Atta Kwami has been announced as the winner of the 2021 Maria Lassnig Prize. The artist will receive 50,000€ and a project with Serpentine Galleries in London, which is partnering with the Lassnig Foundation for this edition of the prize. Set for 2022, the project will include a comprehensive monograph publication and a public art commission. Kwami is a painter, printmaker, independent art historian and curator based in Loughborough, UK, know for paintings, murals and kiosk-sculptures that are conceived as expanded three-dimensional paintings. Established in 2015, the Maria Lassnig Prize is awarded biennially to a midcareer artist in association with an international institutional partner. Previous winners have included Cathy Wilkes, in partnership with MoMA PS1, New York (2017), and Sheela Gowda, in partnership with Lenbachhaus, Munich (2019).
Meanwhile, Tekla Aslanishvili received the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award 2020. Aslanishvili will receive $15,000 from the Han Nefkens Foundation towards the production of a new videowork by November 2021, which will then tour to the five collaborating institutions: the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona; the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; WIELS in Brussels; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila, and Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. Aslanishvili is an artist, essayist and curator based in Tbilisi and Berlin. She creates experimental documentaries, video installations and texts, that research and explore specific geopolitical contexts while ‘connecting to a wider discourse on the impact of extractivist economies on a planetary scale’. The Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award supports moving-image artists under 35 based in West or Central Asia, and whose work has not yet received institutional recognition
