Frieze London
15–18 October 2014
Regent’s Park
London
The winner of the inaugural Frieze Artist Award is Mélanie Matranga. The Frieze Artist Award allows an emerging artist to realise a major project at Frieze London as part of the critically acclaimed Frieze Projects programme.
For Frieze London 2014, Matranga will create a series of online videos that follow a young artistic couple as they negotiate ‘freedom, success and the proper functioning of a couple.’ The episodes will be filmed during the construction of Frieze London in Regent’s Park, including a purpose-built café, which Matranga has designed for use by visitors. The narrative structure of the video will focus on the simultaneous building of both the couple’s relationship and the set of the café itself. Through these two storylines, the project will look at the confluence of emotional and monetary trade economies. Each three- to five-minute episode is co-directed by Valentin Bouré and will be broadcast online.
Matranga (b. 1985) is the first French artist to be recognized by Frieze Projects’ distinguished programme of artist awards, which in past years included the Emdash Award (2011–13) and the Cartier Award (2006–2010). Matranga’s previous projects have employed animation, sculpture, and installation to create environments that communicate the emotional value of their production and economy.
The Frieze Artist Award is a major new initiative from Frieze Projects, inviting an artist to create a new site-specific work at Frieze London 2014. Matranga’s proposal was selected from over 1,000 applications by artists from all over the world.
Based in Paris, Mélanie Matranga graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2011 and she has exhibited internationally at Bodega, Philadelphia (2011), BETC, Nuit Blanche, Paris (2012), and Tripod, Nantes (2014). Recently, Matranga was included in Castillo/Corrales’ group exhibition The Issues of Our Time, Paris (2013), which traveled to Artists Space, New York (2014). She has also been nominated for the Prize Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard / Art Contemporain 2014.
The selection committee for the Frieze Artist Award 2014 was Nicola Lees (Curator, Frieze Projects), Hilary Lloyd (artist) and Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen (Directors, gta Exhibitions).
Frieze London will take place 15 to 18 October in Regent’s Park, London and will present over 160 of the world’s leading contemporary galleries. Frieze London is sponsored by Deutsche Bank.
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