Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman has been named the winner of the $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize 2024. Her win was announced at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv on 29 October, having been delayed for a year due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Established in 2009 by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and awarded to artists aged 35 and under, plans to hold the prize’s 15th anniversary exhibition and ceremony in August of this year were further delayed by Russia’s attacks on Kyiv and Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The art centre has since installed a generator.
Ashfika Rahman's winning work, Behula and a Thousand Tales 2024
Photo by Oleksandr Piliugin/Pinchuk Art Centre Future Generation Art Prize
Rahman, who is 35 and from Dhaka, studied photography in Germany before recently moving to Amsterdam. Her work, Behula and a Thousand Tales, which was chosen from among over 12,000 entries from almost 200 countries, was commended by the jury as “a floating embroidery between land and sky” that “links the human condition and aspiration for gender justice with mythology and spirituality”.
Three members of the seven-member international jury attended in the announcement Kyiv: Bjorn Geldhof, the centre’s artistic director; Alicia Knock, the curator and head of the Contemporary Creation and Prospective Department at the Centre Pompidou; and the art critic and curator Hou Hanru, former artistic director of Rome’s MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts. The jury said that Rahman “represents a future generation of artists that are committed to the ideals of community building and repair”.
In her acceptance speech by video link during the hybrid ceremony, Rahman told the audience in Kyiv about the difficulties of life as an artist, the obstacles she faced in getting her installation from Dhaka to the Ukrainian capital, and her hopes of getting at least a special prize to support further work. “I was just crossing my fingers that if I get the special one then I can survive two or three more years and produce more work. But I think this is not me but the team that made it possible, because at one point we almost lost hope,” she said, thanking the Kyiv-based curators.
$60,000 of the top prize is a cash award and the other $40,000 is describe as “an investment into the work, however that might take form.” An additional $20,000 was divided among six winners of the Special Prize, including Palestinian artist Dina Mimi and Zhang Xu Zhan from Taiwan.