Debuting the inaugural winners for their new CHANEL Next Prize, Chanel has established this prize as a biannual advent which seeks to support 10 international artists across the realms of film, music, performance and visual art. Apart of the larger CHANEL Culture Fund that was launched in March 2021, the French luxury fashion company uses this to build “unique initiatives and partnerships that will support innovators across the arts,” according to a statement from Chanel.
“We extend Chanel’s deep history of cultural commitment—empowering big ideas and creating opportunities for an emerging generation of artists to imagine the next,” Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture said in a statement.
This commitment to the arts has long been part of Chanel’s vision ever since it’s conception, supporting avant-garde artists throughout an ever-shifting cultural landscape.
Each of the 10 artists chosen for this prize will receive $113,000 alongside mentorship and networking opportunities facilitated by Chanel.
The winners were chosen by a number of established cultural icons, including actress Tilda Swinton, artist Cao Fei, and architect David Adjaye.
Working with a number of collaborators for the CHANEL Culture Fund, the French brand developed partnerships to create new programs at institutions that will support innovation in creative and cultural thinking, teaming up with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, Power Station of Art in Shanghai and GES-2, a new contemporary art center in Moscow, Russia.
See a full list of winners below:
- Jung Jae-il (born in Seoul; Seoul and Berlin-based), a composer, performer, music director and producer paving a new genre that fuses traditional Korean music with the sounds of western instruments.
- Keiken (London and Berlin-based), a collaborative practice between artists Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos and Tanya Cruz, whose work merges the physical with the digital by building online worlds and augmented realities for the viewer to experience.
- Lual Mayen (born in Aswa, South Sudan; based in Washington, D.C.), a self-taught game designer who uses his own experience as a refugee from South Sudan to design immersive gaming and digital tools to generate educational experiences and social impact.
- Marlene Monteiro Freitas (born in Cape Verde; based in Lisbon), a dancer and choreographer known for her electrifying presence and powerful aesthetics influenced by the Carnival tradition of her native island.
- Rungano Nyoni (born in Lusaka, Zambia; Lisbon and London-based), a filmmaker whose highly original films inhabit spaces and characters rarely seen on screen, bringing them to life with humanity, nuance and wit.
- Precious Okoyomon (born in London; based in New York City), an artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice investigates the racialisation of the natural world, Christianity, intimacy and ideas and experiences of life, death and time.
- Marie Schleef (born in Goettingen; Berlin-based), a theatre director whose work is constructed on research, exploring and asserting the too often missing female gaze and challenging male dominated theatre conventions.
- Botis Seva (born and based in London), a dancer, choreographer and director deeply rooted in hip hop dance theatre who experiments with form, structure and theatrics to reinvent choreography.
- Wang Bing (born in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province; based in China), a filmmaker whose works are finely observed portraits of those on the margins of contemporary Chinese society.
- Eduardo Williams (born in Buenos Aires; based in Paris and Buenos Aires), a filmmaker and artist who crosses freely between documentary and fiction to create works t
