The NEON Curatorial Award is set up in partnership between the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Through building links between young curators in London, and Greece, curatorial practice is shared and new ideas developed around the presentation of contemporary art, with the aim of championing curatorial excellence.

The young curators who take part in the exchange have the opportunity to draw from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, Greece and virtually curate their own exhibition.

Whitechapel Gallery is pleased to announce Joseph Constable and Rebecca Edwards as the winners of the 2015 NEON Curatorial Award. This is the first year in which two winning curators have been selected.

Joseph Constable was selected for his proposal The Labours – a title taken from a photograph from British artist Helen Chadwick, which depicts the artist’s naked body lifting a life-sized columnar representation of herself. In response to the contemporary context of Athens and its drive for creative self-organisation, this group show, including works by Joseph Beuys, José Damasceno and Pierre Huyghe amongst others, will explore how artists and artworks can create the conditions of rupture necessary for new modes of subjectivity. Constable proposed the empty spaces of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens as the setting for The Labours – a symbolically appropriate venue currently in a state of flux ‘where internal labour becomes an abstracted, performed bureaucracy.’

Rebecca Edwards was chosen for her proposal The Ear And the Eye – a two part exhibition to be shown simultaneously in London and Athens. The UK exhibition (presented at ANDOR in East London) will be comprised of a multichannel sound installation physically representing composer Alex Tyrrell’s album Memories We Made in The Computer Age, whilst Stop Counting, an installation by Karla Black will be displayed at State of Concept gallery in Athens. A dialogue will be created between both installations through the use of live recordings and projections in real time of the corresponding artworks in the two cities. The physical and the non-physical will ‘be in a state of synchronicity’ through technology. The exhibition will ‘confront the idea of spaces’ and what this means for art and the contemporary.

The judging panel for the 2015 NEON Curatorial Award consisted of three curators: Nicolas de Oliveira, London Metropolitan University, Ingrid Swenson, PEER, London and Grant Watson, Royal College of Arts, and was moderated by Nayia Yiakoumaki, Whitechapel Gallery.
The two best submissions received the award at a ceremony at the Whitechapel Gallery this evening, Thursday 10 December.

From left to right: Iwona Blazwick, Rebecca Edwards, Joseph Constable, Nayia Yiakoumaki, Dimitris Daskalopoulos