A collaboration between the Norval Foundation and the Sovereign Art Foundation, this prize aims to promote artists from the continent and the Arab diaspora internationally.
The shortlisted artists will be exhibited in Cape Town from 25 January to 20 March 2023 and their works will be auctioned by Sotheby's (25 January - 1 February) to benefit the artists and the educational activities of the Norval Foundation.
The public is also invited to vote: the artist with the most votes will be awarded the Public Prize. The winner of the Grand Prize will be announced on 25 January.
Huda Lutfi (b. 1947, Egypt) is a historian and artist who works in a wide range of media, including collage, assemblage, painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. She is interested in the physicality of materials as well as the symbolic associations imbued in them. By recycling, re-appropriating and re-imagining objects outside their original context, Lutfi subverts the political, cultural and economic systems that produce meaning. Her frequent use of feminised objects such as dolls, thread, mannequins and magazine clippings reflects her artistic and academic interest in constructions of masculinity and femininity. The selected work is "Entropy", made in 2021, a hand-embroidered piece that evokes female craft traditions.
Saïd Afifi (born 1983, Morocco) is an artist who lives and works in Morocco. He takes an experimental approach to drawings on paper, using lead or graphite to crop or re-install digital data. The use of simple pencils containing lead is far from trivial. Unlike charcoal, which comes from plants, lead comes from rock, which itself originated in the explosion of stars. As such, Afifi's work is concerned with notions of time, while also addressing issues of the natural landscape, biomimicry and the impact of new technologies in observing the world. The selected work is entitled "Geomorphology of an Exo Landscape: Survey 32", produced in 2021. It is an image inspired by a satellite view of the earth, reconfigured by the artist's eye.
For more information: https://bit.ly/3iTw5Mo
Photo: "Geomorphology of an exo-landscape: Survey 32", Saïd Afifi, 2021, graphite on paper.