SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.- It was announced at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney today that Melbourne artist David Rosetzky is the recipient of the inaugural Anne Landa Award for moving image and new media work. For winning this Award, David Rosetzky receives $25,000 and his work, Untouchable, is acquired for the Gallery's collection.

David Rosetzky's video considers how we represent our lives to ourselves and how our experience of self is affected by relationships with others. In Untouchable we look into three rooms whose inhabitants speak about an emotionally charged experience that is preoccupying them. Each speaker narrates the thoughts that seem, at least initially, to refer to the other person in the room with them. The relationship between the protagonists becomes increasingly ambiguous, however, as speakers on different screens start to say each other's lines. The title Untouchable echoes their inability to connect with each other, while also suggesting the viewer's uncertain relationship with the screen characters. This distance reflects one of the paradoxes of globalisation: the tension between our contemporary drive to individualism and the desire for communality, for a sense of meaning achieved through belonging and interrelationships.(1)

Commenting on winning the Anne Landa Award, David Rosetzky said: "I am very excited and appreciative about receiving the Anne Landa Award. To have a video installation in the Art Gallery of New South Wales' collection is a great honour. The award will enable me to further develop my practice as I plan to use the prize to buy equipment and time in the studio to work on new projects. I am very thankful to Sophie Landa in initiating this award and exhibition with the Art Gallery of New South Wales as it helps raise the profile of contemporary new media art in Australia and also provides artists with much needed opportunities and support."

Aged 34, David Rosetzky's work was most recently represented in the 2004 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Contemporary Photo-Media at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and in Living Together is Easy which was shown at Art Tower Mito, Japan and at the National Gallery of Victoria. In addition to his art practice, David lectures in the Photography Department at the Victorian College of the Arts and is an Education Outreach Presenter in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art's Outreach Schools Program.

Selector's Comments: "Over the last decade David Rosetzky's video art has explored the nuances of contemporary human relationships. This multi-channel video work, Untouchable, is a highly layered and sophisticated meditation on our desire to connect with each other and the fact we are often unable to do so. The work is sensitively filmed, has a poignant and open-ended narrative and it has a refined physical presence within the gallery space.

"Untouchable will become part of the Art Gallery's permanent collection, a fitting tribute to Anne Landa's visionary support of the creative arts."

The work of the six artists selected for the Anne Landa Award will be on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until Sunday 13 February.