Abhijan Toto wins Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art dedicated to curators under 30

The 10th Edition of the Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art - EnterPrize, a major international award dedicated to curators under 30 conceived by the GAMeC of Bergamo in 2003 with the support of the Bonaldi Group, and born from the desire to remember Lorenzo Bonaldi’s passion for art and collecting, was won by Abhijan Toto and his exhibition project The Forest, Even The Air Breathes.

Abhijan Toto (1994) is a writer and independent curator. He is interested in ecosophy, multidisciplinary research, labor and finance. In 2018 he co-founded, with Pujita Guha, the multidisciplinary platform The Forest Curriculum. She has previously worked with Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh; Bellas Artes Projects and Bataan, Philippines; Council, Paris; and Asia Art Archive. A selection of his most recent exhibitions include Bona Park: Re-enactments, Cartel Artspace (Bangkok, 2019) Southern Constellations, Museum of Modern Art (as guest curator, Ljubljana, 2019),The Exhaustion Project: There Is Still Work To Be Done, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2018), Postscripts, Bangkok Biennial (with Chareon Contemporaries Collective, 2018), History Zero, Mumbai Art Room (Mumbai, 2017). She has participated in residencies at various institutions, including Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; HSLU-University of Applied Arts and Sciences, Lucerne; Tentacles Art Space, Bangkok; ICI Curatorial Intensive, Bangkok (2018), Gwangju Biennale Curator’s Workshop (2018); Trans-Curatorial Academy, Phnom Penh (2018).

The jury, chaired by Lorenzo Giusti, Director of GAMeC, and composed of Caroline Bourgeois, curator of the Pinault Collection in Venice, Nicola Ricciardi, Artistic Director of OGR in Turin, and Li Zhenhua, independent curator in Berlin and Zurich, unanimously decreed to award the prize to The Forest, Even The Air Breathes project for the artist’s way of developing theoretical reflection around nature, understood as a new form of transcultural cosmology in an experimental and collective curatorial approach.

Born from a clear research urgency, the project is articulated in an exhibition with a solid conceptual position and a conscious and well-defined spatial vision. Theexcellent selection of artists, the result of frequentation and a real sharing of ideas, prospects the possibility of an important and fruitful moment of exchange with the territory, capable of rethinking artistic practice in a systemic, ecological and universal perspective.

The Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art - Enterprize has always wanted to emphasize the centrality and significance of the figure of the curator in the international art scene through the production of an unpublished exhibition project, conceived on the basis of an assigned exhibition space and budget.

Starting this year, the format of the prize has been changed: a series of exhibition projects will be hosted in the museum’s Spazio Zero in the year of the award, curated by established professionals in the contemporary art world.
For this first occasion, Edoardo Bonaspetti is the Guest Curator of the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum of Luke Willis Thompson (among the finalists of the 2018 Turner Prize) on view from May 30 to September 1, 2019.

Abhijan Toto ’s project will be hosted at GAMeC in 2020.

Pictured, Abhijan Toto with Lorenzo Giusti, Nicola Ricciardi, Caroline Bourgeois, Li Zhenhua and with Simona, Nini and Rosamaria Bonaldi during the award ceremony. Ph.Credit Michele Stroppa

Abhijan Toto wins Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize for Art dedicated to curators under 30

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