• aucklandartgallery.com

Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander have been announced as the winner of the Walters Prize 2021, New Zealand’s most prestigious contemporary art award.

The announcement was made by this year’s Walters Prize international judge, Kate Fowle, Director of New York’s MoMA PS1, at a gala dinner held at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander receive $50,000 for the honour.

Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander were awarded the Prize for their presentation of Atapō, 2020.

In judging the award for which there were four finalists, Fowle said, ‘The installations bring nuanced perspectives on social, cultural and political urgencies of our time that each deserve our attention and engagement. As such, it does not feel appropriate to award the prize based on a personal selection of one work over another, particularly when I cannot physically be present with them.’

‘Instead, I would like to award the Prize to Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander as a celebration of the inspiration they bring through their sustained collective practices, as well as for the potential futures they offer in their collaborative thinking and generative processes. For me, these qualities, together with the commitment the artists have to creating proximity, signal the work that needs to be done by all of us in the coming years, regardless of the barriers we encounter.’

Fowle made her selection from exhibited works by artists Fiona Amundsen, Sonya Lacey, Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander, and Sriwhana Spong.

‘The eight women that were selected by the jury and the four installations that they have produced reveal incredible sophistication in how to invite us to embrace often fluctuating or contradictory perspectives on a story or a phenomenon that is otherwise somehow out of reach. As different in form and subject as each presentation is, there is a powerful, uniting force in how they each ask us to slow down, listen, be present, think again and be aware of our environment, ourselves, our contexts,’ says Fowle.

With a legacy that now stretches over a decade from the Prize’s inauguration in 2002, Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander join a celebrated list of former Walters Prize winners: contemporary New Zealand artists Ruth Buchanan (2018), Shannon Te Ao (2016), Luke Willis Thompson (2014), Kate Newby (2012), Dan Arps (2010), Peter Robinson (2008), Francis Upritchard (2006), et al. (2004) and Yvonne Todd (2002).

The Walters Prize recognises outstanding works of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the immediately preceeding years.

Held biennially, the Walters Prize aims to make contemporary art a more widely recognised and debated feature of cultural life. Named in honour of the late New Zealand artist Gordon Walters, the Prize was established in 2002 by Founding Benefactors and Principal Donors Erika and Robin Congreve and Dame Jenny Gibbs, working together with Auckland Art Gallery.