CKÖ Wins Swiss Art Award

The Swiss Art Awards are an exhibition of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture that takes place at the Messe Basel Convention Center at the same time as Art Basel fair. The exhibition opens tomorrow and runs until June 22, 2014, while CKÖ and the eight winners in the Art category and the one winner in the Mediation category will receive their awards at a preview and ceremony this evening. Each winner receives an endowment of 25,000 CHF.

CKÖ's "The White Cube" is commended in an awards statement as "a room-within-a-room installation ... skillfully transformed into an inaccessible object. The slanted segment of the spatial construct leans against a massive substructure and appears, in contrast, light and provisional. The deep engagement with materiality, construction, accessibility or even functionality helps to render this object enthralling."

CKÖ was formed in 2012 "out of joy for doing." With backgrounds in architecture, the art collective has created works of different scales and media that are often at the scale of rooms or interact with buildings in interesting ways. Their first piece was an intervention in a vacant building in Zürich, and most recently they intervened at the Kunsthalle Arbon, filling a hall with a wooden grid that visitors traversed.