Video of Prizegiving Celeste Prize 2013, 5th edition, Space Fienaroli, Rome.
On 7th December hundreds of arts lovers gathered with Celeste Prize finalists and the prize curator Ami Barak to determine with their votes this year’s winners who received 20,000 € in cash prizes.
Noa Giniger, winner of Painting & Graphics Prize, Celeste Prize 2013.
The Sorrow the Joy Brings: this artwork is part of a series of collages made from found images. Each image presents a landscape with a weeping willow tree in it. The intervention is minimal; the treetop is cut out and flipped around. By doing so, the branches of the weeping willow – that are initially hanging down heavily – are turned upside down, thus being raised upwards.
The Sorrow the Joy Brings comes from a simple desire to make a weeping willow laugh. To create an act that literally causes an existing tree to change its nature. The work also points out the relativity in which we exist and function and the way it influences our reading of the world; where familiar spatial concepts borrowed from the physical world like 'up' and 'down' are used in order to express and organize a whole system of non-physical concepts like emotional states.
Pavel Braila, winner of Video & Animation Prize, Celeste Prize 2013.
Ink Ribbon Fingerprints: 26 professional ten-finger typists ( as 26 letters) type simultaneously on old typewriter machine one page of their memoir of the time when each of them have been using it. Invited to make an intervention in Technisches Museum Wien, Pavel Braila makes his tribute to the Typewriter : “the child of war and peace, munitions industry and poetry, metallurgical plants and pacifist aspirations that was invented by men, but became a weapon of women's emancipation”
LAB BINAER, winner of Installation, Sculpture, Live Media & Performance Prize, Celeste Prize 2013.
White Noise : even today, in an age of digital music files, many audiophiles still swear by their classic record player for listening to music.
The exhibit »White Noise« consists of an empty record, meaning that the groove was cut into the blank record without any acoustic information. And yet, if one listens very closely, one can hear an impressive spectrum of frequencies.
External influences, such as dust, result in an mechanical aging process, which create variations within the acoustic nothingness. Therefore, in time, nothingness generates a complex »Noise«-sculpture.
A projection onto the domed ceiling visualizes what exactly is going on in the groove: When standing in front of the record player, to your left, you will see the conserved primitive state, therefore the record's first run. To your right, a realtime visualization of the record's current frequency spectrum.
Dominique Blais, winner of Curator's Choice Prize, Celeste Prize 2013.
Ring : "On the wall, four hard copies show us ghostly traces produced by the arrangement of lit candles in front of a camera obscura. At the foot of each copy, Dominique Blais has laid a bronze sculpture made with the lost wax technique. It is the residual shape of the candles used to produce the photographic image. Entitled Ring, this piece refers to Wagner's opera tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung. Lasting almost 15 hours, this work breaks up into a prologue and three days. For each opera, the artist has lit a candle in front of a pinhole with the aim of exposing photosensitive paper to the effective duration of the representation. The revealed image (in negative format) functions like the abstract testimony of the flow of time relating to the presence of musical work."
Perrine Lacroix, from the press release of the exhibition "d'une seconde majeure ou mineure" (La BF15, Lyon)
Cristina Gardumi, winner of Visitors Prize, Celeste Prize 2013
Adults don't exist: since the dawn of humankind, initiation to adult life has been marked by precise rituals and trials: you had to find a trasure in a deep forest or in a labyrinth, to hunt the bigger prey, to move from here to there on a burning path, ad so on. If you passed the trial you were a new adult person, and you were ready to bump into the world. But in our so called civilised little world when can we declare we are finally grownup? We could assert that this is just an arbitrary boundary: the Passage is life itself in its entirety, and if among ancients and contemporary tribes myths and legends instructed them about the rites of passage, to contemporary Man myth is increasingly a private matter. Our symbols come out from our daily life and they are the psychoanalytic roots of our personal behaviour (if you believe in this kind of stuff); religious sharing has been replaced with personal contents sharing on the social networks. Private Life become contemporary epic. Or adults just don’t exist, at least among us.
Videos by Clizia Corti