The Abraaj Capital Art Prize rewards unique partnerships between artists and museums. Ed Lake on the 2010 winners "It's like winning a gold medal without running," said the Lebanese painter Marwan Sahmarani on Sunday. For him, the race is still to come. He is one of the three artists to receive the 2010 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, the most generous art award in the world. His fellow recipients, announced to leading figures in the UAE art world at a ceremonial iftar at the DIFC, are the Egyptian photo artist Hala Elkoussy and the Algerian sculptor Kader Attia. Each artist now gets roughly Dh750,000 to produce his or her most ambitious work to date, in time for a grand unveiling at Art Dubai in March.
The hope, as Abraaj's executive director Frederic Sicre explained, is that they will "produce pieces of work that reflect the cultural diversity of our region and that can be used internationally as ambassadors of this part of the world". The plan seems to be working. The fruits of last year's prize - a film by Kutlug Ataman, a rug by Nazgol Ansarinia and a mirrored, star-emblazoned pagoda by Zoulikha Bouabdellah - are about to be exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design in New York.
Size isn't the only unusual feature of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize. It also has an unconventional format: it's essentially a reward for a successful tender. A curator must nominate an artist from within the Menasa region (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) who then pitches a projected artwork, ideally one that would require a giant budget as supplied by the private equity firm Abraaj Capital. One might have expected that the worldly, entrepreneurial curators would lead the charge under this arrangement, but apparently that hasn't been the case.
"If you talk to all of the recipients this year, it was the artist in each case that proposed the project to the curator," said Laurie Ann Farrell, the curator at the Savannah College of Art and Design and sponsor of Attia. "In this day with the internet, artists are so savvy. I think that all of the artists from this region are really plugged in to watching Art Dubai develop." Elkoussy was enthusiastic about the way the prize altered the working relationship between artist and curator. "A lot of the time you get the curator involved with the artwork after it's finished," she said. "Sometimes a curator is able to commission work but the scale of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize is quite unique in that sense."
Still, her sponsor, Jelle Bouwhuis of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, was modest about his contribution. "Basically, most of the work will be done by her," he said. None of the new crop of artist-curator partnerships were giving much away about their plans for the prize money. Elkoussy revealed only that her project would be "deeply rooted within the contemporary visual culture of Cairo" and would consider "how such a diverse culture that is sitting at the cusp of a lot of change is dealing with the process of writing its history". Cryptic as this sounds, work is well advanced on the finished product. Elkoussy and Bouwhuis were told about their victory several weeks ago. "We had to keep it a secret," said Bouwhuis, straight-faced. "My mother doesn't know," added Elkoussy.
Sahmarani was even more inscrutable about his plans. "We have an idea. A vague idea," he said. "It's a painting installation." It may have been intrinsically impossible to say what the finished object would be like. "Painting always changes during work," he said. "You never know where to go in the painting. You begin with something, you end up with something completely different." One wonders what he can have said to the prize committee. Perhaps they felt his existing body of ghostly, aqueous figurative canvases spoke for itself. Still, would he be able to burn through $200,000 when performing his prize commission?
"Everybody asks me this question!" he said. "You know what? On the contemporary art scene - I'm not saying in the Middle East - but in the contemporary art world, $200,000 is nothing. Matthew Barney [the American video artist behind the Cremaster cycle] did a whole project and I'm sure it's more than $200,000, so $200,000 could easily be used. It depends if I want to, but my aim is to go full on the project."
Attia preserved his aura of mystery by not attending the prize announcement at all. Nevertheless, Farrell, his curator, promised a "truly experiential installation" that will deal with architecture and memory with "a little bit of a political twist. He's so steeped in theory and poetry and aesthetics and looking at the history and modernism as it's unfolded in North Africa. I think you're in for a bit of a surprise".
The three finished artworks will be presented at the 2010 Art Dubai art fair in March.