Mozambique: Mia Couto an optimist without hope - interview
Notícias (File) / Mozambican visual artist Félix Mula ahs just been nominated for the Novo Banco Photo award
Mozambican photographer Felix Mula is one of the finalists in the 2016 Novo Banco photographic competition for contemporary video and photographic artists from the Portuguese-speaking world.
Mula is competing against Angolan Mónica de Miranda and Paulina Pimentel from Portugal for the 40,000 euro award.
The three artists were chosen by a jury composed by Mozambican artist Pompilio Hilário Gemuce, the Portuguese curator David Santos and Angolan architect and curator Paula Nascimento.
Son to a Mapto studio photographer, Mula was nominated for his 2014 Maputo exhibition “Processes”.
“His photographs, with an almost complete absence of human figures, are always hiding something at the same time as revealing the attitudes and the nature of the human being. Although photography was Félix Mula’s primary genre, his creative consistency is also revealed in his provocative installations,” the jury writes.
In the jury’s opinion, Mónica de Miranda is “an artist whose work crosses several borders and outlines a landscape of plural identities, inspired by her own experience of an increasingly itinerant culture”.
In “Hotel Globo”, an exhibition held in 2015 at the Portuguese National Museum of Contemporary Art, Miranda explored the appropriation of colonial architecture – a hotel in Luanda – for new modes of occupation and use, raising questions about memory and the impact of colonial spaces in comtemporary experience.
Pauliana Pimentel was nominated for her exhibition “The Behaviour of Being” in the Lisbon Galeria das Salgadeiras, which “has a core of great narrative images, based on a strong aesthetic and formal consistency”.
Explaining their choice, the jury writes: “This exhibition confirms the maturity of an artist who, in recent years, has brought work of subtle narrative, marked not only by the ambiguity of meaning, such as a particular and profound attention to the human figure in its landscape and social involvement.”
The selected artists will present exhibitions of new work at the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon from May 18. The prize will be awarded in June at a date to be announced.
Another born in Mozambique artist, Angela Ferreira, won the Novo Banco Photo prize in 2015.
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