Alexander Brodsky accepts his award in front of members of the Jury

Tonight, Russia’s National Center for Contemporary Art celebrated the winners of its Innovation Prize, which is awarded in five categories: Work of Art; Theory, Criticism or Art History; Curatorial Project; Regional Project; and the New Generation Prize for emerging artists.

We already said a few words about the nominees, but we would like to take a moment and congratulate the Jury for making some unexpected decisions this year. Jury members included: NCCA curator Irina Gorlova; Moscow Biennale Commissar Joseph Backstein; Director of the Department of Contemporary Trends at the State Russian Museum, Alexander Borovsky;  Krasnoyarsk Biennale curator Sergey Kovalsky; Transmediale artistic director Kristoffer Gansing; and curator Marc-Olivier Wahler.

But enough with that. The winners:

Curatorial Project : Victor Misiano, Impossible Community

Regional Project : Enclave, Kaliningrad

Theory, Criticism or Art History : Andrey Fomenko

New Generation Prize : Taus Makhacheva

Best Work of Art : Alexander Brodsky 

The ceremony was held in Artplay, in the space that hosted the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. If the champagne pre-game weren’t enough, laureates were feted with human decorations, who were dancing/shivering to opera on the scaffolding outside.

A hearty congratulations to all!

Nominees for Work of Art include projects by Andrei Kuskin, who was recently featured in Performa’s 33 Fragments of Russian Performance, alongside other relative newcomers MishMash and Kuda Beguyut Sobaki (Where the Dogs Run) as well as Alexander Brodsky and Vitas Stasyunas.

Still from Olga Chernysheva, Trashmen, 2011, featured at Auditorium Moscow

No surprise, nominees for Curatorial Projects are plucked straight from the Moscow Biennale roster: Marina Zvyaginsteva and Yuriy Samodurov’s “South Butovo: Dormitory District”, Katya Degot and David Riff’s Auditorium Moscow: A Sketch for Public Space”, Olesya Turkina’s Necrorealism (whose catalogue is also nominated under the Theory, Criticism and Art History catagory) and Victor Misiano’s “Impossible Community.”  A pleasant addition is Andrei Smirnov’s “Generation Z”, which explores the sound experiments of the 1910-1930′s.

Taus Makhacheva, The Fast and the Furious, 2011

Of course, we always enjoy the New Generation nominees, particularly as we have had the pleasure of working with many of the artists, including Alexey Buldakov (nominated alongside Anastasya Ryabova for the clever video ATTENTIONWHORES) and Valery Shtak, nominated for his Bits of Truth project. Other nominees include Roman Mokrov, Alexander Gronsky, and Taus Makhacheva for her “The Fast and Furious” project, featured in the main project of the Moscow Biennale.

We congratulate all of the nominees and look forward to the exhibition!

Didier Courbot, Needs

Up until November 6th, you can still catch “Impossible Community” at the Gogolevsky branch of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

The show spun out of a two-year attempt of the group Escape to create their retrospective. They eventually recruited distinguished curator Victor Misiano to help them expand the exhibition from a solo show into an investigation of collaborative creativity and the extent to which art can affect society. The show hinges on the idea that the inherent “impossibility” of collaboration – the lack of central motivation and therefore the constant thwarting of goals – is exactly what gives it possibility.

The works range from Escape’s dissection of the collaborative process (a spreadsheet ranking the different members’ contributions to various projects) to direct interventions into the city like Pavel Althamer’s Unseen Hands (which had the artist and his students volunteering for municipal clean-up) and Didier Courbot’s Needs (for which the artist plants flowers in highway dividers or paints pedestrian crossing stripes onto corners, anticipating and answering a city’s “needs.”)

Documentation from Pawel Althamer, Unseen Hands, Moscow, 2011

Artists in the project include: Konstantin Adjer, Valeriy Ayzenberg, Pawel Althamer, Johanna Billing, Sonia Boyce, Vaast Colson, Didier Courbot, Honore d’O, Jeremy Deller, Alberto Garutti, Jens Haaning, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marcel van der Meijs, Ilya Budraitskis, IRWIN, Suchan Kinoshita, Jiri Kovanda, Yuri Leiderman, Andrei Silvestrov, Anton Litvin, Liza Morozova, Roman Ondak, Adrian Paci, Cesare Pietroiusti, ESCAPE Program, R. E. P., Shimabuku, SOSka, TanzLaboratorium, Moniek Toebosch, Jaan Toomik, Luca Vitone, Yevgeniy Fiks, Vadim Fishkin.

A three volume catalogue is forthcoming. For more information, check out Impossible Community’s official blog, with in-depth interviews and documentation of interventions.