The Cord prize is a new international contemporary art award aiming to support and acknowledge the practice of early and mid-career visual artists. Entry costs $30 and the inaugural Cord Prize invites artists who are working within the field of photography to apply. The award comprises an individual first prize of $10,000, second prize of $1,000, and third prize of $500. Additionally, twenty-two artists will be selected for online exhibition and a piece of writing will be commissioned from the award jurors.
Photography has become a universally accepted, unchallenged, medium of contemporary art. Concomitantly, photography’s capacity to influence our everyday lives has become exponentially important with the ubiquity of visual social media and the opening up of the possibilities for us to communicate and disseminate our photographic images independently of institutional support. It could be said that the ubiquity which photography has achieved, its establishment in the contemporary art canon, is both a blessing and a problem – marking a new beginning, a place to start from all over again, yet more challenging than ever to make meaningful photographic work that resonates in cultural space and will endure. The inaugural Cord Prize invites early and mid-career artists who are working within the field of photography to apply.
The brief
Against this setting, applicants to the inaugural prize are invited to submit up to 16 images of current work from a wholly or partially photo-based practice, using any photographic process or medium. Applications should be accompanied by a resume and text of up to 400 words detailing your research and practice. You may also wish to contextualise your work within what you see as the significant cultural issues at play within contemporary art photography.
The Cord Prize will be awarded twice-annually, alternating focus on specific disciplines, with curated themes and critical surveys; and with photo-based practice as a recurring thread.
Submissions open on 15th April, closing on 2nd June 2013.
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