Payam Mofidi wins Vista Prize 2018

TEHRAN (Iranart) - The winner of this year’s Vista Prize has been announced. It’s an artistic idea about contemporary art and it was chosen from among 9 other final entries.

In a ceremony on Thursday, January 11, the jury chose Payam Mofidi’s work, titled Body, Colonial Islands and Strategic Depth, as the winner of the Second Vista Prize in Tehran. Mofidi’s contemporary art work focuses on social and humanitarian traits as well as the fact that most immigrants usually fall victim to human traffickers. A representative of Mofidi received the prize, which is a check for 300 million rials (about $6,800), in his absence.

The ceremony was attended by a number of A-list artists, including Kambiz Derambakhsh, Mehdi Hosseini, Behzad Shishegaran, and Yaghoub Ammameh Pich at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

The director of Vista Art Gallery and founder of Vista Prize, Parisa Pahlavan, expressed her hope that Vista finds its real position and that the program will be held in a wider artistic range:, The Vista is an idea-based award. We received 198 artistic ideas this year, of which 178 were individual and 19 others group works. Of this 114 were female and 77 male. The majority of participants were above the age of 50.

Pahlevan continued: The top artistic ideas are on display at the Vista Art Gallery. The plan is to include and consider a wide range of ideas in other fields as well. This is a private project but we still expect to get all the help we can possibly get from authorities in charge of artistic affairs.

According to Pahlevan, the award is the brainchild of Behnam Kamrani, it has seen some improvements in quality compared to last year, many artists from provinces are taking part, and the ultimate goal is to make it a regional or international annual event.

At the end of the ceremony, top works by other artists which had reached the finals also received certificates of appreciation from the jury. They included Majid Tabrizi (An Elephant in the Room), Masoumeh Mohtadi (Oldness), Payam Ghelichi, Nazgol Nayyeri, Sanam Sayeh Afkan and Emad Mardani (Kaf), Marjan Madani Razeghi (Anonymous), Emadeddin Anoushirvani (92 Pages), Maryam Farshad (Mother’s Room), and Aghil Mardani and Emad Mardani (Finite Land).

The selected art works of Vista Prize are on display at Vista Art Gallery until January 15. The gallery is located at No. 11, 12th Alley, Miremad St., Motahari St., Tehran.