Carol Vogel’s column announces the six finalists for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize that comes with $100,000 and a show at the museum (all bullet points are quotes from Vogel):
- Walid Raad, 42, a Lebanese conceptual artist who lives and works in Beirut and New York. Last year, in a multimedia project at the International Center of Photography, he depicted the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s in graphic detail, through the voices of people who never existed, using details he invented. He has also created a video purporting to show sunsets supposedly recorded by a Lebanese surveillance-camera operator.
- Cao Fei, 31, a Beijing artist whose work has been shown in many biennials. Ms. Fei explores the rapid evolution of Chinese society and cultural trends in her photographs, videos and new-media world.
- Hans-Peter Feldmann, 68, a German artist living in Düsseldorf who appropriates everyday images for his carefully conceived installations. At a show at the International Center of Photography last year, he filled a room with the framed front pages of 100 newspapers — from Paris, Dubai, Sydney, Seoul, New York and elsewhere — printed on Sept. 12, 2001.
- Natascha Sadr Haghighian, a conceptual artist in Berlin. (She refuses to give her age.) Her works have included video, performance, computer and sound pieces. A recent one, “Cut,” involved projections of moving razor blades that seemed to be slicing the gallery walls.
- Roman Ondak, 43, a Slovakian artist who lives and works in the capital, Bratislava, where he stages performances and installations. His work in his country’s pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale involved an indoor environment that reproduced the greenery, bushes, paths and trees between other exhibition pavilions. Mr. Ondak also created “Measuring the Universe,” at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition that closed last month, in which visitors’ heights, first names and the date of the measurement were recorded on the gallery walls.
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 39, a Thai filmmaker who takes politics and relationships as his subjects. His work was shown at the 2008 Carnegie International, where he won the inaugural Fine Prize for outstanding emerging artist.
Inside Art: Finalists Announced for Hugo Boss Prize (New York Times)
