Award recipient

Solo exhibition of the award recipient

9. December 2022 – 1. May 2023
Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

Shortlist

Shortlist Exhibition

15. September 2021 – 27. February 2022
Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

Lamin Fofana presented the multi-sensory installations BLUES and Ballad Air & Fire, which combined sound elements with light and scent, as well as with moving image and photography by Fofana’s long-term collaborators Nicolas Premier and Jim C. Nedd. BLUES centred around tracks from a trilogy of albums the artist composed in dialogue with seminal texts that contemplate the experience of Black life in the West: Black Metamorphosis, Darkwater and Blues. Fofana’s new musical project Ballad Air & Fire offers looked to more-than-human temporalities such as the ebb and flow of the tide and the rhythms of night and day.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff showed two series of photographs. For Exteriors, the duo photographed promotional images at real estate projects around the city, which were then printed on PVC banners and hung from awnings. The pristine renderings form a stark contrast to the dirt and disorder of the construction sites which frame them. The new series Collective Image consisted of close-ups of the murky yet shimmering water at the municipal sewage works at Ruhleben, Berlin. In the second room, visitors could watch a trailer for the first two episodes of the ongoing television series Paradise, which Henkel and Pitegoff shoot at their bar “TV”. The full episodes could be seen at a variety of bars and independent cultural spaces around the city.

Sandra Mujinga created two new groups of sculptures that reflected her continued interest in strategies of worldbuilding, a process typically associated with science fiction genre by which a new universe is constructed and populated with fantastic new species and governed by alternative rules. Reworlding Remains consisted of three tall, standing sculptures, which were fashioned from interwoven fabric that was bunched and draped to create skins for specter-like figures. In Sentinels of Change a fourth figure stood watchfully over a schematic, three-dimensional representation of a prostrate dinosaur body. The entire exhibition space was bathed in a green light that enveloped viewers as they entered.

The installation Song for VEB Stern-Radio stemmed from Sung Tieu’s interest in the recruitment agreement of 1980 between the GDR (East Germany) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The agreement brought up to 100,000 Vietnamese contract workers to almost 1,000 publicly owned enterprises (Volkseigener Betrieb or VEB). Along the walls of the exhibition space hung the work Date, Flight Number, Ministry, Factory, Workers Target, Workers Actual (Complete Edition), derived from material from the Federal Archives, which Tieu transcribed verbatim, reformatted onto multiple sheets, and then finished with ink stampings. At the center of the installation was a room within a room, the walls of which were clad with stainless steel panels. The room housed eight radios produced by Vietnamese workers in the VEB Stern-Radio Berlin factory. The radios were used to transmit a sound piece, which filled the space with dissonant industrial sounds that gradually transitioned into a melody.

Second Jury

First Jury