The InterArts Department is pleased to announce that the two winners of the InterArts Course Evaluation Response Grants are: Susan Kwon and Moreshin Allahyari. In awarding the grants jury wrote:

In the review of the 14 applications for the InterArts prize we considered the clarity of the written proposal, the quality of the previsualizations and the effect the funding would have on the ability to complete the project. In the end we selected Susan Kwon’s Submit Secret Project and Moreshin Allahyari’s Heaviness and Lightness video objects.

Ms. Kwon and Ms. Allahyari are engaged with concerns that have resonance to our current political and artistic context. In the case of Ms. Kwon, Submit Secret Project is a participatory form that invites people to reveal themselves within the anonymous environment of a web or paper form. The proposed piece has elements reminiscent of the web project Learning to Love You More by Herrell Fletcher and Miranda July as well as other artists associated with the umbrella term “relational aesthetics”.

Ms. Allahyari’s video work addresses censorship [internal and external] of women in Iran from the position of an insider. Her proposal places the videos within miniature theatrical contexts and will create a sense of intimacy and reliquary. In her book On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir and the Collection, Susan Stewart, in considering miniatures and toys, states that

“The toy world presents a projection of the world in everyday life; this real world is miniaturized or giganticized in such a way as to test the relation between materiality and meaning.”

It is this kind of perceptual change that offers a potential lens into an experience of an individual; making the unknown less distant.

The two members of the jury were Sabina Ott, Art and Design, and Mat Rappaport, Television.

Congratulations to Susan and Moreshin!