Zac Langdon-Pole has been announced as the winner of the 2018 BMW Art Journey Prize. An international jury selected him unanimously from a shortlist of three artists whose works were exhibited in the Discoveries sector at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong. Langdon-Pole's project will take him later this year across a world that humans and birds have been navigating for millennia. He will follow the flight paths of birds like the white stork or the arctic tern, traveling along the earth's axis where the Northern and Southern Hemispheres' summers intersect.
Migrating birds cover some of the longest distances traveled by any living being. Their routes have guided the Polynesian pathfinders across the seas. Inspired by this ancient celestial tracing, Langdon-Pole's journey questions the position of humans as the center of the world. Weaving through Central Europe, Southern Africa, and the Pacific Islands of Samoa and Hawaii, his Art Journey seeks to understand how culture intersects with the science of celestial mapping—and from there flows into larger existential inquiries about who we are and how we are situated in the world.