Chanel has named the inaugural winners of its Chanel Next Prize, a new biannual award that the French label founded in March to support 10 international artists and creatives working across film, music, performance, and visual art. The prize was founded as part of a larger initiative termed the Chanel Culture Fund, established last year in the wake of the pandemic to expand the luxury label’s backing of the arts.
The award is given to artists who the fashion label believes are redefining their respective fields. In a statement, Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture, explained that the prize falls in line with the legacy of the label’s founder, the late Gabrielle Chanel, who supported avant-garde artists of her era. “We extend Chanel’s deep history of cultural commitment—empowering big ideas and creating opportunities for an emerging generation of artists to imagine the next,” she said.
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Each winner will receive €100,000 ($130,000). With it comes access to a network of mentors selected by the brand over the next 20 months. Each recipient will be allowed to allocate the prize funding to any project of their choosing.
Under the Chanel Culture Fund, Chanel will also partner with a number of institutions to establish other awards and back exhibition programming. Among Chanel’s collaborators are Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, and GES-2, a newly opened contemporary art center in Moscow.
The 10 recipients of the prize were selected by actress Tilda Swinton, artist Cao Fei, and architect David Adjaye. Each artist was nominated by an advisory board of 25 international leaders in the cultural sector working in various fields. Below, a look at the winners of the inaugural group of the Chanel Next Prize:
– Jung Jae-il, a Seoul-born, Berlin-based composer whose work merges Korean and Western sounds.
–Keiken, a London- and Berlin-based collective comprising artists Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos, and Tanya Cruz, whose make use of installations, performances, gaming engines, and augmented reality in their practice.
– Lual Mayen, a South Sudanese refugee and game designer engineering educational and social impact tools.
– Marlene Monteiro Freitas, a Lisbon-based dancer whose choreography references her native island of Cape Verde.
– Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian-Welsh director and screenwriter based in London who gained recognition for her 2017 film I Am Not a Witch.
– Precious Okoyomon, an artist and poet based in New York, who won the 2021 Frieze Artist Award and is known for their immersive installations that examine the natural world and its ties to racial histories.
– Marie Schleef, a Berlin-based director whose work examines the dynamics of male-dominated theatre conventions.
– Botis Seva, a London-based dancer and choreographer whose practice is rooted in hip-hop.
– Wang Bing, a filmmaker known for projects that examine people at the margins of Chinese society.
– Eduardo Williams, an artist and filmmaker based in Paris and Buenos Aires whose documentary and fictional works examine the role of the camera.
Source: artnews.com