Finalists exhibition

Fondazione Merz is pleased to present the exhibition of the five finalists selected for the Art Section in this third edition of the Mario Merz Prize.

The protagonists of the collective are: Bertille Bak (France), Mircea Cantor (Romania), David Maljković (Croatia), Maria Papadimitriou (Greece) and Unknown Friend (USA).

The exhibition hosted at the Fondazione includes styles and formal solutions that vary greatly, but which are united by a powerful interrogatory force aimed at the present. Multiple stories, individual evolutions that mix with the community and distinct generational events all converge in an attempt to build a new language to capture a sense of the present time.

Five different processes of iconisation of the present that transform reality into five stories are presented: the life of the community to which Bertille Bak belongs, the ruins that evoke collective tragedies in the works of Mircea Cantor, memory and its organisation as archives in David Maljković, an investigation into social bonds in the work of Maria Papadimitriou, a tragicomic narrative that overturns the normal balance between reality and fiction in the ironic approach of Unknown Friend.

The artists were shortlisted by members of the pre-selection judging panel, Claudia Gioia (independent curator), Samuel Gross (Head Curator, Istituto Svizzero) and Beatrice Merz (President, Fondazione Merz) also curating the exhibition.

The public is invited to vote for their favorite artist by visiting the exhibition or logging onto the website (mariomerzprize.org) to view and judge the artwork online. The public vote will be added to the votes cast by the jury, whose members are: Manuel Borja-Villel (Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), Massimiliano Gioni (Artistic Director, New Museum, New York and Fondazione Trussardi, Milan), Lawrence Weiner (artist), and Beatrice Merz.

The winner will be commissioned to produce a new site-specific solo exhibition at Fondazione Merz.

Bertille Bak (Arras, France, 1983). Her work is direct, ironic, political and immersive. She chooses to blend in with the life of the communities on the fringes of a dominant culture, to create an iconic view of the present, made of opposing marginality, privations and excesses but also of tradition and sense of belonging. The formalisation of this creative process and of the feeling of empathy that unites the artist with her fellow travellers, takes shape in something that is closer to fairy tale than to documentary. From the miners’ dispersion that also suggests the eclipse of the productive subject, as was experienced in the 20th century, to the nomadism of the gipsies which is also that of contemporary thinking: a present that seeks a new language for rights, the rules of coexistence and of social change.

Mircea Cantor (Oradea, Romania, 1977). “Unpredictable Futur” and “Les Mondes” are the first words of his creative manifesto in which he prefers doubts in his research and dialogue between cultures to certainty. His is a responsible art because it is capable of crossing history, recognising the human condition, drawing on archaism, the bipolarity of meanings and all the major themes. It is in the imaginative tension that the iconisation of a present full of possibilities takes shape; from the depiction of a nature capable of mitigating the distortions of technology to the simplicity of materials modelled like ancient ruins to evoke current tragedies, and to the smile of a child who is disarming because it seeks and gives nothing.

David Maljković (Rijeka, Croatia, 1973) is an archivist of the vision and its parables. Starting from the cultural heritage and the disillusionment of the corporate utopias of the 20th century, he uses photographic crops and objects set into real or sketched-out sets, always open and never completely finished. A perfectionist of displays, he is surgical and passionate in approach but also detached as befits an expert in archives. Protecting the collective memory is his objective and his present is concentrated on the mechanisms of reproduction and transmission of vision, the cognitive substance of things. It is in the composition and decomposition of the elements that the attempt to attune to the flow of time finds nourishment, to contain it, celebrate it and avoid its oblivion.

Maria Papadimitriou (Athens, Greece, 1957). It is in the social bond that she indicates the key to all processes of recognition, regeneration and cultural change. Myth, tradition, ancient crafts, the city and its forgotten inhabitants, objects or space trouvés, everything flows into a practice of exploration to discover new things or those hidden from “normality”, and make them visible because they are capable of acting in common. Hers is thus a generous creative process that trusts in people, work and everyday life. She prefers interaction and “boycotts” in solidarity to activism tout court in order to create new visions and thoughts. The present lies in the social narrative, as a whole, in the sharing of values ​​where everything is connected and a future is planned for and with everyone.

Unknown Friend (Stephen G. Rhodes, Houston, USA, 1977 and Barry Johnston, Alton, USA, 1980) adopt a tragic-playful attitude to cross the threshold of the present, consciously and unconsciously passing back and forth between successive stages of reality to overturn and shake up truth and fiction. From the encounter between anarchic dream and fantasy, the narrative dimension of the creative process takes the form of a performance in which video, words, music and sculpture all converge. The effort is destructive and conciliatory, sarcastically individualistic and utopian, striving towards something still elusive but which certainly seeks a less compromised present elsewhere, where the words and directions of meaning are free of the 20th century overtones, of its hackneyed propaganda and social conditioning.

Mario Merz Prize
Held every two years, the Mario Merz Prize, was established to identify and celebrate key personalities in the field of visual art and music composition. It is the only international prize for art and music. The Mario Merz Prize, promoted by the Fondazione Merz with the collaboration of an organising committee and supported by an authoritative international committee of honour, has been awarded the Medal of the President of the Italian Republic. The prize is supported by the Embassy of Switzerland in Italy, the Embassy of Italy in Switzerland, the Piedmont Region, the City of Zurich and the City of Turin. The selected winner for the art category will be commissioned a site-specific solo project at the Fondazione Merz and the winning composer in the music category will be commissioned to make and perform a new musical score.

Winners of the Mario Merz Prize previous editions: Art: Wael Shawky (Egypt), 2015; Petrit Halilaj (Kosovo), 2017; Music: Cyrill Schürch (Switzerland), 2015; Geoffrey Gordon (USA)

With the support of Regione Piemonte, Compagnia di San Paolo.

Thanks to Città di Torino and Kuhn & Bülow. Special thanks to Fondazione Merz Patrons.

Press contacts: 
PCM Studio di Paola C. Manfredi: press [​at​] paolamanfredi.com / T +39 02 36769480
Nadia Biscaldi, Fondazione Merz: press [​at​] fondazionemerz.org / T +39 011 19719436 
Melissa Emery, SUTTON: melissa [​at​] suttonpr.com / T +44 (0) 207 183 3577