Angelika Markul, photo courtesy of SAM Art Projects
The 20,000 euro prize will help produce Markul’s new project, Bambi in Tchernobyl. This disqueting video installation is to be exhibited at Parisian Palais de Tokyo in 2013
The SAM Art Projects award takes its name from the art-patron couple Sandra and Amaury Mulliez. The Mulliez couple have supported creative work by artists who reside in France, and whose projects take up the theme of developing countries, since 2009. The awards jury includes renowned art critics and curators, among them Jean de Loisa, the president of Palais de Tokyo.
Along with the 35-year-old Markul, other nominees in 2012 included Louigi Beltrame (born in 1971), Clement Cogitore (1983), Camille Henrot (1978), Adrien Missika (1981) and Charwei Tsai (1980).
"The choice of Angelika Markul was very clear", Mrs. Sandra Mulliez said during the award ceremony. "Apart from the quality of the project, we also considered the artist’s latest achievements, such as the exhibition at Suzanne Tarasieve Gallery which we truly admired."
Bambi in Tchernobyl is a video-art project in development, to be set in the so-called Zona of Chernobyl, a closed area around the disabled nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. Markul, whose work is often inhabited by imagined species of fauna and flora, plans to film the wilderness of animal and plant life that has proliferated in the Zona of Chernobyl since the nuclear catastrophe there in 1986. Nature has regenerated and sprung back to life, free of human intervention. The artist herself revelead upon receiving the award:
"The film is going to be a dialogue with memory, with time, with the dying of things and their rebirth", the artist said upon receiving the SAM award. "I want to convey this terrifying suspense in time and space that the Tchernobyl area constitutes - with its deserted apartment blocks, with the wild fauna and all that is hiding there in the contaminated soil."
Markul plans to film the project in winter 2013, and she will bring objects from the Zona to be be displayed in glass cases during the video installation. The project borrows its title from Bambi, the classic 1942 Disney animation. Markul is planning to employ fragments of that soundtrack in the film: "I want to surprise the viewer, hence the idea of using this music and creating this title. The music is seemingly light, but also disquieting, just like these streches of land which has been left to itself."
Angelika Markul was born in Szczecin in 1977. She graduated from the Multimedia Department of the Parisian Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied in the studio of Christian Boltanski. She currently lives in Malakoff. Markul has presented her work at numerous exhibitions across Europe, including the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Mal/Vac near Paris and the Centre for Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Toruń, Poland. She addresses the theme of memory in her work, as it is inscribed in bodies and in places, and re-creates hidded life cycles. Markul uses the medium of video art and installation, employing simple materials such as black foil, wood and wax.
"The work of Angelika is authentic and strongly charged with emotions that cannot leave the viewer indifferent", said gallerist Suzanne Tarasieve on discovering the artist's work. "I fell in love with her work at the Biennale in Łódź in 2010. I didn’t know her then, and although I seldom present artist who create installations, I knew I had to change that policy when it came to Angelika."
The Tarasieve Gallery on rue Pastourelle, located in Paris' 3rd arrondisement, is currently hosting an exhibition of Markul’s newest work. Among those pieces is Polowanie / The Hunt, which was previously shown at the Galeria Arsenał in Białystok.
Apart from the presentation at Palais de Tokyo, Angelika Markul is scheduled to have an individual exhibition at the French Chamarande Castle in March 2013 and another show at the Museum of Art in Łódź in the fall. She is also to take part in the New York Performa Biennale.
Editor: SRS
Source: press release