Call for entries for the COAL Prize 2016 - responses from artists to current environmental issues. It is open to artists from all over the world who deploy their creativity to devise and experiment with solutions and bear witness to the transformation of territories, lifestyles, organizations.

The COAL Prize will reveal the wealth of responses provided by artists to current environmental issues and will encourage the emergence of a new culture concerning nature and sustainability. The global ecological crisis, in the form of climate change, loss of biodiversity, depletion of resources, and various forms of pollution, is above all a cultural challenge that is determined by our individual and collective behaviour.

The COAL Prize is open to artists from all over the world who deploy their creativity to devise and experiment with solutions and bear witness to the transformation of territories, lifestyles, organizations, and means of production, while making a contribution to the process themselves. Together they are participating in building a new collective narrative, a new world of imagination, an evolving shared heritage, a positive framework that is optimistic and essential for everyone to find the motivation to implement the necessary changes towards a more sustainable world.

The COAL Prize, created in 2010 by the COAL Art and Ecology Association, aims to present to the general public and political figures other ways of understanding the complexity of climate and other environmental challenges through a multiplicity of views and creative alternatives. Every year the COAL Prize highlights ten projects by artists working on environmental issues in the field of visual arts. They are selected through an international call for projects. One of them is awarded the COAL Prize by a jury of personalities from the domains of art and ecology.

Organized under the patronage of Madame Ségolène Royal, the COAL Prize 2016 will be awarded during a ceremony organized in Paris in October, with the support of the French Ministry of Environment, Energy and the Sea, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, the European Union and the Imagine2020 network, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and the François Sommer Foundation.

SCHEDULE

Application deadline : September 11, 2016 at midnight.
The Coal Prize will be awarded in October 2016.

PRIZE’S ENDOWMENT

The prize-winner receives an award of € 5,000 and is invited for a residency at Domaine de Belval (Ardennes – France) by the François Sommer Foundation including € 3500 for the resident in production aid. The Foundation also offers up to € 1000 in transport support (transportation to and from Belval, travel on site), and offers food support of up to € 50 per day. A real observatory of rural and wild life, every year the Domaine de Belval welcomes artists chosen for their interest and their contribution to renewing the vision of the relationship between man and nature.

IMAGE CREDIT: Seung-taek Lee, Earth Play, 1979-89, Balloon painted with oil, 500cm (diameter). Courtesy of Gallery HYUNDAI and the artist