Selectors 1997

1997

Selectors for the 1997 New Contemporaries Open Call

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing OBE RA (b. 1963) is an English conceptual artist, one of the Young British Artists, and winner of the annual British fine arts award, the Turner Prize, in 1997. In 2007 Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett stands on London's Parliament Square.

Gillian Wearing is known for her method of documentation of everyday life through photography and video, concerning individual identity within the private and the public spaces, where Wearing blurs the line between reality and fiction.

Photo: Francesco Guidicini

Image of Gillian Wearing

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968) is an art curator, critic and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'art revue.

In 1993, he founded the Museum Robert Walser and began to run the Migrateurs program at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris where he served as a curator for contemporary art. In 1996, he co-curated Manifesta 1, the first edition of the roving European biennial of contemporary art.

Image of Hans Ulrich Obrist

Sarat Maharaj

Sarat Maharaj (b. 1951) is a writer, researcher, curator, and professor. Maharaj began his education in Apartheid South Africa, but left for Britain. In 1980, he began his doctorate at Goldsmiths - his thesis was The Dialectic of Modernism and Mass Culture: Studies in Post War British Art. He is an authority on the work of Richard Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp, and James Joyce. He is a Professor of Visual Arts and Knowledge Systems at the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University in Sweden and was Professor of Art and Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, London from 1980 to 2005.

Photo: Charlotte Marklund

Image of Sarat Maharaj