Working across art, film and academia, Dimitri Venkov was awarded the Kandinsky Prize for Best Young Artist Project of the Year in 2012 for his mockumentary Mad Mimes. Starring familiar names in the Russian contemporary art circle, including artist Arseniy Zhilyaev and art historian Alexandra Obukhova, the film is an ironic anthropological study of a fictional, socially marginalised community in Moscow that practices mystic, cult-like rituals and survives by collecting roadside trash. Venkov has also been twice nominated for the Innovation Prize, Russia’s equivalent of the Turner Prize, in 2012 and 2014.