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The Vasseur BALTIC Artists’ Award 2022
Fernando García-Dory, Laleh Khorramian, Ima-Abasi Okon
April 9–October 2, 2022
BALTIC Artists’ Award is a biennial award established to recognise artists deserving of an international platform and offers a step-change moment in their career, each receiving an exhibition at BALTIC, 25,000 GBP to realise new work and a 5,000 GBP artist fee. Three established international artists are invited to nominate an artist in the early stages of their career. For the 2022 iteration, Otobong Nkanga has nominated Ima-Abasi Okon, Mika Rottenberg has nominated Laleh Khorramian and Hito Steyerl has nominated Fernando García-Dory.
In its 20th anniversary year, BALTIC renames the award The Vasseur BALTIC Artists’ Award, in memory of the late Isabel Vasseur, an admired figure who inspired a generation of curators and artists with her fearless approach to putting art in the public realm. Through the 2022 Award, BALTIC Legacy Patron, Vasseur continues to support the growth of contemporary art. Her career spanned more than thirty years, encompassing photography and experimental film, important curatorial initiatives at festivals in Glasgow, Gateshead and Edinburgh, and through her London agency, Art Office, she commissioned public art projects throughout the UK. Vasseur served on the Board of Trustees for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2004-08) and lectured on the influential Curating Contemporary Art MA at the Royal College of Art (1993–2003).
Fernando García-Dory
Fernando García-Dory´s work engages with the relationship between culture and nature, as manifested in multiple contexts, from landscape and the rural, to desires and expectations in relation to identity, crisis, utopia and the potential for social change. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, microorganisms, social systems, traditional art languages and collaborative agro-ecological projects and actions. Since 2009, García-Dory has developed INLAND, a collaborative platform and para-institution dedicated to agricultural, social and cultural production.
García-Dory studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and is now preparing his PhD in Agro-ecology. His work has been shown at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Reina Sofia, Madrid; SFMOMA, San Francisco; amongst others. He has participated in biennials in Athens, Lisbon, Gwangju, Jeju, and in Documenta 13. He is a fellow of Council of Forms in Paris and a board member of the World Alliance of Nomadic Pastoralists. He was awarded the Creative Time’s Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change.
Laleh Khorramian
Laleh Khorramian’s work spans animation, drawing, monotypes, collage, paintings, sculpture and clothing. Her practice combines the cosmological thinking of ancient cultures, their complex mythologies and spiritual vocabularies within her own imagined worlds, synthesising them into histories that are both futuristic and ancient. By removing cultural or historical specificity from her narratives, she uses the ordinary to portray the epic, the universal and the transient, in a search for worlds beyond our own.
Born in Tehran, Iran, Khorramian lives in Upstate New York. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her undergraduate degree from The Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA from Columbia University, New York. She has exhibited in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, US; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Art Basel, Switzerland; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Istanbul Museum of Art, Istanbul; the Sundance Film festival; Midnight Moment, Times Square, New York and Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Australia.
Ima-Abasi Okon
Ima-Abasi Okon works with sculpture, sound and video to produce installations that explore the historical and political charge of materials. She employs exhibition-making as an exercise in syntax, adopting linguistic and grammatical structures as a way of complicating the construction of knowledge. In her recent works, Okon has repurposed industrial and handmade objects, removing their use-value or function in order to explore the formation of taste, subjectivity, productivity and excess.
Okon lives between London and Amsterdam. She has exhibited at Turf Projects, London and Void, Derry-Londonderry; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kingsgate Project Space, London; 13th Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal and The Showroom, London. In 2018, she was awarded the Nigel Greenwood Research Prize and the Summer Residency at Hospitalfield, Scotland. She participated in the residency programme at Rijksakademie voor beeldende kunsten (Academy for Fine Arts), Amsterdam.
BALTIC exhibitions also opening in 2022
BALTIC & Travelling Gallery: What’s for Tea?
February 21–July 18, 2022
In its 20th year as a free admission art gallery in Gateshead, BALTIC partners with Travelling Gallery, Scotland, on a new exhibition that will travel to communities and schools across the North East of England.
What’s for Tea? will explore food production from the perspective of local and community initiatives and their contrast with global mass production. The exhibition will feature works by Futurefarmers, David Lisser, Kara Chin, Isabella Carreras, Asunción Molinos Gordo and Turner Prize-nominated duo Cooking Sections.
Mounira Al Solh: A day is as long as a year
April 9–October 2, 2022
Mounira Al Solh’s paintings, works on paper, embroideries and films explore migration, memory, trauma and loss. Drawing from the artist’s personal conversations and encounters with those who have been affected by conflict in Syria, Lebanon and the Middle East region, Al Solh’s works tell stories of displacement and uncertainty, often reflecting on the struggles of women in the Arab world. The artist’s exhibition at BALTIC will include a large-scale embroidered tent developed collaboratively with groups of women in Lebanon, the Netherlands and Gateshead.
Carolina Caycedo
May 28–November 20, 2022
Carolina Caycedo makes work that addresses the commons, environmental justice, just energy transition and cultural and environmental biodiversity. For Caycedo’s first survey exhibition in Europe, BALTIC presents an overview of her artistic practice over the past twenty years, alongside a new commission inspired by the River Tyne, which expands her ongoing River Book series. The exhibition will feature works from major series including Be Dammed (2012–ongoing), a multimedia project that examines the impact of hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects on communities and the environment.
Hinterlands
October 22, 2022–April 30, 2023
This group exhibition considers the landscape of the North East of England, its histories, mythologies and legacies and potential futures for custodianship. The exhibition includes new commissions and existing works by artists connected with the area, reflecting on ideas of rootedness and belonging, human and more-than-human relationships, boundaries, land and time in the era of the climate emergency.
Jala Wahid
October 22, 2022–April 30, 2023
Bringing together sculpture, video, sound and text, Jala Wahid’s work highlights the ways in which global and interregional politics have shaped Kurdish identity. Her innovative practice explores this at the intersection of fiction and reality and touches on urgent issues in relation to nationhood, diasporic living and migration, intergenerational connections and cultural manifestations.
Wahid’s first major institutional solo exhibition receives the support of The Foundation Foundation.
Hannah Perry
December 10, 2022–July 2023
Hannah Perry works across installation, sculpture, film and printmaking. She continuously generates and manipulates materials to develop a sprawling network of references; the result is an often candid, and personal exploration of mental and emotional health in our contemporary, hyper-networked society. At BALTIC, Perry presents a major new body of work that considers labour, motherhood and class.
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