'Delusional' video filmed in a paddling pool wins art prize
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Your support makes all the difference.A Dutch artist whose video installation was filmed underwater in a paddling pool was named the winner of the Beck's Futures art prize last night.
Saskia Olde Wolbers, 33, was presented with a £24,000 cheque by Yoko Ono after beating nine shortlisted artists, including one who sculpts in carpet fluff and draws on bananas.
Interloper , Olde Wolbers' winning piece, follows the voice of a narrator as he travels through a hospital which is, in reality, made out of a hamster cage. The voice belongs to a comatose man in intensive care, lying next to his lover with whom he was trapped in a car crash. What emerges is a narrative inspired by the true story of a Frenchman with pseudologica fantastica syndrome (sufferers have a compulsive need to lie) who for 18 years pretended to be a doctor for the World Heath Organisation.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts described the work as "part scientific documentary, part parable; the film is mesmeric and unsettling and plays with notions of consciousness, reality, truth and the beauty of disaster". It has an accompanying work told from the woman's viewpoint which will be shown at Maureen Paley's Interim Art gallery in Bethnal Green, east London, in September.
The artist collected the prize, which rewards up and coming talent in the UK, in a ceremony at the ICA in The Mall, central London, where works by all the nominated artists are displayed until 16 May, when they go to Glasgow.
Olde Wolbers, who trained at the Chelsea College of Art and now lives in London, said: "The money will help me cover the cost of living and I'll use it to make new work."
Klaus Biesenbach, a curator on the panel of judges, described Olde Wolbers' documentaries as "suggestive and delusional".
He added: "In a world where documentaries and science have authority, these enigmatic narrative fictions call everything in doubt." Doug Fishbone from Goldsmiths College, London, won the Beck's Futures student prize.
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