Artists selected for Supernova’s Focal competition program will compete for $3,250 in cash prize awards including Denver Digerati’s inaugural artist residency award. Our awards are determined by this year’s three illustrious guest jurors and will be announced during our Closing Night Awards presentation on Thursday September 28th. The Grand prize award winner will also receive a limited edition 3d printed Supernova Trophy, designed and produced by Kristin Stransky, as shown in her photo here.
Sine Özbilge
Sine Özbilge is a multidisciplinary artist with a strong focus on animation and mixed-media. She holds a BA in ‘Design and Arts’ from the Libera Università di Bolzano FUB Italy, as well as an MA in ‘Animation’ from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts KASK Belgium. She has been mentored by Aldo Cibic - the contemporary successor of the renowned Italian Memphis Designer Ettore Sottsass as well as valuable artists such as Han Hoogerbrugge.
She also often works in a duo on multiple projects with her sister Imge Özbilge. In her personal practice, Sine creates obscure worlds where subconscious desires, conflicts and struggles metamorphose into absurd and surreal artworks. These often have a mixed media basis where animation and live-action metamorphose in order to explore new connotations, narrations and stylistic forms. Her work focuses on Femininity, the Subconscious, Art history, Post-net aesthetics, Cyberculture, Gamification and Absurdism.
Sine was the Supernova “World on Fire” 2020 Grand Prize winner in the focal competition category.
AUJIK
For AUJIK, nature is divided into Refined and Primitive categories. This seperation presents a conflict that is the root of all chaos in the world, and in order to reach a sublime state, AUJIK generates rituals to harmonize the organic and synthetic realms. Refined nature consists of evolved technology such as robotics, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, DNA manipulations, and body enhancements. The Primitive includes fauna, flora, and the Earth itself with its precious stones, minerals, and metals. The pulsating foliage and advanced interfaces that emerge in the biosphere serve as sacred artifacts, visions of a futurist environment. Through crossbreeds of biotic and technological systems, AUJIK’s animism for the Digital Age presents new possibilities for evolution and strives for Post-Human nirvana.
/by JC Gonzo
AUJIK’s multi-media works have been showcased in galleries, museums, and festivals worldwide including the Prix Ars Electronica 2011, OneDotZero London BFI 2011/2013/2016, SIGGRAPH Asia, CMoDA Beijing, Biwako Biennale 2012,2014, 2018. Japan Media Arts Festival 2010/2015. Nordic Outbreak by the Streaming Museum, NYC 2014, 'Death is your Body' Frankfurter Kunstverein 2014, Co-workers, Museum of Modern Art, Paris 2016, Oberhausen film festival, Rotterdam film festival, Dokfest Kassel.
Had solo exhibitions at gallery's in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and at CAC Vilnius, Museum of Art, Turku, Finland. Made music videos for Cloud Nothings, Dax J, Sun Araw, Liturgy, Guzz and others. Collaborations with Christ, Mira Calix, Daisuke Tanabe, Sion Trefor and dvdv.
Made commissioned work for Space Shower TV, Japan. STRP Eindhoven. UABB Bi-City Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\ Architecture. Dazed & Confused and more.
Mainly work with Computer animation, but also AR, VR, photo, clothes, painting, music and installations.
AUJIK aka Stefan Larsson, born in Sweden, lives and works in Otsu, Japan. MFA Umea art academy.
AUJIK’s artworks have been presented in the Supernova Festival focal competition in 2016, and in the program Go Digital! in 2018
Snow Yunxue Fu
Snow Yunxue Fu is a New York-based international New Media Artist, Curator, and Assistant Arts Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Using topographical computer-rendered images and installations, her practice merges historical, post-photographic, philosophical, and painterly explorations into the universal aesthetic and definitive nature of the techno sublime.
Fu’s work reviews and interviews have been covered in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Arebyte on Screen, Sedition Art, St. Louis Magazine Art Review, Pearl River Delta Art News, Canton River Newspaper of Economy, Guangzhou Today’s Focus in China, etc. The.Up.Life Magazine and NOOW from Switzerland has ranked Fu as one of the top five contemporary artists in 2018. She was awarded the First Place in the Digital Art Category of the Art Rights Prize in 2020 and was also awarded and the New York University’s Curricular Development Challenge Fund Grant in 2021 for The Post-Photographic 3D Imaging Curriculum she has been developing in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She participated in residencies such as Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on the Governors Island in New York, the Hatch Residency through the Chicago Artist Coalition, Biocultura Residency in Santa Fe NM, Lexington and Concord Artist Residency in Illinois, and Estudio Nómada’s Mas els Igols Residency in Barcelona, Spain. She was also the juror of the 2019 Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival in Chicago. She has given lectures and presented on her work and research in conferences, symposiums, and institutions around the world including International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia in Brisbane Australia, ByteDance (TikTok’s mother company), Agora Digital Art, the Chinese American Art Faculty Symposium, Veritas Forum, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, Tsinghua University, China Academy of Art, and etc.
Her new media artworks have also been collected by the Currents Museum of Art in New York, Duende Art Museum in Guangdong China, Richard and Ellen Sandors Family Collections, and other institutions. With a background in painting, Fu remains the youngest artist collected by the National Art Museum of China. She sees her transition into new media as a natural extension of her conceptual research in which she draws parallels between the physical, metaphysical, digital, and multi-dimensional spaces. Fu’s artwork has been shown internationally in solo shows, group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals including the Duende Art Museum, Guangdong, China; New York Gallery of Chinese Art, Times Square ZAZ Billboard Project, New York; New York; Ars Electronica, Austria; Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy; Pioneer Works, New York; NADA Art Fair, New York; Sedition, Hong Kong; Arebyte Gallery, London, UK; West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, China; Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, Shenzhen, China; Pingyao International Photography Festival, Shanxi, China; Thoma Art House, Santa Fe; Currents Santa Fe New Media Art Festival, New Mexico; The Wrong Biennale, Current Museum of Art, New York, and etc.
Snow’s artworks have been presented in Supernova in the focal competition in 2018, and across numerous programs every year since then.