VIDEONALE AWARD OF THE FLUENTUM COLLECTION
The Videonale Award of the Fluentum Collection goes to VIDEONALE.18 artist Che-Yu Hsu for his work "副本人 (Single Copy)". Congratulations!
For the third time, the Fluentum Collection is funding the Videonale Award of 5,000 euros to support the winning artist in the production of new works. The jury awarded an honorable mention to Tekla Aslanishvili for her work „Scenes from Trial and Error“.
The competition jury consisting of: Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg (director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn) Fatima Hellberg (director of the Bonner Kunstverein), Matthieu Lelièvre (art historian, independent curator and consultant at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon) and Dr. Linnea Semmerling (director of the Düsseldorf Inter Media Art Institute) explains its decision with the following
Jury Statement:
“The jury convened virtually on March 1st, 2021 to view the artworks in the exhibition and select the prize winner. While we did have the chance to explore the exhibition on a virtual tour, it was certainly not the same as coming together in Bonn to experience the works in their exhibition set-up. The circumstances of the pandemic thus increased our dependency on the viewing copy, which made it more difficult to assess installations but also renewed our sensitivity for single channel works in unexpected ways.
The works in the exhibition conveyed a considerable spectrum of current video practices, including young newcomers as well as more established positions, and ranging across a multitude of genres and styles including documentary, narrative, experimental, mashup, and animation. Keeping with the spirit of Videonale, we were seeking to reward a young position that could convince us with an idiosyncratic approach to a new topic that they could truly make their own.
After an exciting deliberation stimulated by the high quality of the artistic propositions, we unanimously recognized Che-Yu Hsu as this year’s winner of the Videonale Award of the Fluentum Collection. His Single Copy from 2019 is an equally sensitive and rigorous recapitulation of the surgical separation of the Chang brothers, a set of Siamese twins born in Taiwan in the 1970s. The personal memory of the narrating twin Chang Chung-I is intricately interwoven with the collective memory of the heavily mediatized 1979 surgery that came to stand symbolically for the political relations of
Taiwan and China at the time. The jury was impressed with the sensitivity for the physical body that is revealed through Chang’s personal memory but also through various layers of modeling from the silicone cast to the digital scan. While the script allows for elaborate reflections about the video camera as a prosthetic, the human body’s capacity for remembering, and many different readings of the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon, Hsu does not force any of these interpretations. Instead, he convinced the jury with his effortless storytelling, careful composition, technical sophistication, and visual poignancy.”
More information on the award winner can be found here: Che-Yu Hsu
Honorable mention
The jury awarded an honorable mention to Tekla Aslanishvili's "Scenes from Trial and Error". In her work, Aslanishvili searches for traces of the failed billion-dollar projects Lazika and Anaklia City on the Georgian coast. Using documentary techniques, Ashlanishvili shows the material and social consequences of the many years of attempts to build a futuristic port city.
More information on the artist can be found here: Tekla Aslanishvili
The Fluentum Collection
Fluentum is a platform for the production, collection and presentation of contemporary art with a focus on time-based media, in particular moving images. It was initiated by the Berlin software entrepreneur Markus Hannebauer who started collecting video art in 2010. Since early 2019, Fluentum has been showing art in its own exhibition spaces in the listed main building of a former military compound in Berlin-Dahlem.
The former VIDEONALE award winners are:
V17: Sohrab Hura
V16: Randa Maroufi
V15: Shelly Nadashi
V14: Christian Jankowski
V13: Nate Harrison
V12: Manon De Boer
V11: Beate Geissler & Oliver Sann
V10: Roland Schappert & Michael Ebmeyer
V9: Călin Dan
V8: Denis Beaubois
V7: David Larcher, Bill Seaman, Paul Bush, Jem Cohen
V6: Sadie Benning, Peter Callas
V5: Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid, Ken Feingold
V4: David Larcher, Norbert Meissner
V3: Woody Vasulka, Paul Garrin, Cecelia Condit
V2: John Adams, Dara Birnbaum, Llurex
V1: Jean-Francois Guiton, Volker Anding, Herbert Wentscher
You can find the works of former Prize winners in our Videonale’s online video archive or at the respective festival website.
COMPETITION JURY VIDEONALE.18 AWARD OF THE FLUENTUM COLLECTION
Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg studied German Philology, Anglistics and History in Tübingen, Berlin and Freiburg, doctorate in the field of German Philology, works as freelance journalist since 1986. Hewas director of Kunstverein Freiburg (1990-2000) and Kunstverein Hannover (2001-2008) and lectured on art theory and art history at the universities of Freiburg and Hannover, as well as Staatliche Kunsthochschule Stuttgart and Freie Kunsthochschule Basel.Since 2004 he is a honorary professor at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and since 2008 director of Kunstmuseum Bonn. He realized numerous exhibition projects, most recently a solo exhibitionwith works by Martin Noël (2020) and the exhibition„Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland“.
Fatima Hellberg is Director of the Bonner Kunstverein. She has curated exhibitions and projects in institutions including the ICA, London; Tate Modern; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; South London Gallery and Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. Hellberg was Artistic Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2015-19) and previously based in London where she served as curator at Cubitt Gallery and Electra, a contemporary arts organisation with a long-running dedication to gender and feminism. Hellberg has taught and lectured at the Critical Studies Programme, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, at Oxford University, ZHdK, Zurich and the Art Academy of Bremen. Hellberg studied History of Art and Visual Culture at Oxford University and Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London.
Matthieu Lelièvre is is an art historian and independent curator and consultant at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon (macLYON). He completed an MA in museum studies at the Ecole du Louvre and art conservation at the Institut National du Patrimoine. He co-founded several associations, private galleries and museums in Berlin. In Paris, he directed the drawing cabinet of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. From 2016 to 2018, he served as artistic director of a private foundation to prepare the programme for artists' and artists' residencies and to initiate a collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts in Orléans. In 2019, he moved to the Palais de Tokyo to co-curate the 15th Lyon Biennale. Since 2018, Lelievre has been working with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon as its artistic advisor. He is currently developing several projects as a writer and independent curator with exhibitions, performances and workshops in Brazil, Italy and Tunisia.
Dr. Linnea Semmerling is the director of the Düsseldorf Inter Media Art Institute (IMAI), a foundation dedicated to the collection, distribution, presentation and conservation of media art. She holds degrees in Cultural Studies, Art Studies and Technology Studies from the Universities of Maastricht and Amsterdam. Semmerling organized exhibitions at ZKM Karlsruhe (DE), IKOB Eupen (BE), TENT Rotterdam (NL) and Marta Herford (DE), and contributed to catalogues (ZKM Karlsruhe, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl), art magazines (Kunstforum International, Metropolis M), and academic journals (Organised Sound, Leonardo Electronic Almanac). Her curatorial and research interests concern socially engaged artistic practices and the relationships between technologies, institutions, and the senses.