Targetti Poulsen won't be at Milan this year, but The Premio Targetti Light Award is going ahead and will be celebrating its tenth anniversary with a tribute to Futurism, the first artistic movement (just thirty years after Edison’s invention) to understand the revolutionary potential of electric light and that its extraordinary power was not limited merely to making it possible to see at night. The theme is the exploration of the movements' prophetic exaltation of technology intended for the first time ever as the inspiration and primary content of an artwork: coinciding with the hundredth anniversary of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.

The Award is an international competition for under-40 talents held every two years. It has been created by Targetti to promote the creativity of young artists and to stimulate increasingly profound thought on the bonds between technological innovation and artistic creativity. The participants – more than 3,000 competed in the first five editions – will be asked to create a work of art using artificial light as both medium and content. This year they will start from new reflections on the extraordinary vitality of the technical-expressive concepts developed by the Futurists concerning the role that light can play in creating a work of art. While respecting the formal criteria set out for the competition, the artists may use any material and technology and avail themselves of advice from Targetti’s experts to optimize the expressive power of light in their works. Entries will be judged by a panel comprising Amnon Barzel (artistic director of the Targetti Light Art Collection), Omar Calabrese (semeiologist), Alessandra Mammì (art critic for L’Espresso magazine), Peter Noever (Director of MAK, Wien), Franziska Nori (Project Director of CCCS, Florence), David Sarkysian (director of MUAR, Moscow) and Paolo Targetti (president of Targetti Poulsen Group

The winners’ artworks will also become part of the Targetti Art Collection - the most important European collection dedicated to Light Art and which includes works by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Gilberto Zorio and Brigitte Kowanz - and will be included in the itinerant exhibition which has been ongoing since 1998 visiting some of the world’s most prestigious museums such as MAK (Vienna), the Chelsea Art Museum (New York), and MUAR (Moscow)..