The Nam June Paik Art Center in Korea has named Joan Jonas as the winner of the Nam June Paik Prize 2024. Launched in 2009 and named after the Fluxus video artist, the prize honors artists who champion creativity and cross-cultural understanding through their work. The award, which emphasizes peace-building and global understanding, includes an award of KRW 50 million ($35,798) and a solo exhibition at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul next year.
Known as an “artist’s artist,” Jonas has profoundly influenced generations of artists with her integration of live performance and video—a pioneering approach she developed in New York’s downtown art scene in the late 1960s. Her early works, such as Vertical Roll (1972), use fragmented footage and distorted visuals to explore themes of female identity and media perception. In recent years, her work has explored the connections between civilization and nature, human and non-human life, offering critical reflections on anthropocentrism. Jonas was selected to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in 2015, where her installation They Come to Us Without a Word (2015) examined humanity’s relationship with nature.
Jonas’s career has included numerous retrospectives, including at London’s Tate Modern in 2018 and, most recently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year. In response to receiving the Nam June Paik Prize award, Jonas stated, “I am honored to receive this prize, especially to remember Nam June, a great artist. It will be a pleasure to work with Nam June Paik Art Center on the show in 2025.”
An international jury, chaired by Frances Morris, former director of Tate Modern, selected Jonas as the winner, with the award ceremony scheduled for November 28, 2024. “Jonas not only played a key role in shaping early video and performance art but continues to explore urgent new terrain,” said Morris, who highlighted her “immersive installations that explore themes of ecology, landscape, and kinship between humans and non-human species at a time of climate breakdown.”
