AAP Exhibition: Last Chance to See

A platform for innovation and originality, the Aesthetica Art Prize Exhibition invites audiences to engage with captivating projects from some of today’s leading artists, both established and emerging. From individual narratives to global concerns, the artworks comment on contemporary culture and explore themes such as globalisation, perceptions of space and alienation in the digital age.

As the boundaries between the public and the private begin to merge into blurred depictions of reality, contemporary art is the mechanism that enables us to respond to a renewed understanding of living. The 2017 presentation features the work of 16 shortlisted artists who hail from diverse locations including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Japan, the USA and the UK.

Utilising a range of media, they work within the categories of Photographic & Digital Art; Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media; Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture. and Video, Installation & Performance. Images of 84 longlisted pieces will be shown on monitors within the gallery – offering a unique chance for visitors to explore the breadth and diversity of work being produced across the world today.

The Emerging winner, Maryam Tafakory, combines the moving image and performance art in her video works. She is interested in womanhood and rites of passage, drawing on the notion of the personal as political. In the fractured and subjective narrative of Absent Wound (2017), the physical strength of wrestling is contrasted with the protagonist facing the beginning of her menstrual cycle.

The Main Prize winner, Adam Basanta, uses everyday electronic objects of commercial technology and communications to assume new roles in installations, The winning piece, Curtain (white), the ubiquitous white earbud headphone’s connotations of a retreat from the outside into a private ‘bubble’ are expanded upon, as a three metre-long array of them generate white noise patterns.

Open until 10 September at York Art Gallery. For more information: www.aestheticamagazine.com/art-prize/exhibition

Credits:
1. Julio Bittencourt, Plethora.