2023-05-31 17:25:30
The American artist of Vietnamese origin Mr Andrew Nguyen has won the eighth edition of the Joan Miró Prize this Wednesday for the social, political and environmental “commitment” of his work, which addresses collective memory, history and the impact of colonialism through movement and sculpture.
This was announced by the member of the jury and president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation (Arab Emirates), Hoor Al Qasimi, at a press conference in Barcelona together with the director of the Fundació Joan Miró, Marko Daniel, and the director of Programs of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), Alexandros Kambouroglou.
The jury has valued Nguyen’s ability to appeal “both to reason and to feelings due to her first-hand experience of migration”, as well as the depth and imagination that permeate her work, which allows her to address the concerns and challenges of the contemporary societies.
When collecting the award, endowed with 50.000 euros, The artist has highlighted the importance for him that his projects capture the lives of other communities, incorporating them into all creative processes, and he has confessed that his “weak point” are those affected by war and immigration, colonialism, the capitalism, the impact of the climate crisis and the trauma inherited through history.
Nguyen (Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, 1976), who immigrated to the United States as a child, has claimed that storytelling allows heal and imagine other possible futures in a collective act of liberation and “political resistance”, and that listening to them is a powerful force of solidarity and empathy.
His work delves into other aspects such as the multiple identities of migrants and the first generations of descendants, and among his recent projects stands out ‘The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon’ (‘The unburied sounds of a turbulent horizon’), a video installation about fragments of unexploded ordnance.
Marko Daniel He has praised the radical visual poetics that, according to him, the works of Nguyen and Joan Miró share, and has highlighted that the foundation is “the first institution that will introduce the artist’s magnificent work in this country” with a monographic exhibition in 2024.
Besides the financial endowment, The award, which is held every two years, entails the production of an exhibition that Nguyen will star in in 2024 at the Fundació Joan Miró, which in previous editions has recognized Olafur Eliasson (2007), Pipilotti Rist (2009), Mona Hatoum (2011), Roni Horn (2013), Ignasi Aballi (2015), Kader Attia (2017) and Nalini Malani (2019).
In addition to Marko Daniel and Hoor Al Qasimi, the jury is made up of the artistic director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens (Greece), Katerina Gregos; the Head of Curation at the Art Museum of Singapore, Haeju Kim, and the Board Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Ann-Sofi Noring, former Co-Director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (Sweden).
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