(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - A video installation examining Islamic faith and prayer has won this year's Blake Prize for religious art, reports The West Australian.
The Blake Prize for Religious Art (named after the artist and poet William Blake) is a prestigious annual art prize in Australia established in 1949 as an incentive to raise the standard of religious art.
Sydney artist Khaled Sabsabi won the $20,000 prize with a three-channel installation which depicts Muslims in Sydney engaged in worship .
Sabsabi was not there to receive the prize because he is in Beirut as part of the 2010 Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship.
He had spent three months filming the project, which runs for a little over 90 minutes..
"The result is a beautiful and unique visual manifestation of a contemporary Australian ceremony," the judges said.
"The work utilises video as a means to access and forge connections between people, representing and enacting the hospitality shown by a religious community in opening up their practice to draw in a wider audience."
The Sydney Morning Herald said that the Muslims subjects of Sabsabi's winning multimedia entry couldn't appear more, well, ordinary.
''There's no paraphernalia, no religious robes, nothing to create a barrier between observer and the participants,'' said one of the judges, Dr Julian Droogan, a lecturer in religious history at Macquarie University.
''Nothing to give the religion any exoticism or mystique. It is an inviting piece of work that talks to the viewer of religion as normal daily practice, as social community, as being held together by family and kin.''
Others who took a prize include WA artist Abdul Abdullah, who won the $5,000 Blake Prize for Human Justice for his work "Them and Us", a self portrait of the artist and his brother; and Carla Hananiah, who won the $5,000 John Coburn Emerging Artist Award for her oil painting Refuge (2009).
The 60th Blake Prize Exhibition is showing at the National Art School Gallery, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, until October 15.
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The Blake Prize for Religious Art (named after the artist and poet William Blake) is a prestigious annual art prize in Australia established in 1949 as an incentive to raise the standard of religious art.
Sydney artist Khaled Sabsabi won the $20,000 prize with a three-channel installation which depicts Muslims in Sydney engaged in worship .
Sabsabi was not there to receive the prize because he is in Beirut as part of the 2010 Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship.
He had spent three months filming the project, which runs for a little over 90 minutes..
"The result is a beautiful and unique visual manifestation of a contemporary Australian ceremony," the judges said.
"The work utilises video as a means to access and forge connections between people, representing and enacting the hospitality shown by a religious community in opening up their practice to draw in a wider audience."
The Sydney Morning Herald said that the Muslims subjects of Sabsabi's winning multimedia entry couldn't appear more, well, ordinary.
''There's no paraphernalia, no religious robes, nothing to create a barrier between observer and the participants,'' said one of the judges, Dr Julian Droogan, a lecturer in religious history at Macquarie University.
''Nothing to give the religion any exoticism or mystique. It is an inviting piece of work that talks to the viewer of religion as normal daily practice, as social community, as being held together by family and kin.''
Others who took a prize include WA artist Abdul Abdullah, who won the $5,000 Blake Prize for Human Justice for his work "Them and Us", a self portrait of the artist and his brother; and Carla Hananiah, who won the $5,000 John Coburn Emerging Artist Award for her oil painting Refuge (2009).
The 60th Blake Prize Exhibition is showing at the National Art School Gallery, Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, until October 15.
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