Tiffany Sia and Ahmed Umar Win 2024 Baloise Art Prize

New York–based artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia and Sudanese Norwegian visual artist Ahmed Umar have been awarded the twenty-fifthBaloise Art Prize, the largest art prize affiliated with the Swiss iteration of Art Basel, which closed on June 16. The CHF 30,000 ($34,000) award is presented annually to artists exhibiting in the Statements section of the fair, which centers emerging artists. The Baloise Group, a Swiss insurer that administers the prize in partnership with the fair, has purchased works by both artists and has donated Sia’s to the MUDAM in Luxembourg and Umaar’s to the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) Frankfurt.

The Hong Kong–born Sia was honored for her installationsThe Sojourn, 2023, andAntipodes III, 2024, presented at Art Basel by Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna. Investigating the intersection between road movies and martial arts flicks,The Sojournoverlays text atop shots of the Taiwan landscape and is projected on a curved curtain.Antipodes IIIcomprises a rearview mirror rewired to display a twenty-four-hour-long recorded livestream video. In both instances, the unconventional presentation of the films is meant to invite scrutiny of the images’ materiality while lending the work a painterly quality.

The Sudan-born Umar, who was raised in Saudi Arabia and lives and works in Oslo, won for his wall-mounted installation “Glowing Phalanges/Forbidden Prayers,” presented at Art Basel by Oslo’s OSL Contemporary Gallery and featuring cliché souvenirs that the artists has reworked and arranged like prayer beads in a variety of poses. The work is intended to show the complexity of Islam and the diverse ways in which it is practiced, as well as to examine the notion that spirituality may reside in objects.

Sia and Umar were selected by a jury including Karola Kraus, the general director of MUMOK Vienna; Marie-Noëlle Farcy, curator and head of collection at MUDAM; Susanne Pfeffer, director of MMK; Swiss collector and arts patron Uli Sigg; and Ann Demeester, director of Kunsthaus Zurich.