ARTES MUNDI PRIZE SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED

Seven artists have been nominated for Artes Mundi (Latin for “art of the world”), the UK’s biggest visual-arts prize.

The shortlist of artists for the $62,000 prize, hosted in Wales, consists of Miriam Bäckström (Sweden), Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Phil Collins (Great Britain), Sheela Gowda (India), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), Darius Mikšys (Lithuania), and Apolonija Šušteršič (Slovenia). The 2012 competition has attracted more than 750 nominations from more than ninety countries. The artists will show at National Museum of Art until October 6, 2012, after which the award will be presented to one of the participants in November.

In 2010 the Artes Mundi 4 Prize was awarded to Yael Bartana who went on to represent Poland at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The first Artes Mundi Prize was awarded in 2004 to Xu Bing, a Chinese-born artist living between New York and Beijing. In 2006 the Artes Mundi 2 Prize was awarded to the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila and in 2008 the Indian artist N. S. Harsha received the prize at Artes Mundi 3.

The shortlist for the fifth competition was chosen by two appointed selectors, Anders Kreuger, curator at Museum van t in Antwerp, Belgium and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, curator of Contemporary Art at Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York and curatorial agent for Documenta 13.

Prize director Ben Borthwick said, “We are delighted with the exceptional quality of this shortlist which was drawn from a very strong field of nominations. We look forward to welcoming the artists to Wales and creating an exhibition in October that will give audiences the opportunity to engage with the most exciting international contemporary art.”