Burwood Art Prize 2023
Burwood Art Prize theme 2023
Visibility, Ritual, Legacy
The Burwood Art Prize invited artists across Sydney to engage, consider and reflect upon one or more of the following themes: Visibility, Ritual, Legacy. Each theme could be examined and negotiated in a literal, abstract, formal and informal sense.
Artists were encouraged artists to see these themes as lenses through which their art can be perceived by different people in different ways. A portal and invitation for our audiences to explore broader ideas around identity, community, culture and personal experience. Artists were also invited to consider how each of these themes may connect or disconnect with their personal practice, experience, surroundings or environment.
2023 Burwood Art Prize Winner
$10,000 Acquisitive Prize
Johanna Ng
Dad Shot, I Shoot
single channel video, stereo sound
9minutes 5 seconds
My father had aspirations to become a professional photographer in his twenties. Carrying his legacy, I now have similar aspirations to a version of my father I can never meet. Dad Shot, I shoot uses his collection of colour photo slides as its main material; as I looked through a selection of them, I encountered scenes I’ve never seen before. The ‘subtitles’ are a transcription of my observations of the scenes’ formal qualities blended with conjectures, while my father’s voice narrates his own reminiscences and lapses of memory. The work builds on the common ritual of sharing memories through photographs but evades a holistic and visible representation of these photos. These strategies parallel the navigation of thresholds between personal memory, cultural displacement, migrant imagination, and our right to opacity.
2023 Burwood Youth Prize Winner (open to all Sydney entranced aged 16-20 only)
$1,500 non-acquisitive
Aryan Sethi
Witnessing time
Printed photograph
We see through a lens of past occurrences, rituals and the upheld legacies of our ancestors, ultimately shaping our identity today. ‘Witnessing Time’ was captured in Old Delhi’s historic fort Red Fort, which served as the primary residence of the Mughal empire during the 16th and 17th centuries. After much bloodshed and British influence, traditional Mughal architectural styles fused with British styles. The figure in the photograph is looking out into the azure, witnessing a sort of freedom that may have not existed in previous times. Whether that freedom is flourishing is unknown, but is, nevertheless, grounded with ancestral legacy.
2023 Burwood Local Prize Winner (Burwood LGA residents only)
$1,500 non-acquisitive
Gigi Huang
Burwood 1995
Acrylic, ink, wool on cotton
Within this painting is a photograph taken of mum and I, in Burwood Park, 1995. Overlaying with paint, needle, thread – building layers of stitching over the landscape and surrounding the figures –this artwork is part reflection, ritual, and process. Having migrated at a young age to Sydney, my interest lies within intersectional identities, immigrant and migrant experiences. Therefore, my practice investigates the possibility of ‘unlearning’ an identity through the analysis and reinterpretation of histories, events, memories, or experiences both personal and not my own. This work helps me explore constantly evolving concepts around femininity, memory, and identity.
Burwood Art Prize People's Choice Award
$1,000 non-acquisitive
Smruti Patil
Warli
Gauche on poster board
‘Warli’ – A traditional art form employed by the indigenous people of my hometown near Mumbai, exemplifies that transcending time, culture and art will always remain. Through the medium of simple, yet intricate figures, this tribe would capture scenes from their day-to-day lives in much simpler times. Traditionally created on mud huts with a mixture of rice powder and water, their ways of living, rituals, and customs would all be captured in paintings and be an archetype for generations to come. Here I’ve depicted my rural hometown and captured the nuances of a time when technology didn’t obscure human interactions and visibility
Prize Pool Total: $14,000
Art Prize Judging Panel
Owen Leong
Owen Leong is a contemporary artist working with sculpture, photography, video and performance. He uses personal mythologies to explore systems of power, culture and representation. His artworks employ forces of creation and destruction to investigate the cyclical nature of order and chaos, and to reflect more universal aspects of human nature.
Leong’s work has been exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre; Monash Gallery of Art; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; Singapore Art Museum; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen; and the National Museum of Poznan, Poland. His work is held in the public collections of the Australia Council for the Arts, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Gold Coast City Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, Newcastle Art Gallery, University of Salford Art Collection UK, and private collections in Australia and internationally.
Reina Brigette Takeuchi
Reina Brigette Takeuchi is a Japanese Australian artist-researcher, curator and dance maker interested in cross-cultural exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration. Influenced by her experiences living peripatetically across East and Southeast Asia during her youth, Takeuchi uses an auto-ethnographic approach to her art/performance processes.
Reina has exhibited internationally and has performed for Ars Electronica Festival, SomoS Arts Berlin, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Late program. Her writing has been featured in Delving into Dance, 4A Papers and Kill Your Darlings; and was awarded the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Prize in Non-fiction. She is currently a PhD candidate at QUT, focusing on Asian Australian performance for her research project Countermoves of the Transcultural.
Donita Hulme
Donita currently works as Program Producer- Pacific at the Museum of Applied Arts And Sciences (MAAS). The proud daughter of English and Fijian migrants and a champion for arts and creativity in her community, Donita has undertaken cultural engagement and producer projects with Penrith City Council and Campbelltown Arts Centre.
Donita has previously lead the ERA YALOVATA NA MARAMA program for The Veiqia Project; a ground-breaking international collaborative whose Western Sydney work connects Fijian women of all ages with contemporary female artists, rich cultural knowledge, and the reclaimed awareness of traditional Fijian female tattooing. Donita is an active member of the Pasifika community, previously sitting on the boards of both the NSW Council for Pacific Communities and the Fiji Youth Initiative (FYI).
2023 Burwood Art Prize Catalogue(PDF, 9MB)
For further enquiries, please email arts@burwood.nsw.gov.au.