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Mumbai’s Collaborative Studio Wins 2020 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize
By Emika Suzuki
Installation view of CAMP’s In Cameras Res, 2019, three-channel city choreography with automated 4k CCTV cameras,
Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP was announced the winner of the 7th Nam June Paik Art Center Prize on October 13. The group will receive a cash award of KRW 50 million (USD 43,630) following a digital ceremony on November 20, while their solo exhibition at the Center in Seoul will be held in 2021.
Founded in 2007 by artists Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, and Sanjay Bhangar, CAMP connects and interacts with independent art and media groups to produce short- and long-term projects such as film, video, electronic media, and public art in their examination of topics relating to media, its history, and methods of distribution. The group was lauded for its commitment to the idea of art as a collaborative, social sphere of questioning. Jury chairperson Dieter Daniels, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, said that the jury was unanimously drawn to the group as it “develop[s] low-threshold participatory concepts in a wide range of ‘media,’” as well as to its “interventions in the public domain [which] allow for open access,” mounting resistance against “the power of globalized capital.”
CAMP's recent works include the video A Passage through Passages (2020), which explores newly rebuilt roads in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and India via an endoscopic view that portrays society’s ugliness and vulnerability, and three-channel video installation In Cameras Res (2019), which depicts scenes of Amsterdam captured via CCTV’s to highlight issues of surveillance and privacy.
The annual Nam June Paik Art Center Prize was established in 2009 to recognize artists and theorists whose works are in tune with the late artist Nam June Paik’s practice, which combines art and technology to explore new ways of communicating and interacting with viewers. The other members of this year’s jury included Beck Jee-sook, director of Seoul Museum of Art; Daniel Birnbaum, director of Acute Art; Kim Seong Eun, director of the Nam June Paik Art Center; and Eugene Tan, director of the National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum.
Emika Suzuki is an editorial intern of ArtAsiaPacific.
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