Alexandra Stratimirovic of Serbia and Gevorg Zigzabian of Armenia are the first prize winners of the fifth edition of the Targetti International Light Art Award.

 

Along with them, at the top of the list are the young Italians, Stefano Cagol (second prize), Michela Colasuonno and Alice Azario (third prize) and Emanuele Fucci (honorable mention).

 

The award ceremony was held at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, 26 January 2008 in the exhibition area of Lobby 16 at ArteFiera during the exhibition of works by the artists who won previous editions of the competition.

 

The judging panel - Amnon Barzel (artistic director of the Targetti Art Light Collection), Omar Calabrese (semeiologist), Alessandra Mammì (art critic for L'Espresso), Peter Noever (director of the MAK in Vienna), David Sarkysian (director of MUAR in Moscow) and Paolo Targetti (president of Targetti Sankey SPA) – wanted to pay tribute to these young, under 40 artists’ creativity and ability to reveal all the expressive power of artificial light by selecting their works from the over one thousand projects that were submitted from all parts of the world.

 

The winners received prizes totaling € 40,000 and their works will enter the TARGETTI LIGHT ART COLLECTION (the collection of contemporary art which in its first ten years has become one of the most prestigious groupings dedicated to Light Art) and be part of the traveling exhibition that has already been displayed in some of the world’s most important museums, from MUAR in Moscow to the MAK in Vienna, from the Chelsea Art Museum in New York to the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw.

 

The competition, sponsored and financed by Targetti (the third ranking European firm in the field of architectural lighting) was created to develop more and widespread awareness of light’s emotional power and to open the experiments, launched in 1998 with the Targetti Light Art Collection to young, emerging talents. Today, the Targetti Light Art Collection comprises over 40 luminous installations created by some of the world’s best established artists whom the curator, Amnon Barzel, had asked to use artificial light as both expressive tool and primary content.

 

 

Alexandra Stratimirovic (Yugoslavia-Sweden) completed an almost etymological  process. Her piece – that is almost playful in relation to art history traditions – is a huge watercolor made with colored water inside small transparent containers which, when juxtaposed, create the image of a portrait.

 

It was with great technical skill and imagination that Gevorg Zigzabian (Armenia-UK) has created “Ipse xixit”, an inspiring cosmic machine in which the passage of time and the transformation of things are dictated exclusively by the changing light-shadow relationships of the heavenly bodies.

 

Stefano Cagol (Italy) has once again focused his attention on socio-political themes. With cynicism and disenchantment his WAR of kaleidoscopic golden light denounces the unbreakable ties between war and wealth.

 

Michela Colasuonno and Alice Azario (Italy) propose a very intimate and sophisticated photograph on the theme of transparency – an “outside” that becomes “inside” thanks to the artificial backlighting of the image of a window through which light seems to filter.

 

Emanuele Fucci (Italy) works on the theme of shadows and uses light to “draw” funny scenes taken from daily life in a big apartment building – a symbol of a childhood in the courtyard portrayed with barely concealed nostalgia.