Nam June Paik Award 2014Newcomer Award 2012: Céline Berger–Haus Lange
Opening and presentation of prizes: 28 September 2014, 11.30 a.m., Museum Haus Lange
CAMILLE HENROT wins the Nam June Paik Award 2014 - International Media Art Award of the Arts Foundation North Rhine-Westphalia (Kunststiftung NRW)
MANUEL GRAF receives the Nam June Paik Award Newcomer Award 2014
The NAM JUNE PAIK AWARD is one of the foremost international prizes for media art. The Kunststiftung NRW has regularly awarded this distinction every two years since 2002. It is given in memory of the Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006), who was one of the great pioneers of video art in the 1960s. Paik the composer, performer and media artist is synonymous with innovative approaches to the latest technological possibilities. Time and again, humorously anarchic impulses injected new life into art, and he saw media art as a global, universal language. With this award, the Kunststiftung NRW honours artists who explore the possibilities of the media in the spirit of Nam June Paik.
Together with a major art museum in North-Rhine Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW organises an exhibition every two years to accompany the Nam June Paik Award. This year the Kunstmuseen Krefeld have been chosen for the occasion. A team of experts has shortlisted the following artists this year for the Paik Award 2014: ULF AMINDE, CORY ARCANGEL, CAMILLE HENROT and JON THOMSON & ALISON CRAIGHEAD. The winner, who is to be selected by a second jury, will be named at the opening of the exhibition.
Ulf Aminde (1969) likes to enter into collaborations with people from different social backgrounds and cultures and to realise performances and video pieces with them. This results in works and installations that theme in their confrontative immediacy aspects such as identity, role concepts, and clichéd thought patterns.
Cory Arcangel (1978) operates with his work in a region spanning music, visual art, publishing and merchandising. He alters existing computer programmes to generate new ones and thus develop novel visual, acoustic and product languages (e.g. magazines, iPhone cases, LPs).
Camille Henrot (1978) turns her mind equally to ethnographical, scientific and current geopolitical issues. She gathers information and sets it out in sculptural multimedia works that are marked by poetic stringency and documentary precision.
Jon Thomson (1969) & Alison Craighead (*1971) link up data and information that are readily available on the Internet with the concrete realm of experience. Global perspectives and the viewer's vantage point are joined up directly so that fundamental insights can be forged into temporal, spatial and structural connections in our times.
A further part of the media art prize is a newcomer award that is presented to an up-and-coming artist from the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, which enables a new work to be realised within the framework of the exhibition. The NEWCOMER PRIZE 2012 was awarded to CÉLINE BERGER.
Céline Berger (*1973), who lives and works in Cologne, has realised a new video installation entitled Betterment Room, in which she has further pursued her involvement with economic structures and personal performance capabilities. Inside the empty rooms of Museum Haus Lange she created a mental examination room in which managers in business suits sat around for a whole day with nothing to do. Surveillance cameras captured the process of waiting and the unfilled time - both of which fundamentally contradict the mindset of economic efficiency. Standardised and 'free' time clashed head on with their different values.
