Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Rebecca Moccia are the winners of the 6th edition of the OGR Award, the prize supported by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT grants 5,000 euros each to two artists whose work embodies a special attitude of interaction and confrontation with new technologies.
The artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Rebecca Moccia are respectively represented by the mor charpentier gallery Paris, Bogotà and Mazzoleni gallery, London, Torino.
The prize has been assigned by an international jury composed of María Berríos, Director of Curatorial Programmes and Research, MACBA, Barcelona; Samuele Piazza, senior curator, OGR
Torino; Bettina Steinbrügge, director, MUDAM, Luxembourg, with the following remarks:
The jury unanimously selected two artists with an exemplary research-based practice dealing with the intersection between art and technology, where every project is rendering visible, with refined aesthetic poignance, that which most of us ultimately ignore. Both artists reflect critically on the abstraction and alienation of new technologies in a deeply embodied and corporeal manner via sound and temperature. They delve into social and political urgencies with precision, care and profound artistry.
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In her artistic research Rebecca Moccia explores societal structures, often through practices of human feeling and emotion. Her training in sculpture grounds her investigations connecting space, bodies, and context, through materiality and thermal images. Her piece Ministry of Loneliness explores feelings of solitude and isolation, not through individuation, but as a collective phenomenon linked to the advancement of technoscientific order.