Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil Announces 2023 Prize Winners
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The organisers of the Biennial's 22nd edition have announced nine prize winners selected by a jury of international artists and curators.

Nine prize winners have been named following the opening of the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil on 18 October at Sesc 24 de Maio in São Paulo.

The guiding theme of this year's edition, which features artists from the Global South and reflects on the Biennial's evolution, is 'Memory is an Editing Station'.

The prize winners were chosen by an international jury comprising Adrienne Edwards, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Argentine artist and curator Gabriela Golder; artist and 2023 MacArthur Fellow María Magdalena Campos-Pons; Patrick Flores, deputy director at National Gallery Singapore; and filmmaker and curator Vivian Ostrovsky.

'The works in the Biennale express and demonstrate the diversity of forms, the courage of artists to speak to the complexity of the issues they confront, and to face the difficult concerns of society like migration, ecology, oppression, colonisation,' said Edwards on behalf of the jury.

'We strongly support the articulation of materials and the dialogue between them, from ritual objects to digital technology,' she said.

The Sesc Art Prize, which is exclusively for Brazilian artists, was awarded to two artists: Froiid, for their AI-driven sonic installation that produces infinite remixes of rap verses and beats, and Leila Danzinger, for the work O que desaparece, o que resiste (2023), pictured top, which comprises an installation of subtly erased newspapers. Both were acquired for the Sesc Brazilian Art Collection.

Vitória Cribb won the Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Residency Prize, which includes funding of U.S. $10,000 and access to post-production facilities and equipment at the University of Ohio for the completion of an audiovisual work.

Cribb thanked the Biennial's artistic director, Solange Farkas, its curators Raphael Fonseca and Renée Akitelek Mboya, and everyone else who followed her work, which she said 'hasn't been easy.'

The Centro Cultural Do Cariri Residency Prize, which allows a Latin-American artist to live and work in Crato, Ceará, Brazil, for two months was won by PIPA prize nominee Janaina Wagner.

Wagner's practice, which spans film, photography, and installation, explores the systems of order, control, and containment that humans impose on the world.

The Instituto Sacatar Residency Prize allows an artist based in Brazil to spend two months at Instituto Sacatar, which is located in Itaparica, Bahia, the historic port of arrival for over a third of all enslaved Africans shipped to the country.

It was won by Haitian artist Maksaens Denis for his collaborative multi-channel video work Mes revês / My dreams (2021), that explores life in Haiti in relation to protest, spirituality, and the LGBTQIA+ community through the lens of music, rhythm, and dance.

The R$35,000 (U.S. $7,000) O.F.F. Prize is awarded by the American Ostrovsky Family Fund to an artist with no restrictions on nationality.

The prize was awarded to filmmaker and installation artist Bo Wang, whose practice analyses structures of power, economy, and ideology in the context of China and wider Asia.

The jury prize went to Nolan Oswald Dennis for his diagrammatic installation A recurse for three oceans (2023). Honourable mentions were given to Colombian mural artist Gabriela Pinilla and Iraqi artist collective Sada [regroup].

Each prize recipient was awarded a trophy designed by Brazilian artist Denilson Baniwa, who took inspiration from an indigenous fish trap.

The jury commended the Biennial's curators 'for creating conditions for an interdisciplinary context of the works in relation to the sócio-economic environment in the world.'

'In these times of relentless crisis, VB has continued to be a space for imagination, resistance, and propositions for the future coming out of multiple and continuing wars,' they said. —[O]