Annika Thiems, winner of the 2019 NEON Curatorial Award. Photo: Dan Weill.
The Whitechapel Gallery in London recently announced Annika Thiems as the winner of the 2019 NEON Curatorial Award.
The annual award, now in its eighth year, invites emerging curators to plan an exhibition around works from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection. The collection, amassed by the Athens-based financial services entrepreneur, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, holds over 500 contemporary artworks by 220 leading international and Greek artists. Many of the most significant names of the past 25 years of art history are represented, including Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, and Kiki Smith.
Proposals were submitted aspiring curators from Greece, as well as students and alumni from several London-based curation MA programs: Curating the Art Museum, Courtauld Institute of Art; Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art; and Curating, Goldsmiths College.
Daskalopoulo presented the award to Thiems at a ceremony held at the Whitechapel Gallery on December 13. Her proposed exhibition, entitled, “On Air, On Water,” takes the form a three-part radio broadcast, inspired by two understandings of the word “wave,” – wave as in a movement of water, and as in the waves of radio transmission.
“On Air, On Water” sees three artists from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection selected for a micro-residency – Rivane Neuenschwander, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, and Nadeem Din-Gabisi. Each artist would develop, record, and stream one episode for the series, to be broadcast live from Radio Athènes – a broadcaster of contemporary visual culture based in Greece’s capital.
The judges admired the proposal’s strong conceptual grounding, and how its innovative staging over an existing radio network would render Theim’s show accessible well beyond the four walls of a gallery.
The proposal takes Rivane Neuenschwander’s 2008 sculptural installation, “Continentals,” (2008) as an imaginative starting point. The work is comprised of an enormous metal basin filled with cloudy water, with an array of smaller, empty basins floating on top. Each basin is its own island and moves in response to the rippling “tides” of the larger basin. The work, like Theim’s exhibition, speaks to notions of a post-national world, where relationships between continents are in a state of permanent flux.
The judging panel for the 2019 NEON Curatorial Award was comprised of Adelaide Bannerman, Curator at Tiwani Contemporary and Producer for International Curators Forum, London; Galini Notti, independent curator (Athens, Greece); Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance) at Tate Modern; chaired by Dr. Nayia Yiakoumaki, Curator Archive Gallery, Head of Curatorial Studies and Project Manager of NEON Curatorial Exchange & Award.
Elina Kountouri, NEON’s Director commented, “The NEON Curatorial Award encourages a younger generation of curators to submit ideas that explore the boundaries of the discipline and propose innovative exhibition formats. Annika Thiems’ well-deserved winning proposal inspires a thoughtful and original way of experiencing art, whilst integrating Radio Athènes, an important Greek cultural organization.”
With a background in Psychology, Thiems is a recent graduate from the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths College. She works across independent publishing, live events, and public programming, and is part of Zak Group, a London-based design and publishing studio that regularly collaborates with established artists on books, limited editions, and exhibitions.
The NEON Curatorial Award was established in 2012 to boost the early careers of those working with the display of art. It aims to connect emerging curators in London and Greece and to promote the exchange of ideas regarding contemporary art and its presentation.
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