Peter und Luise Hager Prize 2019
On 1st February 2019, the Peter und Luise Hager Prize 2019 was awarded at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar (HBKsaar) in Saarbrücken. For the eighth time, the Peter und Luise Hager Foundation and the Saar Academy of Fine Arts and Design honour students for outstanding work and concepts dealing with the sensual experience and communication of technical, social and cultural processes in a creative, artistic way.
The competition brief was the artistic and creative confrontation of ‘resistance’. The students were free to decide which media they wanted to use to convey the theme of the competition. The 38 competition entries submitted by a total of 62 students were correspondingly diverse, both in terms of formal design and selected media..
The jury selected eleven ‘resistance’ pieces which are currently exhibited in the HBKsaar gallery. Of the eleven selected, three prize winners were selected and announced at the opening ceremony on 1st February 2019.
The members of the jury from the Peter und Luise Hager Foundation are Susanne Trockle as a member of the Foundation's Board of Directors and Gabriela Gross as a member of the Board of Trustees.
The three winners, with prizes awarded by Susanne Trockle and Gabriela Gross, are:
1st prize (5,000 euros) – Shakti Paqué
2nd prize (3,000 euros) – Esther Ramsbrock
3rd prize (2,000 euros) – Joanna-Melissa Crittendon
About the winners
1st prize: Shakti Paqué - LESSON 8 (advanced)
Shakti Paqué succeeds in transferring the psychological and physical experience of resistance into the people she films. Her studio guests should say "no" and only shortly before the video was recorded did they learn that they should nod. While we observe these 41 people saying "no" and nodding "yes" at the same time, their inner resistance is transmitted to us. Some of those filmed do not manage this seemingly simple acting exercise. When saying "no", they shake their heads quickly instead of nodding as required. Children are the worst at contrasting speaking and gestures. Are adults with more life experience better liars? How much is the apparently most honest "yes" or "no" always also an acting performance, a staging of clear opinion in which one can also promise oneself and stumble?
Shakti Paqué's reflection on the emotional basis of all resistance in each of us can be understood as successful artistic research.
2nd prize: Esther Ramsbrock - The possibility on the opposite side. The White Flag.
A human being and a flag: Esther Ramsbrock's seemingly simple drawing signals resistance to a permanent overload; namely to the permanent stress against which every young adult who is halfway interested and informed has to resist. Who wants to live in a world in which children fall victim to sexualised violence? Est ce que ces personnes n’auraient pas quelque par raison ? ce sont les perosnnes qui ne sont pas satisfaites et qui dependent des autre. Qui se retirent de la vie occidentale dite jaune. And aren't the many dissatisfied and dependent people who are rehearsing the total withdrawal in the yellow West or as protest voters somehow right? For all the mass media reasons and pretexts about what to get upset about, it can happen that one's own point of view, one's own productivity, one's own constructive power are confused and one is permanently forced to be morally outraged. Esther Ramsbrock tries something new, a decisive step further: not only react, but express one’s own, different point of view.
3rd prize: Joanna-Melissa Crittendon - Impurity Washing.
Joanna-Melissa Crittendon’s installation shows a washbasin, a towel and pieces of soap, in other words an invitation to wash. Those who are asked to wash are obviously dirty. The washbasin arrangement that might seem normal to us in a hotel room irritates us in a public exhibition room. It seems sterile and cold, the pieces of soap do not look clinically clean, rather organically irregular. Like all soap, it is made from organic waste, but Joanna-Melissa Crittendon says that "its ingredients include my own hair and skin deposits, sweat and body fat, as well as the usual substances used to make curd soap".
All non-prize-winner students exhibiting receive an expense allowance of 500 euros: Catherine Duboutay, Julia Gerhards, Felix Gropper & Bernd Rosinski, Eric Heit, Anja Khersonska, Darja Linder, Radion Rabovski & Sebastian Schuhster and Anica Seidel.
