The shortlist for the Jarman award has been revealed. Now in its 11th year, and named after the late film-maker Derek Jarman, it awards £10,000 to an artist working with moving images.
Last year, the award was won by the London-based multidisciplinary artist Oreet Ashery. While the past two years have seen women dominate the shortlist, this year’s roster hails from a notably broad cultural and ethnic spectrum.
Larry Achiampong and David Blandy – British-Ghanaian and British respectively – have been highlighted for their collaborative body of work, Finding Fanon. Inspired by the lost plays of West Indian writer Frantz Fanon, it features the two artists, in matching three-piece Gilbert & George-style suits, exploring their personal connections to Britain’s historical presence in Africa. Andrea Lissoni, a member of the award jury and senior curator at Tate, featured the work in the museum’s recent exhibition Soul of the Nation. As well as speaking powerfully to critical issues of race and colonialism, he says, “their use of sound and music, and the high quality crafting of the images is wonderful”.
Birmingham-born Hardeep Pandhal has been nominated for his provocative take on contemporary Britain, which draws on street and comic art, as well as his background as a second-generation British Sikh. Using animation described by jury member and artist Melanie Manchot as “fast, immediate, humorous, youthful”, his work is brash and colourful, with a dose of social realism.
German-born artist Lawrence Lek works with virtual reality and 3D simulation across gaming software, installation and performance. His 2017 piece, Geomancer, is a William Gibson-style CGI film about the creative awakening of artificial intelligence.
Margaret Salmon, one of two American-born artists on the list, aligns herself more closely with film-making as most people know it, with distinctive essay films that portray the everyday with warmth and lyricism. The other American is Daria Martin, whose analogue approach to narrative film-making encompasses subject matter – robots, synaesthesia, magic – that is directly relevant to the digital present, with its AI and VR a kind of lucid dreaming. “Finally acknowledging her relevance is important,” says Lissoni.
Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic’s recent Nada trilogy explores the link between modernist architecture and national political power structures, from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s designs for 1920s Germany to those Arne Jacobsen completed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Cibic’s works are interdisciplinary – combining performance with film – and it is precisely this cross-pollination that makes moving image the art form of the moment.
The Jarman award has consistently drawn attention to the rising stars of the UK art world. Previously shortlisted artists include several Turner prize nominees, including Laure Prouvost, Elizabeth Price and Monster Chetwynd.
Some 200 artists were nominated for this year’s longlist by curators across the country. Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery and a member of the jury, says the prize showcases the freedom that artists have working with the moving image, as opposed to traditional film-makers. They are DIY practitioners, she says, and wouldn’t necessarily make it in the film industry, but here they can fashion a space of their own. “You can make a film using your mobile phone; you can be a one-person band. Moving image is immediate, it’s reactive. It doesn’t depend on the box office or the auditorium setting – it can be two minutes or 24 hours long.”
The winner of the award will be announced in November after a British tour of the shortlisted artists’ works.
