Dave Jordano, Semira Sleeping in Kat's House, Eastside, Detroit, 2012.
Four artists, including one Canadian, are finalists for the 2015 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize.
Dave Jordano (USA), Annette Kelm (Germany), Owen Kydd (Canada) and Hito Steyerl (Germany) are in the running for the $50,000 prize. Each of the finalists will be awarded a six-week residency in Canada.
Work by the four artists will go on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in an exhibition that allows visitors to vote on the winning work, beginning September 15, 2015.
Based in Chicago, Dave Jordano began a photographic series in 2010, documenting his hometown, Detroit. The series, Unbroken Down, will be published by Powerhouse Books this fall.
Annette Kelm lives and works in Berlin, creating images that pull from the visual language of advertising. Kelm has shown at the Kunsthalle Zürich, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, 54th Venice Biennale, Aspen Art Museum and MoMA PS1.
Currently based in Los Angeles, Owen Kydd has strong ties to Canada’s West Coast. Educated at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Kydd began working for veteran Vancouver artist Jeff Wall shortly after graduating. In Canadian Art’s 2014 issue, which features Kydd on its cover, critic Aaron Peck discussed the artist’s investigation of “durational photography.”
Hito Steyerl, who is based in Berlin, represented Germany at this year’s Venice Biennale (our associate editor David Balzer discussed Steyerl’s pavilion in his video on Venice’s lighter side). Steyerl teaches new media art at the Berlin University of the Arts.
The four finalists were selected from a longlist of 27 artists by jury members Adelina Vlas, associate curator of contemporary art at the AGO, João Ribas, deputy director and senior curator of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, and Paris-based artist Mohamed Bourouissa.
