpture.
The second edition of the prize, in 2012, was awarded to London-based painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; it was first awarded to Brazilian artist Mircea Nicolae in 2010.