When the Artes Mundi Prize launched in Wales 21 years ago, it was an outlier, and not just because of its uniquely large £40,000 award. Its unabashedly political remit for awarding international art that explores “social realities” and “the human condition” made it an anomaly in a UK that was still making sense of the Young British Artists’ hi-jinks.
“It was a very different context,” says Nigel Prince, the director of the biennial prize, which also has an accompanying exhibition of global artists on the verge of going stellar. In the past two decades, its winners have included Theaster Gates, Yael Bartana, John Akomfrah and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, all now leading voices in their field. While previous exhibitions were held in Cardiff, this year, to mark the 10th issuing of the award, the exhibition will be staged at five venues across four Welsh cities. Throughout its history, each show “has responded to the temperature of the day”, says Prince. “You can chart a progression towards more issues-based art.”
This seems especially true for this year’s selection. While the seven artists up for its £40,000 prize are selected from a world-wide open submission process, Prince notes their shared concerns, including “land use, how it defines ideas of nationhood or belonging, and contested territories.” The three artists displayed at the National Museum in Cardiff all hail from west Asia, and tackle the area’s upheavals. Alia Farid explores the oil industry’s impact at ground level in her film installation, where teenagers living at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq do regular teenage things against a polluted backdrop. Kurdish artist Rushdi Anwar’s work also deals with places broken up by global forces, including the town of Bashiqa, from where his family hail, now controlled by Iraq but claimed by Kurdistan. His ruined photographs of a bomb-strewn Christian church in the town are a thistorically pointed memorial. Torched by the artist, and their remains are placed in boxes, the glazed lids of which bear Islamic designs dating from the Muslim conquest of Spain.
Mounira Al Solh, on the other hand, takes a dig at the expectation that artists from the region will mine its traumas in her series of portraits of female refugees, I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous. She also puts craft traditions to alternative use in her richly embroidered tent sculptures, inspired by the lavish shelters traditionally fashioned for Persian emperors. Her disassembled tent has been co-created with women in her home country, Lebanon. A choir including asylum seekers in Wales will perform at the exhibition opening.
Women’s voices are foregrounded across other presentations. Alongside the Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo’s work in film, which explores the overuse of natural resources, she is exhibiting banners created by the Welsh Greenham Common protesters. Environmental pillage is also at the centre of Taloi Havini’s hard-hitting film and photography exploring Australia’s exploitation of the copper reserves in her native Bougainville.
Storytelling is a potent tool used to question power in two other shows. Nguyen Trinh Thi’s installation using music, simple light projection and chilli plants to create a leafy shadow forest is a quietly effective meditation on violence. At the other end of the spectrum, Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s films show raucous upendings of the patriarchal colonial forces that have supplanted indigenous culture in Central America. The madcap characters in her darkly comic works are inspired by Mesoamerican myths and brought to life with plenty of facepaint and DIY sci-fi dress-up.
One such character, a giant pink-caped bat, may speak for the thrust of this year’s exhibition when it declares, “We broadcast tensions and anxiety infecting the radio spectrum with signals of pulsating detritus.” This year’s artists all pull injustices hidden and overlooked into view. Artes Mundi 10 runs at various venues across Cardiff, Swansea, Newtown and Llandudno, Friday to 25 February.
Prize offerings: highlights from 2023’s exhibition
Taloi Havini’s Habitat, 2018–19
In Havini’s photographs and film installation, the copper of Bougainville seems to bleed out of the ground. It’s a tragic metaphor for what happened on the island after the establishment of a copper mine by the multinational Rio Tinto Group in the 1970s. Local people allege exposure to toxins and forced displacement, and in the 1980s, their anger sparked a violent civil war.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s Verses of Filth, 2021
The first in the film trilogy by the Mexico-based artist, Verses of Filth reimagines an Aztec deity of death and war who picks over human remains and cultural flotsam with a vulture gang. It’s a dark fantasy of pleasure and revolution.
Nguyen Trinh Thi’s And They Die a Natural Death, 2022
This Vietnamese artist’s acclaimed installation uses quiet means – bamboo pipe music and shadow play – to prompt visitors to reflect on brutal acts that took place in a forest in north Vietnam in the 1960s: a prisoner from a detention centre who dared to pick its chilli plants was murdered by a guard.
Alia Farid’s In Lieu of What Is, 2022 (main image)
This series of huge resin sculptures depicts water carriers of all kinds found in Kuwait, from jerry cans to clay jugs. They are actually modelled after public drinking fountains cast in these forms throughout the Gulf, and speak to the relationship to water in desert cities.
• Artes Mundi 10 runs at various venues across Cardiff, Swansea, Newtown and Llandudno, from 20 October to 24 February
• This article was amended on 16 October 2023. An earlier version incorrectly said the teenagers in Alia Farid’s film installation lived in Kuwait. Also, Taloi Havini’s image was incorrectly credited to to Zan Wimberley.
