Artists’ Profiles 2019

Selecting works for the Aesthetica Art Prize is an inspirational and enlightening experience. There are so many artists worldwide creating pieces that need to be seen. Below is a short synopsis from each 2019 longlisted artist, providing insight into their practice.


Photographic & Digital Art

Alec Von Bargen

*Shortlisted*
Alec Von Bargen is a social anthropologist, capturing aesthetic instances that resonate with their historical, political and social contexts.

Aleksandar Antonijevic

Aleksandar Antonijevic is fascinated by hidden details, seeing photography as a poignant medium through which to communicate.

Christiane Zschommler

*Shortlisted*
In the early 1980s, Christiane Zschommler’s grandmother smuggled 1984, which was forbidden in the GDR, through Check Point Charlie.

Fabiola Cedillo

Fabiola Cedillo photographs human beings and their environment, without distinguishing the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Francis Meslet

Francis Meslet roams the world, searching for abandoned sites where time seems to have stopped, including an abandoned blast furnace.

François Aubret

François Aubret is a French minimalist photographer currently living in Los Angeles. Aubret’s documents hidden geometric patterns.

Gianmaria Gava

Gianmaria Gava’s work is mainly focused on exploring the impact of digital manipulation on perception in a post-photographic world.

Giulio Di Sturco

*Shortlisted*
Giulio Di Sturco’s research and visual arts practice reflects upon how the world might look and feel in the future, exploring new architecture.

Joanne Handley

Ideas about freedom, power, and the social structures that define them are at the core of Joanne Handley’s photographic practice.

John Shanks

John Shanks’ High Rise Brisbane 9 is from the urban industrial landscape series. The artist represents various landscape settings.

Julia Fullerton-Batten

Julia Fullerton-Batten’s fascination with the River Thames takes a more concrete form; the project investigates cultural and historical narratives.

Katrin Hanusch

Katrin Hanusch is driven by a curiosity in the human condition with motifs taken from the everyday, resulting in works investigating “touch.”

May Parlar

*Shortlisted*
May Parlar’s practice is a meditation on the nomadic experience of “being”, in constantly changing, constructed realities.

N. A. Vague

NA Vague is influenced by a degree in marketing communications and roles within the media, examining vernacular and advertising imagery.

Noritaka Minami

Noritaka Minami uses photography to document visionary architectural proposals from the 20th century, revealing where they are now.

Oli Kellett

Oli Kellett’s Cross Road Blues draws from the legend that Robert Johnson, the Delta Blues musician, met the devil at a crossroads outside Memphis.

Rebecca Reeve

*Shortlisted*
The observation and charting of biological rhythms are recurrent themes in Rebecca Reeve’s work. Through Looking uses grid-like forms.

Reuben Wu

Reuben Wu’s images are fragments of memory and imagination. Lux Noctis is a series depicting landscapes unbound by time or space.

Tom Butler

Tom Butler makes images about the twin human desires to simultaneously be concealed and perform, expressing ideas of introversion.

Uwe Langmann

Uwe Langmann is interested in showing the poetry in the ordinary. Like a painter creates an abstraction, the artist shows a personal interpretation.

Vikram Kushwah

Vikram Kushwah’s photographs are characterised by dreamlike settings. Lately, the artist has been exploring portraiture surrounding human stories.

Zhou Chengzhou

Zhou Chengzhou’s work combines perspectives from industry, urbanisation and marginalisation. It looks at the alienation between people.


Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture

Alejandro Urrutia Lorenzini

Drawing on the relationship between architecture and sculpture, Urrutia Lorenzini’s Equilibrium explores how identity is constantly changing.

Alexandra Carr

As an experimental artist with a scientific drive behind her practice, Carr utilises media with a particular focus on natural phenomena.

Alina Aldea

With a previous discourse largely made up of installations, sculptures and design, Aldea’s recent endeavours make sense of our place through virtual texts.

Altering Space

Utilising different disciplines, mother and daughter duo Sally Wakelin and Kate Gale, create pieces that move freely in ambient conditions.

Amy Stephens

Concerned with the reclamation of natural objects, Stephens pushes the boundaries between fine art and architecture.

Danne Ojeda

A contemporary interpretation of classical Dutch paintings, Ojeda’s Vanitas explores the representation of the architecture of the human mind.

Mark Bloomfield

*Shortlisted*
Exploring connections between technology, traditional craft techniques and the user, Bloomfield’s Conform No1-4 invites participation and interaction.

Nicolas Bernier

*Shortlisted*
Between the finite and the infinite, Structures Infinies () reflects the outside world until set in motion to unveil a moving and infinite inside world.

Oleg Lobykin

Expressing conceptual ideas through sculptural forms and experimenting with interactive elements, Lobykin’s work focuses on origins of form.

