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The Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art was initiated and developed in 2004/2005 by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway to enhance exchange in international contemporary art and highlight the importance and ongoing influence of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). The award is the highest prize for international contemporary art given in Norway.
The Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art honors the exceptional attitude of Edvard Munch and his approach of translating what the artist sensed in society into his own artistic language. Edvard Munch's interest in everyday life and the struggle of the individual is still relevant to contemporary art today. Munch debated human conditions that were both personal and prevalent among his contemporaries, themes such as terminal illness, poverty, social exclusion, profound grief, love, lust and fear. Through his work he provided a new set of tools for the representation of the self and individual travails - tools that are useful to both artists and viewers in their perception of art and life as such.
The award is intended to support the development of a new work and to cover living expenses during a six-month residency in Norway. The residency is situated at the Munch estate Ekely in Oslo and the award consists of a grant of 55.000 USD.
Ekely is the former property of the painter Edvard Munch, situated 15 minutes from the center of Oslo. The residence at Ekely is part of an artist community of semidetached and detached houses and includes living quarters and a small studio. The residence was taken over from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in June 2002, and was totally renovated by Statsbygg and Architect Lillan Wam, and furbished by the Office for Contemporary Art. It was finished in the spring of 2005, ready for the first Edvard Munch awardee: Amar Kanwar.
Indian documentary filmmaker Amar Kanwar awarded first-ever Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art.
This is the first time that The Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art is awarded. The award was presented to the artist Amar Kanwar by HM Queen Sonja of Norway on 27 April 2005.
Oslo's Office for Contemporary Art in Norway said Kanwar was given the award for "responding to conditions in contemporary India". His films primarily concern issues relating to violence, politics, ecology and sexuality.
Kanwar's works cover topics as diverse as the history and politics of collecting water in the desert, the physical and mental spaces that men and women carve out for themselves within the family, and ecological interpretations of Buddhism.
Other films have dealt with the opposition between globalization and tribal consciousness in the heart of rural India.
What makes Kanwar's films so compelling is the acute immediacy of their images and the perplexing, almost beguiling contours of their narratives. Kanwar's films do not explain, they show and tell. They create a space of continuous traversing between deep personal zones and the complicated outside universe. Kanwar himself calmly but steadfastly declines to elucidate his films with practical information. At the opening of one of his films he reassured the audience that extensive background material on the subjects addressed in his films was just a few URLs away.
Other films of his have dealt with the opposition between globalisation and tribal consciousness in the heart of rural India.
Related links:
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway
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