Lawrence Abu Hamdan receives 2022 Future Fields Commission

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Lawrence Abu Hamdan receives 2022 Future Fields Commission | The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have named Lawrence Abu Hamdan as the winner of the 2022 Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media. Abu Hamdan will become the third recipient of the $125,000 commission, awarded by both institutions to enable the execution and acquisition of a new multimedia installation work encompassing film, performance and sound. The Beirut-based artist, who was one of four joint recipients of the Turner Prize 2019, creates audiovisual installations which explore ‘the politics of listening’ within the sphere of human rights and the law. Abu Hamdan’s Future Fields Commission, titled How to Hear Impossible Speech: Lessons from the Division of Perceptual Studies, will be unveiled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring of 2022.

Russian collectors arrested in Belgium on suspicion of fraud and money laundering | The Russian collecting couple Igor and Olga Toporovsky have been arrested in Belgium on suspicion of fraud and money laundering, The Art Newspaper Russia reports. The allegations have been brought forward after more than 20 works were loaned to an exhibition of Russian avant-garde art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2017 by Igor Toporovsky’s Dieleghem Foundation, with questions over the authenticity of certain works were raised by leading scholars in January 2018. The Toporovskys were arrested last month by Belgian federal police, with the criminal court extending their arrest for one month on 20 December. The couple’s lawyer, Sébastien Watelet, told The Art Newspaper that ‘my clients will react after New Year’s Eve’.

Cheung Yee (1936–2019) | Cheung Yee, the Chinese painter and sculptor, died on December 4 at the age of 83. Born in Guangzhou, China, Yee studied art at Taiwan Normal University in Taipei during the 1950s, where he developed an interest in archaeology and began working with a range of materials. Cheung’s sculptures in bronze, stone and wood, which fused western modernism with more traditional Chinese influences, and the cast paper murals he produced during the 1970s, are housed in many of the world’s museums, including the public collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, and the National Museum of History in Taipei. Cheung was awarded an MBE in 1979 and received the Hong Kong Annual Sculpture Award in 1988.