Sky Hopinka, Sin Wai Kin Win Art Basel’s $33,000 Baloise Art Prize

Sky Hopinka and Sin Wai Kin are this year’s winners of the Baloise Art Prize, a CHF 30,000 ($33,000) award given out annually to an artist showing in the Statements section of the Swiss edition of Art Basel.

Hopinka’s work, the four-channel film Just a Soul Responding, is being shown by New York’s Broadway gallery. The film features images of landscapes with text overlaid referring to colonization and Indigenous histories. “I tell stories that are relevant to an Indigenous audience, unburdened by explanations to an audience unfamiliar with its context,” he said in an interview conducted by Art Basel earlier this year.

A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, Hopinka recently showed his work at LUMA Westbau in Zurich and Tanya Leighton gallery in Berlin.

Sin’s art is being shown by London’s Soft Opening gallery. They are represented by Portraits, five moving-image works featuring deities and fantastical beings, all in service of commentary on masculinity, binaries, and more. Cantonese and Peking Opera influenced the work, and science fiction and drag have inspired past ones.

Born in Toronto and based in London, Sin is on the rise. They were nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, and they have solo shows forthcoming at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome and the newly opened Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York.

Through the award, Hopinka and Sin’s works will be acquired by the MMK Frankfurt and MUDAM in Luxembourg.

Elsewhere in Switzerland, Bea Schlingelhoff was named the 2023 winner of the Société des Arts of Geneva’s prize, which is given to an artist with politically outspoken work. Through the award, Schlingelhoff will receive CHF 50,000 ($55,000) and a solo exhibition at the Palais de l’Athénée in Geneva.