Artes Mundi 8 shortlist is announced

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Artes Mundi 8 shortlist is announced | The shortlist for the eighth edition of the biannual Artes Mundi prize was announced today, the Art Newspaper reports. The five artists nominated for the £40,000 contemporary art prize, which is organised by the Wales-based arts charity Artes Mundi, are Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili; Trevor Paglen, from the USA; Nigerian-born performance and visual artist Otobong Nkanga; and Egyptian painter Anna Boghiguian. A public exhibition of the shortlisted artists’ work will open at the National Museum Cardiff in October 2018, with the winner announced in January 2019. The most recent edition of the prize was awarded in January 2017 to British artist John Akomfrah.

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum receives $1 million grant | The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU) has received a $1 million grant from the MSU Federal Credit Union, which will go towards a new space to be created across the street from the Zaha Hadid-designed building which opened in 2012. This expansion will provide additional display spaces for the institution’s collection, as well as a new research centre. This is the second $1 million gift the MSU Broad has received from the university-based credit union, following a 2013 grant in support of educational programming at the museum.

Queer art exhibition in Brazil is shut down over protests | ‘Queermuseum: Cartographies of Difference in Brazilian Art’, an exhibition at the Santander Cultural centre in the southern city of Porto Alegre, has been shut down almost a month early in response to an online campaign by far-right protesters, who accused Santander bank of using ‘public funds to finance an exhibition with pedophilia and bestiality’. The show, which featured 85 artists with work spanning the mid 20th century to today, opened on 15 August and was planned to run until 8 October before Santander announced its early closure in a statement on Sunday (Portuguese language statement). The move has angered supporters of the exhibition, who are calling for a counter-protest, the Washington Post reports.

Praemium Imperiale art prizes go to Shirin Neshat and El Anatsui | The winners of this year’s Praemium Imperiale international art prize, awarded annually since 1989 by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association, were announced today. The five laureates of this year’s lifetime achievement award – which carries a prize of 15 million Japanese yen (approximately £100,000) for each category of painting, sculpture, music, architecture and theatre/film – are Iranian artist Shirin Neshat; Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui; Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour; Spanish architect Rafael Moneo; and Russian-American dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. The award, which aims to celebrate areas of achievement not covered by the Nobel Prize, will be presented to its recipients at a ceremony in Tokyo on 18 October.

Archaeologists unearth mummies in ancient Egyptian goldsmith’s tomb | A 3,500-year-old tomb belonging to a royal Egyptian goldsmith named Amenemhat has been unearthed by archaeologists working at Draa Abul-Naga, a necropolis on the west bank of the Nile in Egypt. Alongside a statue of Amenemhat and his wife and a number of other funerary objects, the tomb was found to contain three well-preserved mummies of a woman and her two children. The New York Times has described the discovery announced this weekend, which is the latest in a series of archaeological finds in Egypt this year, as ‘relatively modest’, but important in the context of the country’s current attempts to revive its struggling tourism industry.