Paul Bonomini

Bonomini’s Intersections (Cube Form II) explores the relationship with the space in which it exists, as well as the internal voids within the form itself.

Tyler Mallison

Part of an ongoing project related to human resilience and future labour, Working Prototype seeks to materialise new modes and tools of productivity.

Udo Rutschmann

Chance plays an important role in Rutschmann’ artistic process, with final works often unintentional byproducts of a continuing process.

Yuki Ioroi

As a representation of psychology and human behaviour, Ioroi builds upon the universal impulse to begin reading when presented with text.


Painting, Drawing & Mixed Media

Callum Farrell

The language of the immediate landscape – and the understanding of its visual metaphors – is what informs Farrell’s practice.

Caroline Burraway

Burraway’s practice addresses social issues at the core of modern society. She sheds light on issues found in the lives of marginalised individuals.

Charlotte Hopkins Hall

Hopkins Hall’s In the Absence of Control, Exercise Full Reason draws from the idea of ancient Greek councils at the birth of democracy.

Daniel Mullen

*Shortlisted*
Mullen has created a colourful series in collaboration with his partner, depicting a form of synaesthesia through spatial representation.

Emily Moore

Following a trip to Iceland in 2017, Moore began to experiment with the process of painting, combining mountainous layers over loose, painterly ones.

Helen Dixon

Each print from the Big Blue series shows the detail of a single wave in isolation – one momentary formation in an ongoing process of transformation.

Joanna Wlaszyn

Wlaszyn creates alternative representations of reality that are accessible for all. Data Clouds refers to the (in)visibilities of digital data.

Julie Umerle

Umerle paints in series that are open-ended, exploring similarity, repetition and difference within each group of work.

Lucinda Burgess

Neither drawing nor sculpture, Burgess’s Borderlines highlights humankind’s inability to define and fix amidst this constant flow of life.

Mario Abela

Abela’s No map can give humanity a special place in the universe comprises 12 maps joined together, forming a large window-like piece of paper.

Natalia Villanueva Linares

Villanueva Linares has two distinct approaches: moments filled with volume and colour, and detail-oriented situations, charged with metaphor.

Nicholas Kulkarni

Kulkarni’s work creates optical illusions that examine this question. In Misdirection, the checked pattern is like a wave towering above the viewer.

Sarah Shaw

Two minutes to midnight was inspired by the writings of Noam Chomsky. His musings on the Doomsday clock influence this longlisted piece.

Tom Cartmill

Cartmill is interested in the feeling that a weathered or worn surface exudes. Resonance III examines the possibilities of what materials offer.


Video, Installation & Performance

AJ Laas

AJ Laas explores the intersection of the political and the metaphysical. Laas investigates issues of consumption, liberty and interpersonal agency.

Alexandra Davenport

Signaling back to a history in dance, Alexandra Davenport’s practice uses performance, writing, moving image and photography.

Anikó Kuikka

Anikó Kuikka makes narrative moving-image installations about the absurd constructs of realities in mythologies and fairytales.

Charlie Cook

Charlie Cook’s artistic practice reflects the seriousness of the world around us, offering light moments of relief through playfulness.

Christian Noelle Charles

Christian Noelle Charles’ work centres on black female identities, body language and self-worth and is informed by secondary consciousness.

Christine Kettaneh

Through a research-based practice, Christine Kettaneh investigates systems that are simultaneously sculptural and performative.

Christine Margaret

In the experimental documentary Ada, Christine Margaret depicts real events with a fictional protagonist exploring the subject of grief.

Christine Vandemoortele

Christine Vandemoortele’s films use sounds to structure the trajectory of the audience’s experience, inviting quiet contemplation.

Dagmar Korintenberg & Wolf Kipper

With roots in architecture and design, Dagmar Korintenberg & Wolf Kipper’s work the features the creation of spatial structures.

Dami Kim

Dami Kim’s work focuses on bodies as a centre of creation and danger, looking at how we occupy other people’s spaces.

Daria Jelonek

Daria Jelonek‘s focuses on the relationship between nature and technology, exploring the topic light, hidden in our environments.

Djipco

Using open source software and “obsolete” hardware, Djipco make interactive installations that re-introduce tangibility and texture.

Elise Guillaume

Concerned with environmental issues, Elise Guillaume explore patriarchal industries which make nature a commodity.

Erwin Redl

Erwin Redl’s work, engages with binary logic, assembling materials according to a narrow set of rules inspired by computer code.

Grzegorz Stefański

Grzegorz Stefański’s work in performance and film, is primarily concerned with power, identity and the politics of embodiment.

Hettie Holman

Hettie Holman’s Sekseneutraal focuses on the representation of the male figure and the concept of masculinity within in 21st century society.

Ilaria Di Carlo

Ilaria Di Carlo’s work is informed by journeys and identity in relation to landscape and architecture, realised through experimental films.

