American filmmaker Sky Hopinka and Canadian videographer Sin Wai Kin have been awarded the twenty-fourth Baloise Art Prize, the largest art prize affiliated with the Swiss iteration of Art Basel. The CHF 30,000 ($33,000) award is presented annually to artists exhibiting in the Statements section of the fair, which focuses on emerging artists. The Baloise Group, a Swiss insurer which administers the prize in partnership with the fair, will purchase works by both artists and donate them to the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt and to MUDAM in Luxembourg.
The Ferndale, Washington–born Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, won for his four-channel film Just a Soul Responding, which is being presented at Art Basel by New York’s Broadway gallery. The film, which layers texts about colonization and Indigenous pasts atop landscape montages explores trauma and loss, and is representative of Hopinka’s oeuvre, in which he typically investigates the meanings of homeland and landscape and their relation to language and culture.
Sin, born in Toronto and living and working in London, won for their five-part video suite Portraits, presented at the fair by London’s Soft Opening gallery. Inspired by Cantonese and Peking opera, the works examine themes of masculinity, femininity, and binaries through various visual metaphors. Cantonese and Peking Opera influenced the work, and science fiction and drag have inspired past ones. Sin, a 2022 Turner Prize nominee, frequently centers speculative fiction within performance, moving image, and print in fantasy narratives that question the collective gaze and the idealized image.