Alec Von Bargen
*Shortlisted*
Alec Von Bargen is a social anthropologist, capturing aesthetic instances that resonate with their historical, political and social contexts.
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.
*Shortlisted*
Alec Von Bargen is a social anthropologist, capturing aesthetic instances that resonate with their historical, political and social contexts.
Aleksandar Antonijevic is fascinated by hidden details, seeing photography as a poignant medium through which to communicate.
*Shortlisted*
In the early 1980s, Christiane Zschommler’s grandmother smuggled 1984, which was forbidden in the GDR, through Check Point Charlie.
Fabiola Cedillo photographs human beings and their environment, without distinguishing the boundaries between fiction and reality.
Francis Meslet roams the world, searching for abandoned sites where time seems to have stopped, including an abandoned blast furnace.
François Aubret is a French minimalist photographer currently living in Los Angeles. Aubret’s documents hidden geometric patterns.
Gianmaria Gava’s work is mainly focused on exploring the impact of digital manipulation on perception in a post-photographic world.
*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.
Ideas about freedom, power, and the social structures that define them are at the core of Joanne Handley’s photographic practice.
John Shanks’ High Rise Brisbane 9 is from the urban industrial landscape series. The artist represents various landscape settings.
Julia Fullerton-Batten’s fascination with the River Thames takes a more concrete form; the project investigates cultural and historical narratives.
Katrin Hanusch is driven by a curiosity in the human condition with motifs taken from the everyday, resulting in works investigating “touch.”
*Shortlisted*
May Parlar’s practice is a meditation on the nomadic experience of “being”, in constantly changing, constructed realities.
NA Vague is influenced by a degree in marketing communications and roles within the media, examining vernacular and advertising imagery.
Noritaka Minami uses photography to document visionary architectural proposals from the 20th century, revealing where they are now.
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.
*Shortlisted*
The observation and charting of biological rhythms are recurrent themes in Rebecca Reeve’s work. Through Looking uses grid-like forms.
Reuben Wu’s images are fragments of memory and imagination. Lux Noctis is a series depicting landscapes unbound by time or space.
Tom Butler makes images about the twin human desires to simultaneously be concealed and perform, expressing ideas of introversion.
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’s photographs are characterised by dreamlike settings. Lately, the artist has been exploring portraiture surrounding human stories.
Zhou Chengzhou’s work combines perspectives from industry, urbanisation and marginalisation. It looks at the alienation between people.
Drawing on the relationship between architecture and sculpture, Urrutia Lorenzini’s Equilibrium explores how identity is constantly changing.
As an experimental artist with a scientific drive behind her practice, Carr utilises media with a particular focus on natural phenomena.
With a previous discourse largely made up of installations, sculptures and design, Aldea’s recent endeavours make sense of our place through virtual texts.
Utilising different disciplines, mother and daughter duo Sally Wakelin and Kate Gale, create pieces that move freely in ambient conditions.
Concerned with the reclamation of natural objects, Stephens pushes the boundaries between fine art and architecture.
A contemporary interpretation of classical Dutch paintings, Ojeda’s Vanitas explores the representation of the architecture of the human mind.
*Shortlisted*
Exploring connections between technology, traditional craft techniques and the user, Bloomfield’s Conform No1-4 invites participation and interaction.
*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.
Expressing conceptual ideas through sculptural forms and experimenting with interactive elements, Lobykin’s work focuses on origins of form.
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.
Part of an ongoing project related to human resilience and future labour, Working Prototype seeks to materialise new modes and tools of productivity.
Chance plays an important role in Rutschmann’ artistic process, with final works often unintentional byproducts of a continuing process.
As a representation of psychology and human behaviour, Ioroi builds upon the universal impulse to begin reading when presented with text.
The language of the immediate landscape – and the understanding of its visual metaphors – is what informs Farrell’s practice.
Burraway’s practice addresses social issues at the core of modern society. She sheds light on issues found in the lives of marginalised individuals.
Hopkins Hall’s In the Absence of Control, Exercise Full Reason draws from the idea of ancient Greek councils at the birth of democracy.
*Shortlisted*
Mullen has created a colourful series in collaboration with his partner, depicting a form of synaesthesia through spatial representation.
Following a trip to Iceland in 2017, Moore began to experiment with the process of painting, combining mountainous layers over loose, painterly ones.
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.
Wlaszyn creates alternative representations of reality that are accessible for all. Data Clouds refers to the (in)visibilities of digital data.
Umerle paints in series that are open-ended, exploring similarity, repetition and difference within each group of work.
Neither drawing nor sculpture, Burgess’s Borderlines highlights humankind’s inability to define and fix amidst this constant flow of life.
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.
Villanueva Linares has two distinct approaches: moments filled with volume and colour, and detail-oriented situations, charged with metaphor.
