Ebecho Muslimova Wins $40,000 Borlem Prize
Ebecho Muslimova has been named the 2022 receiver of the Borlem Prize, awarded every year due to the fact 2021 to an artist whose function attracts focus to mental health and fitness difficulties. She will receive an unrestricted grant of $20,000, with the identical total donated in her title to the charity of her choice, which the prize organizers stipulate ought to be in the provider of suicide prevention or psychological overall health advocacy. Muslimova picked the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline as the recipient of the donation. The prize was started by collector, composer, and researcher Roberto Toscano in honor of his late brother, Fernando Toscano (1986–2018).
The New York–based Muslimova, who gained her BFA from Cooper Union, is properly identified for her operate centering all-around the fictional character Fatebe, an alter-moi she established while in college to absorb her anxieties and to operate as a surrogate, or avatar, for the artist in day-to-day daily life. Curvy, confident, exaggeratedly sexual, and always depicted in the nude, the cartoonish Fatebe embodies both equally a zest for living and the rejection of societal benchmarks attendant upon the feminine entire body and of the sexual mores imposed upon gals.
“I am immensely honored to get the Borlem Prize,” claimed Muslimova, citing the occasion as “a exclusive option to bring notice to the critical get the job done of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. The cruel illusion of struggling by yourself will have to be dispelled,” she ongoing. “Suicide only magnifies discomfort and produces a ripple outcome of struggling.”
The prize jury this yr was chaired by Alex Gartenfeld, creative director of the Institute of Present-day Art, Miami, and in addition composed of Elena Filipovic, director of the Kunsthalle Basel unbiased curator and historian Mark Godfrey Hou Hanru, artistic director of MAXXI in Rome Gianni Jetzer, curator-at-significant for the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC Luigia Lonardelli, a curator at MAXXI and Evrim Oralkan, cofounder and CEO of on the net electronic museum Collecteurs.
Describing himself as “delighted” that Muslimova was named the winner of the prize, Gartenfeld mentioned that her “work in drawing and painting provocatively explores complex psychological states. With humor, intelligence and creation, Ebecho’s operate empowers viewers to question concerns and imagine critically about the human body, intimacy, and the fraught working experience of currently being alive.”