Indian artist Astha Butail wins 5th edition of BMW Art Journey

Indian artist Astha Butail has won the 5th edition of BMW Art Journey. Astha Butail won over shortlisted fellow artists Julian Charrière and Lin Ke, whose works were presented in the Discovery section at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2017.

The BMW Art Journey has been jointly presented by Art Basel and BMW since 2015 to recognise and support emerging artists worldwide. It is awarded twice a year, to artists exhibiting in the Discovery section at Art Basel in Hong Kong and in the Positions section in Miami Beach.

For each iteration, an international jury selects three shortlisted artists who are invited to submit a proposal for a journey to develop their idea and work. The jury then select the winner based on their project.

Past winners include Samson Young (Hong Kong, 2015), German video artists Henning Fehr and Philipp Rühr (Miami, 2015), British artist Abigail Reynolds (Hong Kong, 2016) and Max Hooper Schneider (Miami, 2016).

The winner of the fifth edition of the Journey was announced in June and is Indian artist Astha Butail, whose work was presented by GallerySKE (New Delhi, Bangalore) at Art Basel in Hong Kong in March 2017.

Astha Butail was born in 1977 Amritsar, and now lives and works in Gurgaon, India. Her practice revolves around the use of geometry as a means of inquiry in order to understand how different elements of one single entity relate to the whole. In her work, she tackles themes of memory and time, notions of the archive and collaborative authorship, such as in her A story within a story (2012-ongoing) project, an archive of books filled by collective contributions by an audience invited to write, draw, engage and react to a note on a prompt card.

Read full report in Art Radar