MobileCoin Art Prize is an award that highlights, celebrates, and supports artwork addressing the integral topic of privacy. MobileCoin partnered with NADA Art Fair 2021 Miami to award the inaugural prize.
Writer and curator Andrew Berardini and MobileCoin art director Inga Bardselected three artists and projects that underlined the importance and nuances of the increasingly critical cultural negotiation of our time.
MobileCoin Art Prize Awardees are:
Gabriella Tores-Ferrar at Embajada, Puerto Rico
Hangama Amiri at Towards, Toronto
Black Experience isn't a Spectacle by afila.si presented by Anteism Books
Each artist recieved MOB equivalent to $2,500
Hangama Amiri, Eight Seated Women, 2021
Hangama Amiri’s pictorial quilts depict the domestic lives of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The Afghan-Canadian artist reveals how important private spaces become when citizens lose their public rights
and freedoms of expression. Such gatherings of women in mutual support reveal how private space is fundamental outside of the punishing rules and surveillance of governments that oppress their citizens.
Gabriella Torres Ferrer, PersonalDataMine 003, (from the series Mine Your Own Business), 2020
In Personal Data Mine 003 (from the series Mine Your Own Business, 2019), Gabriella Torres Ferrer connected their mother's credit card with a screen displaying how our consumer behavior is tracked and our digital privacy is violated by corporations. The work connects a familial tenderness with the troubling practice of data mining by huge corporations towards wealth and profit.
Jesse Katabarwa, Odd.er (Print) featured in afila.si
Jesse Katabarwa & Venessa Appiah’s "Black Experience isn't a Spectacle" encourages its audiences to engage with Afrocentric knowledge productions, rather than through the voyeuristic gaze. On this open platform, artworks are paired with curated libraries that allow the viewer to engage with the theoretical core of the projects. The digital library is an exploration of complex themes, such as how the fetishization of Black bodies so often removes the private dignity of individuals and how Black artists can powerfully reclaim that experience.
The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit collective of professionals working with contemporary art. NADA members include galleries, gallery directors, non-profit art spaces, art advisors, curators, writers, museum and other art professionals from around the world. In addition to hosting year-round programming for its members, NADA hosts two fairs a year: NADA New York in March, and NADA Miami Beach in December.
