Awardees of IMPART Art Prize 2022

The IMPART Art Prize 2022 has been awarded to curator Berny Tan and artists Lin Huiyi and Zarina Muhammad, in a private ceremony that was held at ArtScience Museum on 11 February 2022.

Each winner will receive SGD20,000 to further their practice, which was made possible by Marina Bay Sands under its Sands Cares community engagement initiative. The Jury also acknowledged the work of artist Kent Chan, who received an Honourable Mention.

The high quality of applications received this year reaffirmed the Prize’s aim to not only offer financial support and exposure to promising practitioners, but to recognise and reward high quality work, and send a signal to aspiring practitioners on models of excellence in the scene.

Lin Huiyi (b. 1980) is a visual artist with 12 years of artistic practice under Chow and Lin. Her key art projects include The Poverty Line which covers 36 economies across 6 continents, and was winner of Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2019. She is focused on research-based, collaborative art projects, drawing in knowledge, perspective and networks from economics, public policy and market research backgrounds. She holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences in economics and mathematics from the National University of Singapore and a Master of Business Administration from the Tsinghua University – MIT Sloan School International MBA Program.

Lin Huiyi, Fake Fake Fake

Zarina Muhammad (b. 1982) is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound, moving image and participatory practice, she is interested in the broader contexts of ecocultural and ecological histories, myth-making, haunted historiographies, water cosmologies and chthonic realms. Her work has largely explored the role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends polyphonic voices to data-driven systems and shapeshifting worlds. She has been working on a long-term interdisciplinary project on Southeast Asia’s transmuting relationship to spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity, the social production of rationality and transcultural exchanges of knowledge.

Zarina Muhammad, Pragmatic Prayers for the Kala at the Threshold, 2018

Berny Tan (b. 1990) is an artist, curator, and writer. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the tensions that arise when she applies systems to—and unearths systems in—her personal experiences, complicating the false binary between rational and emotional. As an independent curator, she has developed a practice built on principles of empathy, sensitivity, and close collaboration with artists, accompanied by approachable writing that illuminates the processes and materialities of art-making. Tan holds an MA (Dist) in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BFA (Hons) in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts. Recent curatorial projects include Bad Imitation (2022) at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Recast
(2021) at starch, and Maybe we read too much into things (2021) at 72-13.