December 10, 2022 – February 11, 2023

December 9, 2022 – January 28, 2023

Foundwork is delighted to announce that the 2022 Foundwork Artist Prize has been awarded to Marseille and Essex-based artist Dominique White. As honoree, White will receive an unrestricted $10,000 grant and studio visits with each of the 2022 jurors who include esteemed curators, gallerists, and artists: Edgar Arcenaux, César García-Alvarez, Lauren Kelly, Eva Langret, and Javier Peres.

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Three artists were named to the 2022 short list: Anna Perach (London), Junghun Kim (Netherlands/South Korea), and Chris Zhongtian Yuan (London). Each of the honorees and shortlisted artists will be featured in interviews as part of the Foundwork Dialogues program to be published over the coming months. For more information, visit www.foundwork.art/artist-prize.

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Egyptian archaeologists have uncovered an intact ancient papyrus, dating back to 50 BCE, in what experts in the country are calling the first discovery of its kind in a century.

The 52-foot-long papyrus was found in the Saqqara archaeological area. The ancient artifact contains declarations and spells from the Pharaonic Book of the Dead to assist those who have passed away in their afterlives.

Egypt’s Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, announced the discovery earlier this week during an Archaeologists’ Day event organized by the Egypt Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Waziri said the papyrus, which was fully restored at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, is being translated into Arabic, and will be presented at the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum.

The papyrus was discovered inside one of 250 wooden sarcophogi found at the archeological area last June. Researchers and archaeologists have been working at the site for more than two years. Just in 2022, archaeologists uncovered hundreds of mummies, a pyramid of an unknown queen, five painted tombs, the tomb of an ancient dignitary, and a sarcophagus belonging to King Ramses II’s treasurer.

News of the ancient papyrus was first reported by the Egypt Independent.

Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz has called on the British Museum to return an artifact to Iraq in exchange for the donation of a large-scale work by him.

Rakowitz’s proposal will be addressed in a forthcoming visit between Iraq’s culture ministry and British officials in London next month during a scheduled British museum is tour, the Guardian reports.

Rakowitz has proposed the gift of his 2018 Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square to the Tate Modern, a British Museum affiliate overseen by the U.K. government, in exchange for the latter sharing ownership of an Assyrian artifact with Iraq. He began exploring the exchange in 2020, according to the Guardian, and is now moving closer to becoming a reality.

Rakowitz’s Fourth Plinth commission was a mythical Assyrian winged bull known as a lamassu made of date syrup tins. He wrote of his intentions to give a related work to the Tate Modern in a letter to the British Museum.

Through Rakowitz’s proposed deal, the British Museum would return one of the two Assyrian lamassu sculptures in its permanent collection. The sculptures were uncovered by a 19th-century British archaeologist.

Construction workers in Romania uncovered the tomb of a 5th century warrior and a cache of gilded artifacts, including an ornate dagger encrusted with jewels, while building the A7 Expressway that will run through eastern Romania, according to Live Science.

The tomb is one of four archeological sites that were discovered during construction.

Along with the warrior’s complete skeleton, archeologists found remains of his horse, a gold covered saddle, an iron sword, arrowheads, pieces of gold jewelry, and a golden mask that likely once covered the warrior’s face, Silviu Ene of the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archeology in Bucharest told Live Science.

Ene and his colleagues told the publication Hungry Post English that, while the warrior’s ethnicity was not immediately clear, “we can assume that he lived under Hun rule.” The most well-known of the tribal, horse-riding nomads is Attila the Hun, who with his armies plagued both the Eastern and Western Roman Empire in the mid-5th century.

According to Live Science, the excavation was carried out under difficult conditions in poor weather. Flashlights often provided the sole form of illumination during the excavation.

A rare pair of large floral paintings by Queen Victoria are going up for auction at Hansons Auctioneers’s London showroom next week. The canvases are expected to fetch between £8,000 and £10,000 ($9,870 and $12,340) each.

Queen Victoria, who oversaw the expansion of the British Empire and made critical reforms to the monarchy, reigned from 1837 until her death in 1901.

Accompanying the paintings is a provenance letter in which Alexander Mountbatten, First Marquess of Carisbrooke and Queen Victoria’s last surviving grandson, reportedly identified them as her work, according to the Evening Standard.

“The royal items were purchased decades ago by the seller’s grandfather,” associate director of Hansons London Chris Kirkham said in a statement.

“I was astounded and delighted in equal measure when I discovered the paintings,” he continued. “I was asked to value a few items at a cottage in Surrey, but had no idea of the magnitude and importance of the antiques tucked away.”

Nevada Judge Miranda M. Du tossed a lawsuit filed against Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club — as well as major NFT trading platforms OpenSea and LooksRare — that alleged the parties failed to properly prevent and respond to NFT theft.

Robert Armijo, who filed the suit, was the owner of three BAYC NFTs that he purchased in November 2021 and January 2022. Armijo said that on February 1, 2022, he attempted to trade one of his NFTs on the messaging site Discord. Someone who purported to be interested in the trade sent him a link to initiate the trade, which Armijo clicked. The link was a phishing link that gave the hacker access to Armijo’s Ether wallet. The hacker then proceeded to steal Armijo’s NFTs and resell them on OpenSea and LooksRare.

When the lawsuit was filed last April, Armijo’s lawyers claimed that OpenSea and LooksRare failed “to implement common sense and reasonable security measures to prevent the foreseeable fraud and sale of stolen” property, the original complaint read. The lawsuit named Yuga Labs as a defendant for the company’s failure to “monitor its proprietary and exclusive ape community by denying entry to individuals whose access is predicated on a stolen BAYC NFT.”

The Judge dismissed the lawsuit for all defendants using reasonings respective to each defendant.

Yuga Labs had argued that the case, insofar as it concerned them, was moot because their company did not fall under Nevada jurisdiction as the company is incorporated in Delaware and has no employees in Nevada. Armijo’s lawyers tried to argue that because Yuga Labs does frequent business in Nevada that they could be tried in the state, but Judge Du disagreed.

Despite ongoing arrangements for its return, a stone relic looted from a Nepalese shrine in the 1980s is still on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The eleventh-century artifact featuring the Buddhist and Hindu god Vishnu was donated nearly thirty years ago from the personal collection of Steven Kossak, a former curator in the museum’s Asian art department whose dealings are now being scrutinized by academics, activists, and museum officials.

“This is the third thing that the Met is returning that was donated by the Kossaks,” Erin Thompson, an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told ARTnews, referring to the wooden strut and stone statue that were returned last year. 

Deity sculptures are considered living gods in Nepal. The Vishnu relic is a highly symbolic rendition of the god surrounded by a pearl-and-flame aureole with his consort Lakshmi on one side and the eagle Garuda on the other. Standing on a raised platform with lotus decorations, Vishnu is depicted in his four-armed form with raised hands holding weapons: a discus and a club.

Thompson, who has advised on earlier Nepalese repatriation efforts, had visited the Met two weeks ago to take a closer look.

“The museum not only has donations from the family, but it has at least eight loans from them,” she said, adding that the Vishnu relic currently sits in a gallery near an exhibition including other Asian artifacts donated by the Kossaks through their Kronos Collection. “Once you know that someone is acquiring artifacts without looking too closely as a source, the first thing you should do is look deeper.”