2024-02-13 08:45:20
The winners of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize for contemporary art this Friday were the artists Oskar Helcel, Judita Levitnerová and the collective No Fun. They received the award in the Studio of Heroes, which is a theater in Prague’s Veletržní palác. The joint exhibition of the winners is to be hosted by the Moravian Gallery in Brno.
The Chalupecký Prize has existed since 1990, and was founded by former President Václav Havel with artists Jiří Kolář and Theodore Pištěk. For years, it used to be awarded to one creator under the age of 35. That has changed recently.
First, in 2020, everyone who was nominated started winning, as the finalists did not want to continue competing. Starting this year, the international jury is no longer limited by the age limit of 35. In the last four years alone, 22 entities, including collectives, have received the Chalupecký Prize, i.e. over three dozen people.
This year, on the other hand, the number of winners decreased from last year’s five to three. The current laureates express themselves in a variety of ways, from textile creations to computer games.
“The common theme is that artists don’t care what’s happening around us, and they express themselves with a strong artistic voice on the topics of our time. Whether it’s the gentrification of urban space, developerism, so-called women’s work or the gaming environment and its stereotypes,” he says Karina Kottová, managing director of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society.
This year’s first awardee, Oskar Helcel, is an audiovisual artist and photographer. In his work, he focuses on “the mechanisms of late capitalism in the context of contemporary urban space”.
The second awardee, Judita Levitnerová, lives and works in Brno. It takes into account, for example, the issue of so-called women’s work or aspects such as ecology and excessive consumption of textiles.
The third winning No Fun Collective deals with “queer subversive strategies of video games”, whereby “through a theoretically informed and artistically politically relevant point of view, it reflects cis heteronormative perspectives and seeks effective strategies to break them in cooperation with the queer community”. The group consists of Markéta Soukupová, Ondřej Trhoň, Alex Petrova and Maxine Vajt.
The organizers add that their goal this year was to make the selection of laureates more comprehensible to the wider public. The joint exhibition of the awardees will begin on November 8 in the Moravian Gallery in Brno.