Shahar Marcus has been awarded the Video Section award in the ninth edition Premio Combat Prize, for his work “Homecoming artist (Dresden)” for an incisive investigation, poised between socially codified codes, that strives to be a bastion of control and reference of individuals towards distracted collectivity, in times of widespread aesthetics and in very strident circumstances of post-politics.
Premio Combat Prize was born with the purpose of investigating the most interesting ideas in international contemporary art.
The name Combat draws its conceptual inspiration from combat films, videos shot by American military cameramen during World War II battles. Combat films, often shot on the frontline and live, filmed the horrors of the war to document and show to the American people – not yet used to reality TV – what was going on, including the most bloody events.
Premio Combat Prize shares the same objective, which is maybe ambitious but certainly effective from a cultural viewpoint: to go to the frontline to search for different trends in the international art world and to document at the same time the new artistic languages as they develop. Premio Combat Prize represents a new kind of research model based on a cultural discourse which is free from any commercial constrictions.
Through artistic research, Premio Combat Prize promotes a useful and non banal “comparison-clash”, a sort of cultural battle that is really vital and necessary in these uncertain times.
