Kandinsky Prize announces its 2011 laureates

Still from Polina Kanis, Eggs (2010)

As award season wraps up, today the ArtChronika Foundation revealed the laureates for this year’s Kandinsky Prize.

The main award, Project of the Year, was awarded to Conceptualist Yury Albert, for his Moscow Poll, a series of questionnaires modeled after Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970), that forces viewers to answer either “Yes” or “No” to questions ranging from “Do you think that you can distinguish a good work or art from a bad one?” to “Do you really think that what you are looking at right now is art?”

New Artist of the Year went to Polina Kanis, for the spirited video, Eggs (2010),  which has the artist hopping back and forth across a rooftop, trying to catch eggs that are being lobbed at her from behind the camera. Unbroken eggs are collected in a basket. (You can check out the video here, courtesy of 25Kadr Gallery.)

Installation of Artists Private Collections

Anastasia Ryabova won Media Project of the Year for her website, Artists’ Private Collections. Essentially a social network for works of art, the website  traces the connections between artists as it maps their personal art collections. In tracking which pieces were purchased, gifted or exchanged, the website provides a social topography of an entire art scene.

In other award news, Time Magazine announced that its Person of the Year for 2011 would be The Protester, a conglomerate of all the uprisings from the Arab Spring to last Saturday’s meeting in Moscow. As artists and musicians continue to respond to the rallies against electoral fraud, it will still be some time, however, before it is clear who – if anyone – comes out victorious.