CAMP wins Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2020

Nam June Paik Art Center is pleased to announce that the jury has selected CAMP (Mumbai) as the winner of the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2020. CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in 2007 by Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran and Sanjay Bhangar. CAMP works with film, video, electronic media and public art forms, exploring various media technologies through research, infrastructural interventions, presentation, and documentation.

Zoe Butt, Artist Director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Center, Ho Chi Minh City, and a member of the nomination committee, explains that “CAMP is a site and nexus of rethinking strategies of survival with hands-on technological experimentation.” Her recommendation comes from her understanding that “their commitment to the idea of art as a social sphere of questioning, to which collaboration and exchange is crucial to the challenge of hegemony and its tools, is not only present in their methodologies of making, but also in their critical neighborliness which embraces openness to all forms of consciousness.”

Dieter Daniels, Professor of HGB Leipzig and the chairperson of the jury, was drawn to CAMP for their “process-oriented and open-ended” way as seen in Paik’s ideas such as Global Groove or Random Access Information. They “develop low-threshold participatory concepts in a wide range of ‘media’ such as electricity, transport and surveillance systems, archives, cinema, video, radio, and the internet.” He suggests that their “interventions in the public domain allow for open access,” mounting resistance against “the power of globalized capital.”

The NJP Art Center Director Kim Seong Eun, who served on the jury, accentuates CAMP’s “corporeal approach of getting into the thick of things and people in a time when words such as ‘participatory’ or ‘relational’ are losing momentum.” CAMP’s work, by “reconfiguring the concept of publicness and commons against the muscles of neoliberalism”, Kim adds, “is of particular import and relevance given the shifting horizons of network media culture in the face of the pandemic.” The jury members uniformly believe that with CAMP’s selection, Nam June Paik Art Center Prize has further crystalized the characteristics of its pedigree.

The first Nam June Paik Art Center Prize was awarded in 2009 to four artists, Ahn Eun-Me, Ceal Floyer, Lee Seung-Taek, and Robert Adrian X. Philosopher Bruno Latour won in 2010, followed by artists Doug Aitken in 2012, Haroon Mirza in 2014, Blast Theory in 2016, and Trevor Paglen in 2018.

The prize ceremony this year will be held online in November 20, along with related events. CAMP, as the winner, will be awarded a prize of KRW 50,000,000, and their solo exhibition will be organized by Nam June Paik Art Center in 2021.

Nomination Committee
Bae Myungji (Curator, Performance and Video, MMCA Korea)
Natalie Bell (Curator, MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge MA)
Zoe Butt (Artistic Director, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City)
Cho Seon Ryeong (Professor, Art Culture and Image, Pusan National University)
Stuart Comer (Chief Curator, Media and Performance, MoMA New York)
Michel Van Dartel (Director, V2 Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam)
Patrick D. Flores (Curator, Jorge B. Vargas Museum, and Professor, Art Studies, The University of the Philippines, Manila)
Anselm Franke (Head of Visual Arts and Film, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin)
Curatorial Team, Nam June Paik Art Center

Jury
Beck Jee-sook (Director, Seoul Museum of Art)
Daniel Birnbaum (Director, Acute Art)
Dieter Daniels (Professor, Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
Kim Seong Eun (Director, Nam June Paik Art Center)
Eugene Tan (Director, National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum)

Acceptance note, by CAMP
First, to the jury and the institution, thank you. We are honoured to receive this award in Nam June Paik’s name in this year of ubiquitous, traumatic, and banal media interaction. The 1984 transmission Good Morning Mr. Orwell and the follow-up 1986 Bye Bye Kipling are meaningful and poetic, today. They are reminders above all, that things change, that we can take positions, that we can be wrong or glitch or fail, and that the collective work of artists might still be some of the more vivid milestones we have of desire and memory on Earth.

There is an old saying :) about media, that every new medium takes previous ones as its content. So that TV's content is theater, film and novels, the internet's content is TV serials, phone chats and magazines, AI's content is stuff on the internet, and so on. Nam June Paik showed us that this can also work in reverse, and in many other directions, including barely-perceptible futures. TV can be sculpture, but also a garden, or planetary-scale broadcast art. And not just as metaphors. There are moves other than cannibalization, academization, stuffing one thing into another to reap some profits. Art is not a subset of existing culture. Technology is not exhausted by its current deployment, or its critique. You and your friends can and should, dare to again play in the gardens or sewers of the “medium,” which after all is just another word for the environments we are in.

CAMP cherishes and hopes to relay the artistic but also more general values of getting one’s hands dirty, lightness, radiant generosity, transnationalism, media specificity, courage, relentlessness; historically alive, time and space bending, friendship and invention that are our translation, of what this award contains. We wish to thank all our collaborators, and friends and comrades of CAMP, over the years. Onwards.

Our best wishes,
CAMP