Kuba Dorabialski has won the John Fries Award for 2017, a non-acquisitive prize of $10,000 celebrating excellence in early career visual art practices in Australia and New Zealand. Dorabialski shared with Art Almanac that the award “has already affected my practice; any validation of one’s art practice is valuable, and a prize like the John Fries Award provides a lovely big chunk of validation at an early stage in an artist’s career. It makes me feel a little braver and I feel like I can be more ambitious with future works.”
Dorabialski composed Invocation Trilogy #1: Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection (2017) for the competition. It is a single channel video that addresses architecture and literature with judges noting its high production value and ‘finely tuned’ humour. John Fries Award curator Consuelo Cavaniglia added that his approach is “layered and detailed, you can return to it many times and continue to find new details and subtleties.” The Sydney-based artist, whose heritage is Polish, explained that his practice “attempts to reconcile Modernism with mysticism, and radical leftist politics with the personal poetic. I’m interested in the thin and uncertain border between nostalgia and sentimentality, especially for the recent soviet past.”
Kuba Dorabialski with his work Invocation Trilogy #1: Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection, 2017, single channel video (still), 9 minutes 30 seconds for John Fries Award 2017. © Kuba Dorabialski / Licensed by Viscopy. Photograph: David Varga
Next up, the artist will start work on the second installment of the Invocation Trilogy for exhibition at 55 Sydenham Rd in March 2018, with part three planned as a feature length work. He is also collaborating with artist Katy B Plummer on a live gallery-based cabaret musical to make its debut next year.
Art Almanac also extends our congratulations to artist Barayuwa Munuggurr whose works Ngaraka (bones of the whale) and Napunda (snake/lightning/cloud/clapsticks) (2017) were highly commended. The finalists, who were selected from 600 entries, include Amanda Williams, Angela Tiatia, Anwar Young, Ben Leslie, Bridget Reweti, Claudia Nicholson, Ella Sutherland, Faye d’Evie, Kathy Ramsey and Tina Havelock Stevens.
Now in its 8th iteration, the John Fries Award was established in 2010 in memory of former Viscopy Director and Honorary Treasurer, John Fries and plays an important role not only by promoting the work of the prize-winner but thoughtfully showcasing the intentions of all finalists at this critical point in their careers. Cavaniglia noted that many of the practices demonstrated an interest in ideas related to history to investigations of culture and identity.
In addition to artist/curator Cavaniglia judges included Melanie Oliver, Senior Curator and Programs Manager at The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington; Clothilde Bullen, Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art; Fiona Lowry, multi-award winning artist (Archibald Prize, Moran Prize, Fleurieu Landscape Prize); and Kath Fries, artist, Viscopy board member, Chair of the John Fries Award committee and daughter of the late John Fries.
All 12 finalists works are on view at UNSW Galleries until 2 September, 2017.
