Francois Knoetze Wins SeMA-HANA Media Art Award

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The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) this week announced South African artist Francois Knoetze the winner of the 2023 SeMA-HANA Media Art Award.

The award was presented at the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, THIS TOO, IS A MAP.

Knoetze’s winning work, Core Dump (2018-2019), is an installation comprising towers of e-waste—circuit boards, wires, plastic housing, and so on—and videos pieced together from found footage, performance documentation, and recorded interviews.

On his website, Knoetze says the project ‘explores the relationship between digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism and the reenchanted notion of a Non-Aligned Humanist Utopia.’

‘Knoetze’s work explores multiple layers of the historical, economic, cultural, and political backgrounds of contemporary technological infrastructures, which collectively resonate with the aesthetics of this Biennale’s non-territorial mapping,’ said prize jury chair and Kookmin University professor Hee-young Kim.

Eunju Choi, juror and General Director of SeMA, said, ‘The e-waste reused in the work’s installation provokes not only the issues of extraction and advanced capitalism but also the inter-relationships and responsibilities of each entity living in this world, thereby fundamentally revealing the uncertainty of our lives.’

Knoetze’s work has been exhibited at events and institutions including the Dakar Biennale, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Past recipients of the SeMA-Hana Media Art Award include Hao Jingban and Eisa Jocson (2021), Kearn-Hyung Ahn (2018), Korakrit Arunanondchai and Christine Sun Kim (2016), and Eric Baudelaire (2014). —[O]

Main image: Francois Knoetze, Core Dump (Kinshasa, 2018). Video still. Courtesy the artist and SeMA.