Alumna Sondra Perry '15 Wins 2018 Nam June Paik Award

By
Logan Reed
January 02, 2019
Sonra receiving the prize.

Alumna Sondra Perry '15 was recently named the ninth winner of the Nam June Paik Award by the Kunststiftung NRW, the arts foundation founded by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1989. Perry received a $28,000 award in November at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster. According to the website, “the renowned Nam June Paik Awards (established in 2002) [is conferred] for outstanding electronic and digital artworks that take risks, cross cultural boundaries and take an interdisciplinary approach in the spirit of the late pioneering artist Nam June Paik.”

Perry's video installation, It’s in the Game ’17, 2017, is featured in the prize exhibition at Westfälischer Kunstverein through February 3, 2019.  The piece “weaves a narrative originating with the relationship between her and her twin brother, whose likeness was appropriated by the video game company Electronic Arts for an animated basketball game. For the piece, Perry’s brother, a former uncompensated college basketball player for Georgia Southern University, accompanied her on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they inspected its ethnographic collection comprising works from African, Middle Eastern, and South American nations,” according to ArtForum.

Her work engages critically with the construct of blackness through videos, sculptures, and installations. According to a statement by the jury, “Perry’s work highlights the enduring issue of the exploitation of the black diaspora as public material without due compensation. By inverting her brother’s avatar and showing an ‘inside-out’ view of his hip joint, the work further raises questions surrounding the representation of the body within digital technologies, its simultaneous likeness and uncanny abjection.”

Her work is currently featured in the solo show Typhoon Coming On at the LUMA Foundation in Zurich through January 13, 2019. This past summer, The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland named her as the first recipient of The Toby Prize which amounts to $50,000. Her solo show there will be on exhibition from April 27, 2019 through August 11, 2019. According to Art News, “In the past few years, Perry’s work [has] had various solo shows at such venues as the Kitchen in New York and the Serpentine Galleries in London. Her work was included in the 2015 edition of MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” quinquennial and the New Museum survey “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” and she was the 2017 winner of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize.”

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