KILUANJI KIA HENDA WINS 2017 FRIEZE ARTIST AWARD
Frieze has named Kiluanji Kia Henda as the winner of the 2017 Frieze Artist Award. Kia Henda is the first African artist to receive the prize, the fourth to be awarded. He will be invited to realize a new installation at Frieze London as part of Frieze Projects, the fair’s nonprofit program.
“Kiluanji Kia Henda is a vital voice of his generation and I’m very pleased that the jury made him this year’s Frieze Artist Award winner,” said Raphael Gygax, the curator of Frieze Projects and Zurich’s Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. “His work examines the wounds of his home country Angola left by decades of political unrest. Kia Henda brings satire to bear on politics and the legacy of colonialism in Africa, corrupting enduring stereotypes.”
The jury was made up of artist Cory Arcangel; Eva Birkenstock, director of Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf; Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York; and Gygax. Jo Stella-Sawicka, artistic director of Frieze Fairs, chaired the jury.
A Luanda-based artist, Kia Henda works across photography, video, and performance. Titled Under the Silent Eye of Lenin, his winning proposal is a two-part installation that draws parallels between the cult of Marxism-Leninism in Angola, witchcraft practices during the country’s civil war, and science-fiction narratives used by Cold War superpowers. “Despite being a political doctrine that rejected religion, the way that Marxism-Leninism was indoctrinated during the revolution demanded strict loyalty and unquestionable belief, similar to religious practice,” Kia Henda said. “In this project, the bust of Lenin returns to become the central object of an installation and performance piece, where the memories and narratives of one of the bloodiest conflicts in Africa are molten with the transcendence of witchcraft and the dogmatic dimension of a political ideology.”
Frieze London will run from October 5 to October 8 and, for the fourteenth consecutive year, is sponsored by Deutsche Bank. Previous award winners include Yuri Pattison, Rachel Rose, and Mélanie Matranga.
