The "Roots and Pollen" sculpture project is the first Ukrainian professional award in the field of three-dimensional art. It was launched in 2019 by the M17 Contemporary Art Center together with the Adamovskiy Foundation. The aim of the prize is to identify and support talented contemporary artists from Ukraine. The project invites reflection on the concept of "roots" in society in the contemporary world. It explores how an individual's origin directly or indirectly affects their life, activity, creativity, and worldview. It questions the nature of constant motion and the search for new territories, as well as the motivation to spread and diffuse. Roots grow deeper and deeper, while pollen, on the other hand, cannot be contained or controlled. It flies at high speed to distant territories but eventually settles down and takes root again. The project raises questions about the existence of roots in a globalized world and the durability of something that is unrooted. It explores where the fulcrum lies for art that lives in time and experiences it. The project also explores what the artist sees when looking back, deeply immersed in the meanings of the cultures that raised them and gave them strength. It delves into the artist's perception of beauty and their ideas about the origin of the world. Additionally, it considers how the individual's perspective relates to the overall global perspective.

M17 Contemporary Art Center

Adamovskiy Foundation

City council of Kyiv

Helen Pheby (Great Britain) — the Head of Curatorial Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, an international centre for modern and contemporary art set in 500 acres of historic parkland, five galleries, and an 18th-century chapel. Yorkshire Sculpture Park is one of the most famous parks in the world.

Marianne Wagner (Germany) - Curator, PhD, since 2017 — Head of the Skulptur Projekte Archives (archive of the Sculpture Projects Münster), author of numerous publications on art since the 1960s, above all on performance art, the sociology of art, and artistic production as a form of institutional critique. For her dissertation Lecture Performance. Speech Acts as Performance Art Since 1950, Marianne was awarded the prestigious Joseph Beuys Research Prize in 2014. In 2015, she became the Curator of Contemporary Art and Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur (Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History). The work on the sculpture project — a set of events that every ten years turn the whole of Münster into a public exhibition space and stimulate a qualitative rethinking of the social exploitation of public places — has contributed to the widespread recognition and approval of Marianne among the international professional community.

Lisa Parola (Italy)— is an independent curator, a consultant at the Mario Mercz Foundation in Turin, who is actively involved in the development of sculpture in Italy. Lisa Parola graduated in History of Modern Art from the University of Turin. She is the co-author of various publications and research works about contemporary art in Italy and particularly on the themes of cultural politics, the system of art and territory.

A City and Public Art: Features and Forms of Art Objects in an Urban Environment
The New Technologies: How Technological Progress Is Changing Three-Dimensional Art
Art in Natural Landscape: The Benefits of Environmental Art
Objects of Three-Dimensional Art Against the Background of Depoliticization