This year’s entries for the award are on show at the Moscow Central House of Artists. Along with the finalists, over 30 other projects can be seen at the display. The organizers have actually aimed to gather the highlights of Russia’s modern art.

Significant projects already familiar to the international art community made it to the final and will fight for “Project of the year”. Among those three are: Vadim Zakharov with his installation “Saint Sebastian”; Nikolay Polissky and his “Large Hadron Collider”, successfully presented in Luxemburg; and Pavel Peppershtein with his “City Russia” project, which was also the entry for the Third Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art.

Vadim Zakharov’s name appears again in the “Media-art” nomination, but this time as video-artist. Rivaling him is the “Coffee-break” video-project by artists Juliya Devlyashova and Aleksandra Toshchevikova. The overwhelming favorite is “Electroboutique” by Aristarkh Tchernyshov and Aleksey Shulgin. Their creations are a “blurred iPod”, which shows the spectator images in psychedelic colors of the 1960s.

This year, 331 applications were submitted for the prize. The winner of the “Project of the year” category will take home €40,000, while the winners in two other nominations will receive €10,000 each.