SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.- Edmund Capon, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales announced today that Monika Tichacek, whose video installation work was ‘censored’ while on public display in Melbourne, is the winner of the 2006 Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts.

For winning this award Monika Tichacek receives $25,000 for her work The Shadowers, 2004, a 3-channel, rear-projection video installation, 35.15 minutes duration with sound. Monika Tichacek was born Switzerland 1975 and now lives in Sydney.

In The Shadowers a sado-masochistic relationship of force and submission unfolds between three protagonists, or shadowers (one of whom is the artist). The interplay between these forces is presented in an episodic fashion: intrusive acts of physical force take place on the body alongside beguiling moments of intimacy.

The participants are connected in emotional and physical ways: their skin is pierced and string is used to unite them, they dance the tango in glittering dresses, and one feeds from the other’s bejewelled and bloody face. Horror, surrealism and feminist performance art are all points of reference. Monika Tichacek’s body is the prime visual of her performances; however, unlike the live performance art of the '60s, Tichacek generally performs, films and edits her own work. Yet her performances are similarly explicit and graphic, wherein she sutures her skin and pierces her tongue, acts which complicate the stereotypical tropes of femininity and sexuality.

There are seven finalists in this year’s Anne Landa Award exhibition: Monika Tichacek (winner), Daniel Crooks, Daniel von Sturmer, Tony Schwensen, Philip Brophy, Grant Stevens and James Lynch.

Judges for this year’s Anne Landa Award were Edmund Capon, Linda Michael (Curator, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2006) and Natasha Bullock (Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales).