RUSSIA’S INNOVATION PRIZE WINNERS ANNOUNCED
On May 18, the Innovation Prize—a state-run contemporary art competition that is known as Russia’s Turner Prize—was awarded to artists and curators deemed the best of 2015 in the categories of Curatorial Project, Art Theory and Criticism, Regional Project of Contemporary Art, and New Generation. The prize also honors two nominees annually in the categories of Creative Contribution to the Development of Contemporary Art and Support of Russian Contemporary Art.
This year, Viktor Misiano’s large-scale exhibition “The Human Condition” won him the award for the best Curatorial Project. The show will run until 2018. Olga Shishko was awarded the prize for Art Theory and Criticism for her catalogue, titled Projections of the Avant-Garde. The 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art received the award for best Regional Contemporary Art Project. Aslan Gaisumov’s video Volga—in which he reconstructed the history of his twenty-one-member family who moved with one old Volga car in 1995 from war-torn Grozny to a village where the artist’s grandmother lived—won for New Generation. The winning nominees for the Creative Contribution to the Development of Contemporary Art and Support of Russian Contemporary Art were Boris Orlov and Leonid Mikhelson.
The prize for Work of Visual Art usually celebrates an artwork, however, it was not awarded this year following the controversial decision of the National Center for Contemporary Art—who established the prize—to not accept the nomination of a work by dissident Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky, as artforum.com previously reported.
Several members of the prize’s expert committee had abandoned a session this spring when they were informed that the NCCA director refused an application to promote Pavlensky’s work titled Threat, a performance piece in which the artist set fire to the door of the Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters in Moscow last November. Pavlensky was arrested shortly after the performance and is currently on trial in Moscow. General director Mikhail Mindlin had said that the work was rejected because it involved “breaches of the law and caused material damage.” As it so happens, Mindlin is no longer head of the organization. In an announcement today, the culture minister Vladimir Medinsky revealed that the NCCA will be integrated into Russia’s State Exhibition and Museum (ROSIZO) structure, under the direction of Sergey Perov. Medinsky said that the merger was logical and added that no other employees would lose their jobs as a result.
