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2024 Future Generation Art Prize Reveals Winners
By Annette Meier
Installation view of ASHFIKA RAHMAN’s Behula and a Thousand Tales, 2024, green cotton fabric, gold silk thread with metal frame, dimensions variable, at PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv. Photo by Oleksandr Piliugin. Courtesy PinchukArtCentre.
On October 29, the private PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, Ukraine, announced Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman as the winner of its seventh Future Generation Art Prize for her mixed-media installation Behula and a Thousand Tales (2024). Six additional artists were selected for the award’s Special Prize section, including Iraqi Kurdish artist and activist Tara Abdullah Mohammed Sharif; Mongolian sculptor Bekhbaatar Enkhtur; Palestinian visual artist Dina Mimi; Pakistani artist and filmmaker Hira Nabi; Indonesian printmaker Ipeh Nur; and Taiwanese animation artist Zhang Xu Zhan.
Rahman specializes in mixed-media installations which act as a visual archive of the marginalized identities in her native Bangladesh. Combining photography with text, drawing, sculpture, sound, and video in a research-based process, she documents the global paradigms of sociopolitical violence and oppression, focusing on healing fractured communities. Her winning work captures the heartfelt stories of South Asian women in the form of letters embroidered on green fabric, positioned underneath a curtain of gold threads.
The prize winners were selected out of 12,000 entries by a seven-person jury comprising Cecilia Alemani, curator of the 59th Venice Biennale in 2023; Björn Geldhof, artistic director of the PinchukArtCentre; Diane Lima, a São Paulo-based independent curator and writer; Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, director and chief curator of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt; and Alicia Knock, a curator at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, among others. In a press release, the jury stated that Rahman’s “brave” prize-winning installation “articulates stories that have been historically silenced,” adding that she “represents a future generation of artists that are committed to the ideals of community-building and repair.”
Established in 2009 by the private Victor Pinchuk Foundation, the Future Generation Art Prize is a biannual global contemporary art award that aims to discover, recognize, and offer long-term support to artists aged 35 or under. Rahman received a total of USD 100,000 in prize money (including a USD 60,000 cash prize and USD 40,000 to fund future art projects), while each Special Prize winner was awarded USD 20,000.
The PinchukArtCentre is hosting an exhibition with new and recent works by all 21 shortlisted artists for the prize, which will run until January 19, 2025.
Annette Meier is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.
