Prize ceremony: Thursday, January 29, 2014

Share Nam June Paik Art Center is pleased to announce Haroon Mirza (b. 1977, UK) as winner of the 2014 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. The jury stated that Mirza was chosen for his remarkably cross-disciplinary work, traversing sound art, installation art, video and performance seamlessly drawing on various elements of art and technology, whose experimentality and openness resonate the spirit of Nam June Paik to a great extent. The award ceremony will take place in Nam June Paik Art Center on Thursday 29 January 2015, the ninth anniversary of the death of Paik, and Mirza will be awarded 50,000 USD prize. His solo exhibition will be held in Nam June Paik Art Center later in the year.

Nobuo Nakamura, Director of CCA Kitakyushu, who chaired this year’s jury, commented that “Mirza presents work enclosing many different elements of art and technology, effortlessly traversing domain boundaries. He skillfully combines sound, installation and moving image, conflating old analogue material such as TV, keyboard, amplifier, furniture, with cutting edge high-tech material, positioning aspects of culture and time and transient technology into one space.” Another jury member, Mike Stubbs, Director of FACT Liverpool, added that “the jury selected Mirza for his ability to consistently extend a practice, which continues a fascination with media, time and transmission, much like Paik, similarly speaking beyond cultures, language and belief. […] Work, which demands the imagination and completion by us, the audience, deserves the prize, for his own openness in revealing a process of experiment in creating and re-mixing his own audio-visual system.”

Upon hearing about his becoming the prize winner, Mirza said that “winning this award is very special for me because it celebrates the life and work of an artist and his influence on contemporary culture. Paik was a man who really opened up the territory that my work occupies so this is a real honour and opportunity to build upon this area of practice.”

The Nam June Paik Art Center Prize was established in 2009 to acknowledge artists who, like Paik, open up new horizons through their relentlessly experimental and innovative works. Since its inception, the prize has been awarded to artists and theorists whose works are very much in tune with Paik’s work amalgamating art and technology, pursuing new ways of communication, interacting with audiences, and fusing and conflating music, performance and visual art. The first prize was awarded in 2009 to four artists, Seung-Taek Lee, Eun-Me Ahn, Ceal Floyer, and Robert Adrian X; philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour won the 2010 prize; and the 2012 prize went to artist Doug Aitken.

The Nam June Paik Art Center Prize draws up a shortlist for which five selection committee members nominate two artists, or artists’ teams, respectively, and the final jury consisting of five members chooses a winner among ten nominees.

This year’s nomination committee members are Kazunao Abe, Artistic Director, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM); David Joselit, critic and Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center; Jang Un Kim, Senior Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA); Hyunseok Seo, artist and Professor, Yonsei University; and Kyunghwa Ahn, Chief Curator, Nam June Paik Art Center. The jury includes Nobuo Nakamura, Director, CCA Kitakyushu; Mike Stubbs, Director, FACT Liverpool; Sun Jung Kim, Director, SAMUSO; Kyuchul Ahn, artist and Professor, Korea National University of Arts; and Manu Park, Director, Nam June Paik Art Center.

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