Youngster awarded by DESTE
The youngest artist short-listed for the DESTE Prize this year was finally the one who was awarded the prize yesterday evening at the crowded event at the DESTE Center of Contemporary Art. Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou won the prize for two video works that he had prepared for the competition. A two-screened, audiovisual installation showed the steady image of a fountain and was a comment on artificiality and kitsch sentimentality. The spectacular formations that military airplanes make in the sky was what the viewer saw in the other of the two works. Based in Limassol, Cyprus, the 27-year-old Panayiotou has, in the past, been awarded a scholarship by the French government and the EU for postgraduate studies. He has also had various solo exhibitions. In Athens he has shown his work in group exhibitions: at the Kappatos Gallery during the Art Athina event (the Athens contemporary art fair) in 2004 and in «20 Rooms,» organized by the same gallery a year prior to that. The international committee that made the final decision for this year’s DESTE Prize included art collector and the founder of DESTE, Dakis Ioannou; Nicolas Bourriaud, who is director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; artist Urs Fischer; art collector Pauline Karpidas, and the arts editor of Artforum magazine Scott Rothkopf. Besides the 10,000-euro award, this year’s DESTE Prize also came with a work designed by well-known Greek artist Maria Papadimitriou, a former DESTE Prize winner herself. The other five artists short-listed for the award were Costis Velonis, Poka-Yio (a pseudonym for Polydoros Kariofillis), Dora Economou, Stephanos Tsivopoulos and Dimitris Foutris.
