The Jury has unanimously decided to award First Prize for the Arteam Cup 2017, now in its third year, to Anna Skoromnaya, due to the impressive way she has managed to restore contemporary art’s role of contemplating social issues currently in the news, in addition to aesthetic and cultural reflections. The video-sculpture Cream Hand Mixer # 1, creating an empathy-filled association between hard, industrial materials, unpolished and oxidised, and the delicate, carefree nature of a video depicting faint images of innocent children, revisits the features of a slide found in a play area, an emblematic icon of childhood fun. Combining playfulness, underlined by the incessant cadence of an infantile refrain and play equipment that is fixed in the collective memory, with a draining sense of imminent and unpredictable tragedy, the artist highlights the urgent need to reflect on the way childhood is so often berated, violated and abused, with children cheated out of their rights, their time and their innocence.