Audi Russia together with Cosmoscow Foundation for Contemporary Art have announced the Audi Born-Digital Award 2021 winner: it’s art group "Vorozheya" with their project "Safari Verucca”. The artists will receive 700,000 rubles for implementation, as well as a fee of 250,000 rubles*. The work of the winners will be presented in the Audi City Moscow innovative space on the eve of the 9th Cosmoscow International Contemporary Art Fair, as well as on Cosmoscow Foundation website.
The art group consists of the artists: Anna Afonina, Valeria Ghrai, Nastya Korotkova and Maria Romanova. They work with corporate language imagery and explore obsession with efficiency. Studying poetics of the creative class, freelance and zoom conferences, the artists establish their own mythology of imaginary corporations, complementing it with fantastic images and otherworldly creatures.
The "Safari Verucca" project is an invitation to enter a journey across an undeveloped fantastic planet with splendid nacreous landscapes inhabited by unique flora and fauna. The project is a speculative startup that invites experience-hungry travelers to join a guided tour of a fictional, untouched planet.
Audi City innovative space will feature a fictional travel company office filled with unique alien geological and organic art-like trophy artifacts, and visitors will be able to embark on a virtual safari journey.
The theme of Audi Born-Digital Award 2021 - "Fantasy" - unfolds through diverse scenarios and pictures of an imaginary future.
More than 80 applications were submitted for the competition. The short list was formed on basis of professional jury expert assessment. The jury list included:
Honorary members of the jury:
Audi Born-Digital Award was first held in 2020 and was a direct response to the unprecedented situation caused by the pandemic and the ubiquitous immersion into the online world. The declared theme "Borderline" invited artists to comprehend the possibilities of existence of born-digital-art in the network and in physical reality, as well as to create a statement about the borderline and limiting states of not only digital and media art, but also about the new world everyone found themselves in. According to the results of the expert jury meeting, which included curators of key international institutions and specialists in new media, Pavel Seldemirov was recognized as the winner of the competition with his project "The Becoming." Pavel created a total installation that reproduced the space of a poetically interpreted forest filled with artifacts of 2020.
New projects that haven’t been implemented before and that correspond to the theme of the competition are accepted for participation in Audi Born-Digital Award. Official competition website: audiborn.digital.
*RUB 250,000 and RUB 700,000 are indicated without VAT.