Allegro Prize 2022 – the results of the international competition for visual artists are in!

06.12.2022

Another edition of Allegro Prize has come to an end. Like every year, the goal of the competition was to support and promote visual artists from all over the world. It is also an important platform for discovering new talents and showcasing their works internationally among art lovers.

1,831 artists from 92 countries entered Allegro Prize 2022. The jury composed of Joanna Kamm, Ksenia Malykh, the art collective Slavs and Tatars, Anja Rubik, Dorian Batycka, Dobromiła Błaszczyk, Sylwia Krasoń and Karolina Miszczak awarded 3 main prizes of PLN 25,000 each, as well as 12 honourable mentions. This year’s edition also included a PLN 5,000 Audience Choice Award.

The main prizes were awarded to the following artists and art collectives: Daniil Revkovskiy & Andriy Rachinskiy (collective), Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė (collective) and Zuzanna Czebatul. The Audience Choice Award went to Yuriy Biley. This year, the jury also gave honourable mentions to 12 artists, whose works will be published in Contemporary Lynx Magazine. These are Akwasi Afrane, Alexia Venot, Alicja Rogalska, Andreea Anghel, Beatrice Schuett Moumdijan, Filipka Rutkowska, Monika Czyżyk, Rexy Tseng, SAGG Napoli, Veronika Cherednychenko & Yana Kononova and Yuriy Biley.

About the winners:

Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy

Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy are artists from Kharkiv, who fuse different artistic practices (installation art, video, archives), studying the contexts and landscapes of industrial regions of Ukraine. They graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. In 2010, they created the public page “Pamjat” (Memory) on the social network Vkontakte to research collective memory in the post-Soviet area. They received awards in competitions held by PinchukArtCentre in 2018, 2020 and 2022. In 2020, they won the PinchukArtCentre public choice award for their “Hooligans” project.

We are very happy to have participated in the Allegro Prize and won. For us, it is a very important award and recognition for our long work together. These are very difficult times for us and all Ukrainians, due to the Russian aggression. But we don’t stop working and doing new art projects. Your support will allow us to continue with it. This prize will help us to implement new projects that will present Ukraine to the world. Thank you very much!

Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy

Commentary on the jury's verdict of Allegro Prize: Revkovskiy and Rachinskiy for many years have been observing and documenting their homeland — Ukraine with an eye on the political, giving a strong voice to a highly significant collective memory of a country traumatised by the war. By doing so, they are fusing different formats of artistic practices (installations, video, reenactment, archives), researching the contexts and landscapes of the industrial regions of their country. Artists process a large amount of information, creating new archives in the concept of Hal Foster's “archival impulse” and pulling unpopular topics and unnoticed historical and social processes to the surface of public thought.

Dorota Gawęda i Eglė Kulbokaitė

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are an artistic duo living and working in Basel. Both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. Their joint work spans performance, sculpture, photography, painting and video. They founded the YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–2021). They have exhibited internationally, including at Kunstraum Niederosterreich, Vienna (2022); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022), and Kunstverein Hamburg (2021). They were awarded the CERN Collide Residency 2022 and the Swiss Performance Art Award 2021.

We were very happy to find out we were awarded the Prize amongst many great submissions. We are honoured and humbled, and it means a lot to have our practice acknowledged by a professional jury composed of cultural workers we admire so much. We are very grateful to the jury and also to the many collaborators we have been developing our work with throughout the years. We hope the Prize will contribute to the visibility of our practice internationally and, what is particularly important to us, within the Polish art context as well. Beyond the immediate exposure given by the prize, we look forward to presenting our work within the Contemporary Lynx feature. Financial support is very important, especially in the case of research-driven collaborative practices, and will help us sustain our way of working.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

Commentary on the jury's verdict of Allegro Prize: Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s processual works span performance, sculpture, photography, painting, and video. Their works reference Baltic-Slavic folklore, traditional Lithuanian folk songs, and literature mixed with ecofeminist criticism and anxieties related to ecological and social unease showing our contemporary angst. Real (past and current), dreamt and legendary fears mutate and take on new shapes in the present times — they create new horror narratives that map out our future coexistence. Their collaborative work impressively reflects our time, in which certainty is a matter of the past.

Zuzanna Czebatul

Zuzanna Czebatul graduated in art from Städelschule in Frankfurt am Mein and later attended an MFA programme at Hunter College in New York as a Fulbright Fellow. She has had numerous international individual exhibitions, including at Kunstpalais Erlangen (2021), CAC Synagogue in Delme (2020), Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA Prague (2019) and MINI/Goethe Institute Ludlow 38, New York (2015). Her works have been displayed at joint exhibitions such as Baltic Triennial in Vilnius (2021), Athens Biennale (2021), Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen (2021) and many others. She is currently on a scholarship at Hessische Kulturstiftung in New York.

I am honoured and encouraged, especially since art feels arbitrary to some extent.Since I was born in Poland, my work relates to the country’s history and current state. So I am happy to present my work to a broader Polish audience.

Zuzanna Czebatul

Commentary on the jury's verdict of Allegro Prize: Zuzanna Czebatul in her works often addresses power structures, ideologies and politics in which she exposes fluidity or flexibility. She uses her own body as a trigger for an erotic fantasy of power. Her installations often appear in turns collapsed, destroyed, deflated, or fragmented, and question concepts such as monuments, public edifice and symbolic architecture — they are anti-monuments for an ideology-free society. She breaks through boundaries and systems of domination with mostly monumental installations that give space to important queer feminine perspectives in an often literally oversized way.

For more information about Allegro Prize and this year’s winners, visit https://allegroprize.pl/.

To see the results, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk0uzrDSHeo