Isobel Adderley

The flicker between two states of being is important. Words with multiple meanings: erratic – a movement or behaviour and a glacially moved rock in a landscape.

Jane and Louise Wilson

*Shortlisted*
Jane and Louise Wilson’s work looks at how the geography of a location takes on a porous identity, creating atmospheric installations.

Jenn Nkiru

*Main Prize Winner*
Rebirth Is Necessary is the summation of filmmaker Jenn Nkiru’s loaded feelings and questions about the black experience .

Jennifer Martin

Jennifer Martin’s work questions the role of art and media, in the social and psychological construction of race and its intersection with identification.

Joe Moran

Joe Moran’s work tackles contemporary propositions in dance, performance and critical thought, through improvisation.

Kenji Ouellet

Kenji Ouellet’s work consists mostly of video works and performances revolving around the touch sense. 

Leo Bagus

Bagus’s work includes printed text on overalls from an internal statement within a university, regarding inclusivity and diversity. This is an ongoing work.

Ludivine Large-Bessette

*Shortlisted*
Across Ludivine Large-Bessette’s work, the body becomes a mirror that unsettles and moves the audience.

Maria Luigia Gioffrè

Maria Luigia Gioffrè combines visual art and performance, investigating methodologies of production for images within memory.

María Molina Peiró

*Shortlisted*
María Molina Peiró explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between material and digital realities with One Year Life Strata.

Maryam Tafakory

*Emerging Prize Winner*
Maryam Tafakory explores the contradictory images of women and their portrayal through religion with her film I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin.

Maureen Gruben

Maureen Gruben’s combines industrial, domestic and land-based techniques, sharing intimate perspectives on contemporary life in the western Arctic.

Maya Smira & Samira Hashemi

Maya Smira & Samira Hashemi are two young female artists from enemy countries. Their practices deal with issues of conflict.

Melanie Jame Wolf

Melanie Jame Wolf’s work investigates this sense of movement as it embodies ideas surrounding gender, the body, ghosts, myth and class.

Monica Thomas

Monica Thomas an interdisciplinary artist exploring performance and video. She engages with the area that sits between these forms.

Neville Gabie

Neville Gabie’s background is in sculpture. His work encompases situations or locations caught in a moment of change.

Noriyuki Suzuki

*Shortlisted*
Oh My ( ) is an installation that calls out “god” in 48 languages. The machine monitors a Twitter timeline for iterations of the word “god”.

Quays Culture

Hydrozome is a large waterside rope sculpture of light, sound and interactivity constructed from vast amounts of illuminated rope.

Robbie Thomson

Robbie Thomson’s work brings together fields including robotics, AI and nanotechnology to uncover concepts linked to human perception. 

ScanLAB Projects

ScanLAB Projects is led by Matthew Shaw and William Trossell, who share a common passion for highly crafted making and storytelling.

Sebastian Kite

*Shortlisted*
Sebastian Kite’s work explores the intersection of art, architecture and music, creating installations that illustrate new readings of spaces.

Sim Chi Yin

*Shortlisted*
Sim Chi Yin’s work focuses on histories and memories in land and peoples realised through photographic and filmic installations.

Strange Pill

Strange Pill is a duo of audio-visual artists: Ben Hardy and Zahara Muñoz-Vicens. They explore perception, experimenting with music as collage.

Supriya Nagarajan

Supriya Nagarajan creates immersive interdisciplinary installation performances, working with science and the humanities. 

Teppei Yamada

*Shortlisted*
Apart and / or Together is an attempt to visualise the mercurial, volatile process of cultural homogenisation. The work consists of 10 different heartbeats,

Tiffany Trenda

Tiffany Trenda’s work explores the relationship of the female body and technology. Ubiquitous States is an interactive performance.

Varvara Shavrova

Varvara Shavrova’s practice is focused on family heritage through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories.

Victoria Wareham

Victoria Wareham explores the screen as a forgotten horizon – an invisible strata that exists between the image, the object and the viewer.

Vikesh Govind

Vikesh Govind considers the expectations and prejudices existing in society. Shoes uncovers the masks we wear in today’s society.

Vron Harris

Vron Harris is interested in the construction of film, the representation of time, and subject / object relationships.

Won Moon

Won Moon sees artistic practice as a poetic action. Entanglement links performance, installation and text through a short film.

Yuki Anai & Hideaki Takahashi

Yuki Anai & Hideaki Takahashi approach nature as a medium. The resulting works create new experiences through the senses.

Yunhan Liu

*Shortlisted*
Yunhan Liu’s practice is based on the interactive dialogue between audiences and their environment, as well as the unity of art and experience.

Yuto Hasebe

Yuto Hasebe is intrigued by handmade musical instruments, especially those inspired by the natural world.