In the foreground, silhouettes made from laser cutting and engraving on X-ray hang from the ceiling; a person looks through them towards the camera. Behind the person, four brightly coloured framed photographs on the wall.

Aesthetica Art Prize 2024

Installation view of the Aesthetica Art Prize Exhibition, York Art Gallery, 2024. In front 'La Chute' (2021) by Brigitte Amarger. In the background 'Genetic Bomb' (2022) by Kriss Munsya. Image: Charlotte Graham.

Behind its neoclassical façade, York Art Gallery has for a long time been an active patron of contemporary art. In recent years it has platformed artists as various as Grayson Perry, Ugonna Hosten, Jade Blood, Michael Lyons, Ordinary Architecture, Magdalene Odundo and Jade Montserrat. Since 2017, its spaces have also been the designated venue for the annual Aesthetica Art Prize exhibition, one that has frequently attracted public attention for its production line of famous alumni, including Emmanuelle Moreaux, Liz West and Tania Franco Klein. The prize is awarded by Aesthetica Magazine, a local contemporary arts magazine founded by Cherie Federico in 2002. Its contributions continue to animate the cultural fabric of York by generating debate, engaging with local creative industries and developing independent artistic talents.

This year’s exhibition showcases work by twenty-one artists shortlisted from over 250. In the introductory wall text, Federico, curator of the exhibition with support from Griselda Goldsborough and Kit Monkman, describes art as a ‘powerful agent for change.’ Indeed, by their own unique methods, each work in the exhibition seeks to explore the potential for creativity as a tool to drive societal change, to prompt further thinking and self-reflection, as well as, perhaps, to inspire action. A variety of topics such as ecological crises, racial justice and queer identities are addressed.

Entering the exhibition, the work that immediately captures my attention is a cascading sculpture, its movements mimicking those of a wind chime. Titled ‘La Chute(2021), Brigitte Amarger’s sculpture is made from discarded materials, most intriguingly x-rays, and is filled with cut-outs of little figures falling into the unknown. The fragility of her chosen materials reflects the fraught relationship between the human body and deteriorating environment. The tight-knit, animated texture of this work as well as a demand for close attention is also found in an adjacent work in the same room, Caroline Jane Harris’s ‘A Stopped World’ (2020), made of sixteen stills taken from videos of volcanic eruptions. Each image is layered with another photograph, featuring intricately hand-cut pixelations obscuring the view of the original. By challenging our ways of seeing, Harris’s pixelated images address the problem of perpetual distractions in the digital age, particularly from disastrous matters.

A person looks at sixteen images of clouds on a gallery wall.
Installation view of the Aesthetica Art Prize Exhibition, York Art Gallery, 2024. Caroline Jane Harris, ‘A Stopped World’ (2020). Image: Charlotte Graham.

In the other room, Cinzia Campolese’s ‘Could You Take a Picture’ (2022) echoes this concern about our addiction to technology. By requiring the visitor to approach each neon screen and view the work through their phone cameras, Campolese exposes the extent to which we rely on digital realms. Similarly interactive, Mo H. Zareei’s ‘Material Sequencer’ (2021) explores the materiality of sounds. Visitors are encouraged to place blocks of different materials into a USB-powered step-sequencer to produce different rhythmic sounds. With the first room filled mostly with film works and works that demand the exertion of the eye, Campolese and Zareei’s works in the second room break the monotony of viewing and invite the visitors to interact using their hands and devices to grasp the message. They are certainly the highlights for many: during my visit, little queues of visitors had formed around these two works.

Moving image is one of the dominant mediums in the exhibition. The winners of the Main Prize and Emerging Artist Prize both used the medium for their thought-provoking narratives. ‘The Mechanics of Fluids’ (2022), by Emerging Artist Prize winner Gala Hernández López, uses the suicide letter of an incel (involuntary celibate) as her starting point to spark a discourse on incel culture, their isolation and the virtual shelters in which they dwell. Rather than assuming the usual derogatory standpoint taken against incels, Hernández López’s film starts out as empathetic, before the artist ultimately realises that she, as a woman, is the enemy. Main Prize winner Maryam Tafakory’s ‘Nazarbazi’ (2022) shows how forbidden physical contact between bodies intensifies other forms of human interaction. Collaged from films of post-revolution Iranian cinema and interlaced with lines written by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Forugh Farrokhzad, Ahmad Shamlu, Syrian poet Adonis and Tafakory herself, ‘Nazarbazi’ is a beautifully composed found-footage film that illustrates how Iranian filmmakers utilised the almost, nearly and not-quite to circumvent prohibitive codes around intimacy: bodies in proximity but never touching, the playful exchange of gazes which lend the film its title, and materials as surrogates for touch. Beyond the merely cinematic, ‘Nazarbazi’ is a powerful visual essay that makes us rethink the autonomy of artmaking under state violence. What makes both films outstanding is the level of investigation, with Tafakory weaving together nearly ninety films and Hernández López trawling through the deepest, darkest parts of the internet for her documentary.

Photography is also featured heavily. Kriss Munsya’s colourful series, ‘Genetic Bomb’ (2022), uses oversaturation and playful set designs to draw attention to the disparities between the mirage of an idyllic life and the lived experience of immigrants. Margeaux Walter’s ‘Don’t Be a Square’ (2023), JeeYoung Lee’s ‘Stage of Mind’ (2007–ongoing) and Thomas Jenkins’s ‘Chasing Colour’ (2022) continue this explosion of colour in their works, addressing themes of human disruption of natural landscapes and the photographic medium itself. The often destructive relationship between humanity and nature is apparent as a crucial concern in this exhibition, seen especially in the photographs of Alexej Sachov’s ‘Chronicles of an Emerging Diversity’ (2023) and Yevchen Samuchenko’s ‘At the Pink Planet’ (2019–2020).

Four people in colourful clothing sit amongst colourful furniture on bright green grass on a sunny day.
Kriss Munsya, ‘Dysfunctional Intentions’ (2022) from series ‘Genetic Bomb’ (2022). Image courtesy of Aesthetica and York Art Gallery.

All twenty-one works are arranged across two large rooms. Tafakory’s winning film is placed towards the end of the exhibition in the second room. It is not indicated in wall texts or order of arrangement that Tafakory and Hernández López’s films are the prize winners. This is slightly peculiar considering the exhibition is the culmination of what is essentially a competition. This concealment, however, may be a good thing. Each work has something important to convey, winner or not, and visitors are encouraged to engage with impartiality, not clouded by pre-informed biases.

While this is an awards-based exhibition, a larger effort to construct continuities that are apparent to the average visitor might make the radical ways in which these works confront worldly issues more strongly felt. Such continuities do not have to be so literal as to group them by technique or topic, but might explain further why these works were chosen over others. Each wall text includes a short biography of the artist and a rationale of the work, but a few notes from the jury could, in my opinion, further enrich the viewing experience and result in a more thought-provoking exhibition.

If Aesthetica’s objectives are to foster dialogues between artists and visitors about contemporary problems and introduce emerging global talents, then the exhibition succeeds. Each work is afforded its own analysis and space for thoughtful engagement. York may only be a stopping-off point in many of these artists’ international career trajectories, but Aesthetica’s dedication to amplifying the important messages they carry, while invigorating the city’s art scene, will not go unappreciated.

Aesthetica Art Prize 2024 is on at York Art Gallery, 16 February 2024–21 April 2024.    

Alyson Lai is completing a PhD in History of Art at York.

This review is supported by York Art Gallery.

Published 22.03.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews

1,225 words