Kulkarni’s work creates optical illusions that examine this question. In Misdirection, the checked pattern is like a wave towering above the viewer.
Two minutes to midnight was inspired by the writings of Noam Chomsky. His musings on the Doomsday clock influence this longlisted piece.
Cartmill is interested in the feeling that a weathered or worn surface exudes. Resonance III examines the possibilities of what materials offer.
AJ Laas explores the intersection of the political and the metaphysical. Laas investigates issues of consumption, liberty and interpersonal agency.
Signaling back to a history in dance, Alexandra Davenport’s practice uses performance, writing, moving image and photography.
Anikó Kuikka makes narrative moving-image installations about the absurd constructs of realities in mythologies and fairytales.
Charlie Cook’s artistic practice reflects the seriousness of the world around us, offering light moments of relief through playfulness.
Christian Noelle Charles’ work centres on black female identities, body language and self-worth and is informed by secondary consciousness.
Through a research-based practice, Christine Kettaneh investigates systems that are simultaneously sculptural and performative.
In the experimental documentary Ada, Christine Margaret depicts real events with a fictional protagonist exploring the subject of grief.
Christine Vandemoortele’s films use sounds to structure the trajectory of the audience’s experience, inviting quiet contemplation.
With roots in architecture and design, Dagmar Korintenberg & Wolf Kipper’s work the features the creation of spatial structures.
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‘s focuses on the relationship between nature and technology, exploring the topic light, hidden in our environments.
Using open source software and “obsolete” hardware, Djipco make interactive installations that re-introduce tangibility and texture.
Concerned with environmental issues, Elise Guillaume explore patriarchal industries which make nature a commodity.
Erwin Redl’s work, engages with binary logic, assembling materials according to a narrow set of rules inspired by computer code.
Grzegorz Stefański’s work in performance and film, is primarily concerned with power, identity and the politics of embodiment.
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’s work is informed by journeys and identity in relation to landscape and architecture, realised through experimental films.
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.
*Shortlisted*
Jane and Louise Wilson’s work looks at how the geography of a location takes on a porous identity, creating atmospheric installations.
*Main Prize Winner*
Rebirth Is Necessary is the summation of filmmaker Jenn Nkiru’s loaded feelings and questions about the black experience .
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’s work tackles contemporary propositions in dance, performance and critical thought, through improvisation.
Kenji Ouellet’s work consists mostly of video works and performances revolving around the touch sense.
Bagus’s work includes printed text on overalls from an internal statement within a university, regarding inclusivity and diversity. This is an ongoing work.
*Shortlisted*
Across Ludivine Large-Bessette’s work, the body becomes a mirror that unsettles and moves the audience.
Maria Luigia Gioffrè combines visual art and performance, investigating methodologies of production for images within memory.
*Shortlisted*
María Molina Peiró explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between material and digital realities with One Year Life Strata.
*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’s combines industrial, domestic and land-based techniques, sharing intimate perspectives on contemporary life in the western Arctic.
Maya Smira & Samira Hashemi are two young female artists from enemy countries. Their practices deal with issues of conflict.
Melanie Jame Wolf’s work investigates this sense of movement as it embodies ideas surrounding gender, the body, ghosts, myth and class.
Monica Thomas an interdisciplinary artist exploring performance and video. She engages with the area that sits between these forms.
Neville Gabie’s background is in sculpture. His work encompases situations or locations caught in a moment of change.
*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”.
Hydrozome is a large waterside rope sculpture of light, sound and interactivity constructed from vast amounts of illuminated rope.
Robbie Thomson’s work brings together fields including robotics, AI and nanotechnology to uncover concepts linked to human perception.
ScanLAB Projects is led by Matthew Shaw and William Trossell, who share a common passion for highly crafted making and storytelling.
*Shortlisted*
Sebastian Kite’s work explores the intersection of art, architecture and music, creating installations that illustrate new readings of spaces.
*Shortlisted*
Sim Chi Yin’s work focuses on histories and memories in land and peoples realised through photographic and filmic installations.
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 creates immersive interdisciplinary installation performances, working with science and the humanities.
*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’s work explores the relationship of the female body and technology. Ubiquitous States is an interactive performance.
Varvara Shavrova’s practice is focused on family heritage through the process of remembering, recalling, retracing and re-enacting stories.
Victoria Wareham explores the screen as a forgotten horizon – an invisible strata that exists between the image, the object and the viewer.
Vikesh Govind considers the expectations and prejudices existing in society. Shoes uncovers the masks we wear in today’s society.
Vron Harris is interested in the construction of film, the representation of time, and subject / object relationships.
Won Moon sees artistic practice as a poetic action. Entanglement links performance, installation and text through a short film.
Yuki Anai & Hideaki Takahashi approach nature as a medium. The resulting works create new experiences through the senses.
*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 is intrigued by handmade musical instruments, especially those inspired by the natural world.