We are pleased to announce that curator Berny Tan, and artists Lin Huiyi and Zarina Muhammad have been awarded the 2022 IMPART Art Prize. An intimate prize presentation ceremony was held at the ArtScience Museum on 11 February 2022 with industry stakeholders and media partners. Organised by Art Outreach, the IMPART Art Prize aims to support the professional development of emerging artists and curators by providing impactful career building opportunities, while building awareness and appreciation of Singapore art and practitioners. Each winner will receive SGD20,000 to further their practice, which was made possible by Marina Bay Sands under its Sands Cares community engagement initiative.
Entering its fifth year in 2022, the IMPART Art Prize made several key changes to its criteria to remain relevant to developments in contemporary art practises: the age limit was raised to 18 to 40 years (previously 18-35 years), all previous medium restrictions were lifted; and to recognise the pandemic disruptions, the time period for eligible artworks was extended to those made in the last 4 year (previously 2 years).
The IMPART Art Prize Jury—comprising Tan Boon Hui (Jury Chair), Patricia Chen, Catherine David, Honor Harger and Russell Storer—noted that the changes allowed more established artists and curators with sustained practices and strong examples of work to apply. The overall higher quality of applications also reaffirmed the Prize’s aim to not only offer financial support and exposure to promising practitioners on a needs-basis, but to recognise and reward high quality work, and send a signal to aspiring practitioners on models of excellence in the scene.
The 3 winners of IMPART Art Prize this year are Berny Tan (b.1990 ), Lin Huiyi (b. 1980), Zarina Muhammad (b. 1982).
Berny Tan (b. 1990) is an artist, curator, and writer. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the tensions that arise when she applies systems to – and unearths systems in – her personal experiences, complicating the false binary between rational and emotional. As an independent curator, she has developed a practice built on principles of empathy, sensitivity, and close collaboration with artists, accompanied by approachable writing that illuminates the processes and materialities of art-making. Tan holds an MA (Dist) in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BFA (Hons) in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts. Recent curatorial projects include Bad Imitation (2022) at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Recast (2021) at starch, and Maybe we read too much into things (2021) at 72-13.
In this video, Berny shares about her journey to becoming an independent curator, recent projects of notes and her future plans after winning her very first art prize.
Lin Huiyi (b. 1980) is a visual artist with 12 years of artistic practice under Chow and Lin. Her key art projects include The Poverty Line which covers 36 economies across 6 continents, and was winner of Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2019. She is focused on research-based, collaborative art projects, drawing in knowledge, perspective and networks from economics, public policy and market research backgrounds. She holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences in economics and mathematics from the National University of Singapore and a Master of Business Administration from the Tsinghua University – MIT Sloan School International MBA Program.
In this video, Huiyi shares how her background in public policy and economics contributes to her artistic practice, and the strength of visual art and photography in communicating issues of importance.
Zarina Muhammad (b. 1982) is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound, moving image and participatory practice, she is interested in the broader contexts of ecocultural and ecological histories, myth-making, haunted historiographies, water cosmologies and chthonic realms. Her work has largely explored the role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends polyphonic voices to data-driven systems and shapeshifting worlds. She has been working on a long-term interdisciplinary project on Southeast Asia’s transmuting relationship to spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity, the social production of rationality and transcultural exchanges of knowledge.
In this video, Zarina shares about her practice which she describes as a “multi-headed Hydra” and the importance of collaboration and reflection in her work.
The Jury also acknowledged the work of Kent Chan (b.1984), who was awarded an Honourable Mention. The category was first introduced last year, in 2021 to acknowledge practitioners of great promise for their contributions to the art scene.
Kent Chan (b. 1984) is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in the Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imagination, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. The works and practices of others often form the locus of his works, which have taken the form of film, text, conversations and exhibitions. He is an upcoming resident at Gasworks (2022) and a former resident of Jan van Eyck Academie (2019/20), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017/18) and Rupert’s Residency Program (2015). His works and films have been exhibited internationally and are collected in the Rijkscollectie, Netherlands and Bonnefanten Museum. He is the 2021 winner of the Foundwork Artist Prize.
We extend our heartiest congratulation to our awardees, and sincerely thank everyone who has applied to and supported this year’s IMPART Art Prize. Stay tuned for news on the open call for the next edition of the IMPART Art Prize in the second half of 2022, and do get in touch with us if you have any feedback to share. We'd love to hear from you.