The second edition of the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards is called ‘What Will They See of Me?’ With that title as its guiding theme, the project considers the importance we continue to attach to individual expressions of personal identity, at a time when we all produce and consume so many images that it is hard for any more than a few of them to stand out from the crowd. As more and more photographs, videos and webclips go into circulation, and compete for our attention, which will be the ones that will make it through to the future, and what, in turn, might the future make of them?

The ongoing struggle to be seen and heard has always been an issue for younger, emerging artists – and even more so now, perhaps, in the face of this surfeit of high-quality images,  increasing numbers of them generated by the growing ranks of other like-minded artists. Does an artist now require an even more distinctive or provocative signature to achieve extra visibility? How does the plethora of images that makes up our everyday reality constitute a challenge, a context, or a subject for an artist’s work?

While social media and online image-sharing/video-sharing platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for people to make themselves known to the world, it is also becoming clear that the sum of our online activities can leave lingering, inadvertent traces whose permanence, and whose visibility to data giants like Google and Facebook, has been a matter of considerable debate. As the lines between public and private continue to blur, what are the actual marks we make, or leave behind, in this new online universe? What is the larger picture of ourselves that we are portraying or betraying? And how much, or how little of this will carry forward into the future?

We are looking for moving-image artists within the first five years of beginning their professional practice to address and explore these themes using all forms of the moving image, or working digitally, or online.

We are curious to know what we will get to see from you…

To find out more, please go to the ‘About’ section.