The National Museum Cardiff will be hosting one of the best modern art awards exhibition throughout the winter months with Artes Mundi 7. The international prize has been a regular feature at the museum since it started in 2003 and it’s been successful in its bid to identify, recognise and support contemporary visual artists from around the world.
Dates, times and tickets
The Artes Mundi 7 exhibition will be opening to the public on Friday the 21st October 2016, and will feature at the National Museum Cardiff until Sunday the 26th February 2017. Entrance is free as ever, so you don’t need to worry about expensive tickets, which have become the norm in London.
The Museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm, but galleries, including the ones in which Artes Mundi 7 will be featured, close at 4:45pm to give the Golden Tablet of Pharaoh Akhmenrah enough time to shake out a little fairy dust. However, this year, the exhibition will also be spilling over into the Chapter Arts Centre too, where entrance is again free, giving you twice the opportunity for a lovely day out during the winter months in Cardiff.
About the Artes Mundi 7 exhibition
The exhibition will feature the work of the participating shortlisted artists, which you can read more about below, bringing a wide range of work, artistic styles, origins, materials and medium to the Welsh capital. The idea behind the prize goes a little further than simple aesthetics though, as it focuses on artists who explore social issues and everyday life in recent years. In the past this has included a poster campaign for Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Respect Campaign, Fernando Bryce’s brilliant reproductions of historic printed material and Omer Fast’s disturbingly surreal video Continuity, which depicts the grim reality and effects of war.
Shortlisted artists
The shortlisted artists for Artes Mundi 7 are no less impressive, covering video, multimedia, performance art, spoken word and text:
Amy Franceschini and Futurefarmers (USA/Belgium)
Futurefarmers is a group of art and farming practitioners that work together to explore and challenge the status quo of public transportation, rural farming and food policies.
John Akomfrah OBE (UK)
Ghanaian-born British director, writer and theorist, John Akomfrah OBE produces films in a bid to highlight the impact of African migration in Europe to shed light on little-known and under valued histories of European society.
Neïl Beloufa (France/Algeria)
Neïl Beloufa uses video and multimedia to explore and parody the way that we interact socially, which has featured a wide array of subjects, ranging from aliens to nationalism and terrorism in modern day society.
Lamia Joreige (Lebanon)
Lebanese artist and filmmaker Lamia Joreige explores the trauma of war in her homeland of Lebanon and her home city, Beruit using film and archive documents to surface the links and differences between individual and collective memory.
Nástio Mosquito (Angola)
Nástio Mosquito is a multimedia, performance and spoken word artist who focuses on global and African politics, consumerisation and the concept of global wash.
Hito Steyerl (Germany/Japan)
Berlin-based Japanese artist and writer Hito Steyerl works in video to deliver his slices of feminism and the military in mass media.
Bedwyr Williams (UK/Wales)
Multimedia, performance and text are the media of choice for Welsh artist Bedwr Williams who pits the banal aspects of life against the more severely serious.
Read our review of Artes Mundi 6 for more info on what to expect. You can also visit our what’s on in Cardiff events guide for more from the Welsh capital.
