The Visible Award is an international production award devoted to art work in the social sphere that aims to produce and sustain socially engaged artistic practices in a global context. Visible is also a contemporary art research project, where art is understood in its capability to make people look at things with a different perspective; a repository of knowledge, in its making, for all those artistic practices that are able to lead art becoming part of something else, leaving behind its own codified field and regime of speech, and allowing it to create new meaningful readings, visions and tools about our contemporaneity and our future times.
The Visible workbook series
After the publication of Visible (Sternberg Press, 2010), Visible has committed to continued development in the sphere of publishing by assembling a free, digital, flexible workbook series that could allow us to continue presenting the emerging practices that we gather around the visible network by shedding new light on them. The main idea we wanted to experiment with was one of having workbooks where the exercise we ‘assign’ to the artists and curators on our board is to present a dialogue with an expert coming from another field of knowledge, may this be city planning, economics, cooking or whatsoever other sector of human expertise. In doing so, we are trying to open up modest and unprecedented confrontation spaces where new bestowals of what art can affect and transform, within the social body, are achieved and written black on white on this free space that publishing can be.
We are kicking off this Visible workbook series, edited by Matteo Lucchetti and Judith Wielander, by releasing two issues, available by download on our website. Following a zero issue on the use of publishing as an artistic practice with Temporary Services, we launch the issue number one, where Raqs Media Collective commissioned a text from the historian Kaushik Bhowmik. In the upcoming months other issues will be released, featuring Miguel A. Lopez with the philosopher Giuseppe Campuzano (July), and Heman Chong with the urban planner Jr Wang (September). These first four issues were produced thanks to the kind support of the Kunsthaus Graz.
The 2013 Visible Award open call
With a renewed advisory board composed of 18 curators and artists (98 weeks, Alessio Antoniolli, Zoe Butt, Heman Chong, Chto Delat?, Cosmin Costinas, Galit Eilat, Tarek Abou El Fetouh, Christine Eyene, Eungie Joo, Miguel Lopez, Sofia Olascoaga, Joseph Del Pesco, Raqs Media Collective, Bisi Silva, Pelin Tan, Claire Tancons, and Pauline J. Yao), the Visible prize comes to its second edition, and takes a step further in its aim to research, support and offer a discursive and productive platform to innovative artistic projects that are able to become visible also in fields other than the artistic one. The award not only takes up the discussions about the development of art in a responsible relationship with the complexities of social change, but it also offers artists real opportunities to produce, and thus the possibility to experiment and work on new visions that can have a significant impact on the shared imaginary and on reality itself.
For the first time, we are having a call for proposals, open until June 20 (UTC+1), to let artists and collectives submit projects, from which a selection will join the proposals nominated by the advisory board and will be published on our website. Ten shortlisted proposals will then be publicly discussed by a prestigious international jury chaired by Charles Esche (recently appointed 2014 São Paulo Bienal curator), and composed by a group of intellectuals operating in different fields of culture, that will gather next December at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in order to assess the artistic projects and select the winner of the 2013 Visible Award.
To know more about the award and submit your proposal, please visit www.visibleproject.org