Mozambican Felix Mula is the award-winning New Bank Photo 2016 – publico

 
         

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                 

 
 

The Mozambican artist Felix Mula won the New Bank Photo 2016, the largest Portuguese award for contemporary art, which has a cash value of 40,000 euros and this year has included only national creators and Portuguese-speaking African countries . Besides Mula, were named the Mónica de Miranda artists (Angola / Portugal) and Pauliana Valente Pimentel (Portugal).

The announcement was made on Thursday at the Berardo Museum in Lisbon, where even 2 October you can visit the exhibits that the three finalists designed purposely for the final phase of the award. In line with his previous work, Felix Mula presented photographic works and a facility that now relate to your most unique personal experience, sometimes summon the collective experience and their relationship with the inherited spaces of colonialism as the “canteen” (shops rural), where it sold a bit of everything. On condition returned to his country from Reunion Island, Mula shows the state of abandonment and semi-sleep that many of the colonial buildings were voted. To try to understand the relevance and meaning today has this legacy, the artist sought to oral testimonies of those who lived near these buildings ( “like more listening than register”), work whose result can be only one sentence with inaccurate or incomplete information . Nothing to worry Felix Mula, who likes the friction between reality and fiction, uncertainty and “different versions of the same story.”

In this work Mula, the colonial building stock still intersects with memories who used it and was forced to abandon it, as was the case of Lee family that after the independence of Mozambique, chose Portugal as a destination without any direct relationship with the country, unless a stamped nationality in a passport.

They were part of the prize jury Élise Atangana (France / Cameroon), curator and producer, David Claerbout (Belgium), artist, and Yves Chatap (France / Cameroon), curator and editor. This group understood privilege “work, whose proposal would focus more in the photographic field, given the nature of the prize, which has the photograph in its origin.” The decision, taken unanimously, also stresses “the aesthetic singularity” Felix Mula work, which allows “observes an important path to a relevant understanding of photographic practice.”

Felix Mula was born in Maputo in 1979. He began shooting with his father, studio photographer, to 13 years. He attended the National School of Visual Arts and the Center for Documentation and Photographic Training in Maputo, before joining Superior Reunion Island Arts School. It is also an artist and teacher, since 2012, at the Higher Institute of Arts and Culture, in the Mozambican capital. Participated in multiple exhibitions and residencies in Mozambique and abroad.