Artes Mundi 8

Following the success of the Artes Mundi 7 prize, awarded to John Akomfrah earlier this year, Artes Mundi is pleased to announce the shortlist for the eighth edition of the UK’s leading art prize. The winner of the prestigious 40,000 GBP Artes Mundi prize will be announced in January 2019 following a four-month exhibition of works by the shortlisted artists. The shortlist was selected from over 450 nominations spanning 86 countries and comprises five of world’s most celebrated contemporary artists, whose works explore what it means to be human. They are: Anna Boghiguian, Bouchra Khalili, Otobong Nkanga, Trevor Paglen and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

The Artes Mundi 8 shortlisted artists will take part in a major exhibition which will run from October 27, 2018 to February 24, 2019 at National Museum Cardiff.

Artes Mundi 8 selectors, Nick Aikens, a curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Daniela Pérez, an independent curator based in Mexico City; and Alia Swastika, a Jakarta-based curator and writer, looked for artists who directly engage with everyday life through their practice and explore contemporary social issues across the globe.  

Selector Nick Aikens: “Artistic practice, at its most compelling and enriching, allows us to see the world and our place within it from new perspectives. Each of the five shortlisted artists has consistently done this by pushing the varied media within which they work. I’m delighted we could put together a set of practices from very different contexts but one that shows the myriad, sophisticated ways artists are articulating and responding to some of the most pressing questions of our time.” ​

Karen MacKinnon, Artes Mundi’s Director and Curator: “Artes Mundi’s unique focus on the human condition enables us to bring together artists from all over the world whose art can inspire and challenge the way we see and inhabit our world. Through their diverse practices they consider urgent themes: political minorities and strategies of resistance in the work of Bouchra Khalili; Trevor Paglen’s  investigations of  mass surveillance and data collection; explorations of  landscape, nature, language and displacement run through the work of Otobong Nkanga; the deeply personal and political studies of everyday life captured in the work of Anna Boghiguian;  and the psychologically charged and dreamlike works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films explore sexuality, the unconscious and the natural world. The ebb and flow of their ideas, the different perspectives and terms of engagement, suggest we are in for an extraordinary Artes Mundi 8.”