OGR AWARD 2023

Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Rebecca Moccia are the winners of the 6th edition of the OGR Award, the prize supported by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT grants 5,000 euros each to two artists whose work embodies a special attitude of interaction and confrontation with new technologies.

The artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Rebecca Moccia are respectively represented by the mor charpentier gallery Paris, Bogotà and Mazzoleni gallery, London, Torino.

The prize has been assigned by an international jury composed of María Berríos, Director of Curatorial Programmes and Research, MACBA, Barcelona; Samuele Piazza, senior curator, OGR Torino; Bettina Steinbrügge, director, MUDAM, Luxembourg, with the following remarks:

The jury unanimously selected two artists with an exemplary research-based practice dealing with the intersection between art and technology, where every project is rendering visible, with refined aesthetic poignance, that which most of us ultimately ignore. Both artists reflect critically on the abstraction and alienation of new technologies in a deeply embodied and corporeal manner via sound and temperature. They delve into social and political urgencies with precision, care and profound artistry.
In his work, Lawrence Abu Hamdan delves into the political effects of listening, expanding the auditory in order to create sonic imagery. In Air Conditioning he works with auditory data to deliver textured visual renderings of what he calls atmospheric violence. The image maps the Israeli army’s sonic occupation of the Lebanese airspace over a fifteen-year period. The piece aggregates data from hundreds of individual documents dispersed across multiple locations in the United Nations digital library.
In her artistic research Rebecca Moccia explores societal structures, often through practices of human feeling and emotion. Her training in sculpture grounds her investigations connecting space, bodies, and context, through materiality and thermal images. Her piece Ministry of Loneliness explores feelings of solitude and isolation, not through individuation, but as a collective phenomenon linked to the advancement of technoscientific order.

In line with the mission of OGR Torino, an international hub for innovation and contemporary culture, and one of the most dynamic centres of experimentation in Europe, the assignment of the prize during Artissima underlines the sophisticated relationship between art and technology, the main focus of the initiative. The prize confirms the role of the two institutions as catalysts of creative innovation, activators of synergies between the various cultural realities of the territory, with the goal of reinforcing the network of collaborations between cultural players in the city of Torino.

In 2022 the OGR Award went to Rebeca Romero, of the Copperfield gallery of London, for the work Semilla SAGRADA, unveiled in its physical version in the spaces of the Duomo of OGR Torino, and in its 3D version in a virtual Duomo hosted on the Spatial platform in the Metaverse.

Photo credit: Artissima 2023 | Perottino, Piva, Peirone