HODLER PRIZE 002 IS ON!
We are proud and honored to announce the exceptional Hodler Prize 002 Committee. For the second time, the committee will reward the best narrator of the year, across all disciplines: audiovisual, books, video games, journalism, podcasts, blogs, prompt.... Once again, it will witness and judge the tremendous extension of the written word in the digital age, since text is always the starting point of a story.
The Hodler Prize is to culture what MMA is to combat sports: an exhilarating space for confrontation, abolishing categories to witness the birth of a superior form of multi-dimensional storytelling.
Its reward is in Bitcoin, the multi-dimensional asset par excellence, a pragmatic synthesis of currency, gold and digital, which is asserting itself every day as the superior system for exchanging and conserving value.
Our warmest thanks go to Ledger and CoinShares for making this second edition possible.
The winner of the Hodler Prize 002 will be announced on April 9 in Paris. In the meantime, we will be announcing the works in competition on a weekly basis. Stay tuned!
The world's most revered and celebrated curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist is one of the few to have dared to place text at the center of the exhibition space. He is Artistic Director of the Serpentine in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021), Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021), James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023) Remember to Dream (2023), and Une vie in Progress(2023).
A poetic, prospective and prophetic video game at a time when Los Angeles is still burning, Alice Bucknell's The Alluvials was one of Hodler Prize 001 most exciting discoveries. Alice is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge. Their work has appeared internationally at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Gray Area in San Francisco, Singapore Art Museum, and Serpentine in London, among others. Their writing appears in publications including ArtReview, e-flux architecture, frieze, Flash Art, the Harvard Design Magazine, and Mousse. In 2024, they are a grantee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, recipient of the Collide Residency at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary, and artist-in-residence at EPFL’s Enter the Hyper-Scientific research residency program in Lausanne. Bucknell received a MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.
At the forefront of the Internet revolution for Wired before devoting himself to literature, Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, including Gods Without Men, White Tears, Red Pill and Blue Ruin. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Harper’s and the New York Times. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone.
A brilliant nonfiction writer, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is also the precise reader who introduced us to Cristina Sharpe, winner of the inaugural Hodler Prize. They are the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages. Their essays appear in the 2020 and 2022 editions of Best American Essays as well as The New York Times, Harper’s, Agni, Yale Review, and many other publications. A 2023 United States Artists fellow and the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Marzano-Lesnevich’s next book is the transgender and trans-genre memoir Both and Neither, forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
Creator of Constellation (Apple TV+, 2024), with its stunning narrative, Peter Harness is an award-winning English screenwriter, working in film and television. He was the creator and writer of The War of the Worlds(BBC 1, 2019) and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (BBC 1, 2015). Since his first broadcast script in 2005 (A View From a Hill), he has written and created magical, frightening and audacious worlds, focusing on imaginative adaptations of classic tales as well as compelling original work. He was the writer and executive producer of Wallander (BBC 1, 2012-2015), McMafia (BBC 1, 2018, International Emmy Award, Best Series) and Case Histories (BBC 1, 2011-2013, Scottish BAFTA, Best Series). He has written episodes of Doctor Who (BBC, 2014-2017) and The Crown (Netflix, 2018), as well as a number of theatrical movies, such as his debut feature Is Anybody There? (2008), starring Michael Caine.
Ecology, art, fashion, design... Emanuele Coccia offers a brilliant analysis of the contemporary world, wherever it is being shaped and transformed. He has been teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 2011. His books, translated into many languages, include La vie sensible (2010), La vie des plantes (2016), Métamorphose (2020) and Philosophie de la maison (2021). He has published a book of phototheory with photographer Viviane Sassen (Alchimie Moderne, 2022) He has directed animated videos such as Quercus (2019, with Formafantasma), Heaven in Matter (2021, with Faye Formisano) and The Portal of Mysteries (2022, with Dotdotdot). In 2019, he contributed to the exhibition Nous les Arbres, presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris. He edited the catalogs for the 23rd Milan Architecture and Design Triennial: Unknown Unknowns. An introduction to mysteries. He is currently writing a four-hander on the relationship between fashion and philosophy with Gucci Creative Director Alessandro Michele.
Spearheading a generation that is renewing the codes of contemporary art, Precious Okoyomon (b. 1993) is a Nigerian-American poet who transforms their texts into plastic installations. Their work considers the natural world, histories of migration and racialization, and the pure pleasures of everyday life. They have had one-person exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland; the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Performance Space New York, New York, New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado; The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid Foundation, Madrid, Spain; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York. They were included in the Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn, Estonia; the 58th Belgrade Biennial, Belgrade, Serbia; the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; the 2022 Okayama Art Summit, Okayama, Japan; the 11th Sequences Biennial, Reykjavik, Iceland; the 2023 Thailand Biennial, Chiang Rai, Thailand, as well as in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK; LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany; LUMA Arles, Arles, France; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Nigerian Pavillion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland. Okoyomon’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany and LUMA Arles, Arles, France. Okoyomon was the 2021 recipient of the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award, as well as the 2021 Chanel Next Art Prize. In 2024, But Did You Die?, their second book of poetry, was co-published by the Serpentine and Wonder Press.
The first French intellectual to dare take a closer look at the Bitcoin rupture, Mark Alizart majored in philosophy before working in the field of contemporary art from the year 2000 onwards. He was successively the cultural programs deputy manager of the Pompidou Centre, the deputy director of the Palais de Tokyo, the advisor to the minister of Culture and the director of the LVMH Prize. He has now moved on to join EBB, a start-up created by artist Neil Beloufa intersecting art and AI. Mark Alizart has also written numerous books on topics ranging from theology to computer science, including Cryptocommunism (published by the Presses Universitaires de France in 2017 and translated in English by Polity Press in 2018), a marxist take on the blockchain endorsed by the Accelerationist Manifesto author Nick Srnicek.
A prolific commentator on Nigerian news on X, where 800,000 followers enjoy his daily analyses, Tolu Ogunlesi served between 2016 and 2023 as the Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria on Digital and New Media, and Head of the Presidency Office of Digital Engagement (PODE), which he set up as an in-house digital agency for the Nigerian Presidency and the Federal Government of Nigeria. He’s a two-time winner of the CNN Multichoice African Journalism Award; a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow (2013); a 2015 New Media Fellow of the U.S. State Department's International Visitor Leadership Programme (IVLP); and a 2022/23 Weatherhead Scholars Program (WSP) Fellow at Harvard University, where he researched information disorders and digital media regulation. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Wasafiri, Transition, WLT, Orbis, Magma, Sable, The London Magazine, Westchester Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and others. He’s been awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and a PEN/Studzinski Literary Award; and various writing fellowships. In 2023 he was shortlisted for a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Pharmacy from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK.