Artes Mundi 8 - National Museum Cardiff (until 24 February 2019)

Trevor Paglen, Open Hangar; Cactus Flats, NV; Distance - 18 miles; 10:04am, 2007

Artes Mundi 8 is at the National Museum Cardiff, until 24 February 2019

Artes Mundi is a biennial art prize awarded to an international contemporary artist who directly engages with the human condition, social reality and lived experience and who explores contemporary social issues across the globe. It is the biggest art prize in the UK, awarding £40,000 to the winning artist - the winner will be announced on 24th January 2019.

The shortlist for Artes Mundi 8 (2018) is –

Anna Boghiguian (Canada/Egypt)
Bouchra Khalili (Morocco/France)
Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria/Belgium)
Trevor Paglen (USA)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand).

Previous winners have been –

2004 Xu Bing (China)

2006 Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Finland)

2008 N. S. Harsha (India)

2010 Yael Bartana (Israel)

2012 Teresa Margolles (Mexico)

2014 Theaster Gates (USA)

2016 John Akomfrah (UK)

Reviews
Veronica Simpson (Studio International)  
Jonathan Jones (The Guardian)
Cal Revely-Calder (The Telegraph) 

Anna Boghiguian (Canada/Egypt) was born in 1946 in Cairo, Egypt.

Anna Boghiguian, A meteor fell from the sky, 2018

Anna Boghiguian, A meteor fell from the sky, 2018

Boghiguian’s raw and expressionistic works combine painting, drawing, writing, collage, and sculpture to contemplate the past and present through intersections of economics, philosophy, literature, and myth. Since the 1970s, Boghiguian has travelled continuously, and her work has charted her impressions and observations of various societies, as well as her experiences of non-belonging as a foreigner and outsider. In Boghiguian’s work, the palimpsest of memory takes physical form as a rough accumulation that thickens the surface of her paintings with encaustic, pigment, steel, collage and non-specific debris.

For Artes Mundi she is showing a new monumental installation concerning the steel industry, moving past the faceless global industry and into the communities whose lives encompass it, including nearby Port Talbot, Wales.

Bouchra Khalili (Morocco/France) was born in 1975 in Casablanca, Morocco and lives and works in Berlin and Oslo.

Bouchra Khalili, Twenty-Two Hours, 2018

Working with film, video, installation, photography and prints, Khalili’s practice articulates language, subjectivity, orality, and geographical explorations. Each of her projects investigates strategies and discourses of resistance as elaborated, developed, and narrated by individuals, often members of political minorities. Many of her works suggest civic platforms, from which members of minorities perform their strategies of resistance to arbitrary power. Through her work, Khalili articulates subjectivity and collective history, questioning the complex relationships between the singular and civic belonging and calling for a new collective voice to come into being.

In a UK premiere for Artes Mundi 8, Twenty-Two Hours (2018) follows two young African-American women investigating how, in the 1970s, celebrated French writer Jean Genet was called to action by the Black Panther Party and travelled secretly to the US to support their struggle for racial equality.
  
Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria/Belgium) was born in 1974 in Kano, Nigeria and lives and works in Antwerp.

Otobong Nkanga, Double Plot, 2018, tapestry, detail

Otobong Nkanga, Double Plot, 2018, tapestry, detail.

Otobong Nkanga, Manifest of Strains, 2018 & Double Plot, 2018. Installation view.

Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs and sculptures variously examine ideas around land and the value connected to natural resources.

Nkanga’s interest in minerals has led the artist far and wide, studying the intense mining of the world’s natural resources since the rise of late capitalism. One of the primary means by which the artist’s interest manifests is through the body. In Nkanga’s works on paper and her tapestries, the body becomes a border implicated within the field of mining. Nkanga acts as a cultural anthropologist—tracing the violent means by which contested minerals and objects are exhumed from their natural environments, such as in Nigeria and Namibia—and considers how they are transported to the West. Through her work, the artist re-imagines our relationship to our everyday environment.

For Artes Mundi 8, Nkanga has produced an interactive, site-specific installation, Manifest of Strains (2018), that links the west’s everyday luxuries with the core elements and minerals they’re made from. Nkanga’s installation is mirrored by a 7-metre-long tapestry, Double Plot (2018), that literally weaves together our materialism with industrial exploitation and the detrimental environmental impact of mass industry on African communities.

Trevor Paglen (USA) was born in 1974 in Camp Springs, Maryland, and lives and works in Berlin.

Trevor Paglen, They Watch the Moon, 2010

Trevor Paglen, STSS-1 and Two Unidentified Spacecraft over Carson City (Space Tracking and Surveillance System; USA 205), 2010

His work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. His work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us.

For Artes Mundi 8, Paglen is presenting two ongoing series of seminal work. In the first, The Other Night Sky (2007 – ongoing), Paglen has spent the last eleven years working with a network of amateur astronomers to track the more than 200 classified military satellites that orbit the earth. He is also exhibiting works from his series Limit Telephotography (2005 – ongoing), documenting secret US government bases and operations, often from extreme distances.
  
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand) was born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1970 and lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Invisibility, 2016

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Invisibility, 2016

Working in the space between cinema and contemporary art, Apichatpong Weerasethakul creates installations and films that are often non-linear and convey a strong sense of dislocation and otherworldliness. Through the manipulation of time and light, Weerasethakul constructs tenuous bridges for the viewer to travel between the real and the mythical, the individual and the collective, the corporeal and the chimeric. Over the years, the majority of his projects have involved many of the same actors, which has allowed him to capture different phases of their lives and their experience of ageing. Frequently set in rural Thai villages and forests, his films traverse an extremely personal territory, inviting the viewer to enter the subjective world of memory, myth and deep yearning. By using unconventional narrative structures, expanding and constructing the sensation of time, and playing with ideas of veracity and linearity, Weerasethakul’s work sits comfortably in a world of his own making.

In Artes Mundi Weerasethakul is exhibiting his film Invisibility (2016). The film, shown across two screens, appear dreamlike and meditative, but reveal the ghosts of Thailand’s political past, and the dark underside of political corruption that continues today.