Eye Art & Film Prize

In 2024, Chia-Wei Hsu won the tenth Eye Art & Film Prize. Previous winners of the prestigious prize were Hito Steyerl (2015), Ben Rivers (2016), Wang Bing (2017), Francis Alÿs (2018), Meriem Bennani (2019), Kahlil Joseph (2020), Karrabing Film Collective (2021), Saodat Ismailova (2022) and Garrett Bradley (2023).

As images increasingly shape the way we experience reality, and it is impossible to imagine contemporary art without film and video, Eye launched in 2015 a prize for visual work at the intersection of art and film. The prize is awarded to an individual who has made various works of high quality and is compiling an exceptional body of work that demonstrates a distinct vision of film art and/or visual culture. The prize consists of a sum of 30,000 euros and is intended for making new work.

Bregtje van der Haak, director of Eye Filmmuseum:

“Moving images surround and pursue us everywhere, not only online but also in the physical world. Every hour, some 30,000 new videos are uploaded onto YouTube by users around the world. The TikTok video platform has succeeded in attracting a billion active users and has also penetrated Eye. In recent months, long lines of visitors come to the museum just to record a video, which they then print as an analogue ‘flipbook’ before filming the resulting video and posting it on TikTok. While they are merely examples of dogs trying to catch their tails, the flow of images is constantly increasing, and words are losing ground to images. Blanketing our material landscape, a patchwork of data centres store all these moving images and their data trails. Undersea cables connect the continents and transport that data in nanoseconds, because the fastest wins. The battle for chips, vital for digital acceleration, leads to new geopolitical conflicts, but also new alliances.

Though all this may seem to have nothing to do with art and film, it is the world in which we now make films. What, therefore, is the meaning of cinema and the status of film imagery in art? After all, it is cinematography that has taught us to look at images, that has given us the language of film and film criticism, and that can now offer us knowledge and inspiration to make images complex, meaningful and subversive in this overwhelming context. That is not easy because – precisely in an era of unlimited digital reproducibility – this is also a world in which all images vie for our attention and tricks are devised to ‘mint’ their uniqueness, and thus to ensure their exploitation as speculative ‘commodities’.

How can works of art and cinematic images prove their value and expressiveness outside the parameters of the all-consuming market? Is there life beyond the white cube and the black box?

We cannot isolate ourselves in the ivory towers of the museum world and pretend that this data world does not exist. It is time to think about where we are and to open up film history, wider and deeper, to ‘mine’ and excavate it, in search of meaning for the future. With the Eye Art & Film Prize, we want to stimulate new work by artists operating at the intersection of film and art and, in the process, drive the international discussion about all these questions.”

Prize set-up

The international advisory board nominates artists and filmmakers for the Eye Art & Film Prize. Each year an international jury made up of influential figures from the world of art and film selects a winner. In addition to the prize money that the winner receives, Eye organises an exhibition of their work. That can be either a group or a solo exhibition.

Eye devotes a lot of attention to the intersection of art and film in its programming. Exhibitions, film programmes, events, lectures and symposia spotlight both historical and contemporary developments.

Historical perspective

Film, probably the most dynamic of all arts, only emerged towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1920s, artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel and Hans Richter began to view the medium of film as a source of new artistic potential and employed it to create art. Film subsequently faded into the background in the art world, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that ‘pure cinema’ started to play an important role again within the same world, with artists such as Andy Warhol, Anthony McCall and Michael Snow giving film a museum status.

Midway through the 1990s, film made a definitive breakthrough in the world of visual art. Exploiting the digital revolution, the affordable video projector, new portable cameras and other progressive techniques, a new generation of artists saw film and the moving image as the ultimate means of expression of the day. Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen, Fiona Tan, Isaac Julien, Aernout Mik, Pipilotti Rist and many other artists turned the white cube of the museum into a black box.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the landscape of the moving image broadened even further. A growing group of filmmakers liberated themselves from the cinema space and discovered the possibilities of the three-dimensional exhibition gallery. They made big, exuberant installations on multiple screens, but also small, intimate presentations on a single screen, or they used LCD monitors as part of multimedia installations, thereby demonstrating that the crossover between Art and Film had reached maturity.

Support

Starting in 2023, the Eye Art & Film Prize has been supported by Ammodo. From 2015 to 2022, the prize was a collaboration with the Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor Arts Fund. Ammodo stimulates the development of arts, architecture and science. Artists, scientists and architects make an important contribution to innovation within society. They make connections, offer insights, push boundaries and increase understanding. Their work enables us to look at the world in a different way. Ammodo supports pioneering art projects, initiatives in social and ecological architecture, and high-quality scientific research. Ammodo also produces documentaries to give greater visibility to pioneers in these fields.