Patrick Hough and Lawrence Lek Win 2017 Jerwood/FVU Awards

The artists Patrick Hough and Lawrence Lek have been announced as the winners of the Jerwood/Film and Video (FVU) Awards 2017, a generous prize that grants each artist £20,000 ($29,000) to produce a new moving-image work.

Responding to the curatorial theme of this year’s edition, “Neither One Thing or Another,” both artists will examine the dissolving boundaries between the real the fictional, and between the physical and digital realms.

Lawrence Lek—whose career is on a roll since winning the Dazed Emerging Artists Award last year and who participated recently at Glasgow International—has proposed a work in which an emerging artificial intelligence meditates about its own post-human creativity.

Patrick Hough’s proposal, meanwhile, involves abandoned props and décor from Hollywood Dream Factory taking on a new life as mementos of cinema history.

Lawrence Lek, Berlin Mirror (2042 Retrospective) (2016). Photo: Courtesy Jerwood/FVU Awards.

A jury formed by Steven Bode, director of FVU; the 2014 Turner Prize winner, artist Duncan Campbell; Cliff Lauson, curator at the Hayward Gallery; Amy Sherlock, reviews editor at Frieze magazine; and Sarah Williams, head of program at Jerwood Visual Arts, selected the two winners out of 240 applications.

“The year’s shortlist was an impressive gathering of artists who adeptly pinpointed the various ambiguities and contradictions of our present moment,” Lauson said in a statement.

“The reels and proposals were of an extremely high conceptual rigor, revealing in particular a technological anxiety that continues to unsettle our cultural beliefs,” he added.

Hough’s and Lek’s new commissions will debut in an exhibition at Jerwood Space in London in spring 2017.