American filmmaker Sky Hopinka and Canadian videographer Sin Wai Kin received the twenty-fourth Baloise Art Prize, the highest art prize affiliated with the Swiss iteration of Art Basel. The CHF30,000 ($33,000) prize is awarded annually to artists exhibiting in the fair’s Statements section, which focuses on emerging artists. The Baloise Group, a Swiss insurer that manages the prize in partnership with the fair, will buy works by the two artists and donate them to the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt and MUDAM in Luxembourg.
Hopinka, born in Ferndale, Wash., a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of the Luiseño people, won the award for his four-channel film Just a soul that responds, presented at Art Basel by the New York gallery Broadway. The film, which superimposes texts about colonization and Indigenous pasts over montages of landscapes, explores trauma and loss, and is representative of Hopinka’s work, in which he generally investigates the meanings of homeland and landscape. and their relationship to language and culture.
Sin, born in Toronto and living and working in London, won for his five-part video sequel Portraits, presented at the fair by the Soft Opening gallery in London. Inspired by Cantonese and Peking opera, the works examine themes of masculinity, femininity and binaries through various visual metaphors. Cantonese and Peking opera influenced the work, and science fiction and drag inspired past works. Sin, nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, frequently centers speculative fiction in performance, moving image, and print in fantastical narratives that challenge the collective gaze and idealized image.
