Artist and ACT professor Renée Green is the recipient of the Finkenwerder Art Prize 2022, hosted by Hamburg’s Hochschule für bildende Künste (HfbK).
Initiated in 1999 by Kulturkreis Finkenwerder e.V. and donated by Airbus Operations GmbH, the prize has been previously awarded to Georges Adéagbo, Candida Höfer, Christian Jankowski, and Daniel Richter, among others. The members of this year’s jury were Thomas Demand, Simon Denny, Martin Köttering, Bettina Steinbrügge, and Jorinde Voigt.
According to HfbK, “the jury chose an internationally renowned position who has been known for complex conceptual installations since the early 1990s. As a traveler, Renée Green collects experiences, stories and knowledge in different places and puts them into a living connection with each other. Spoken and written language–documentary, poetic, fictional–finds expression on textiles and paintings, on documents, notes and photographs, in books, audio pieces and videos. Meanings thus become fluid, insights questioned. Her work ranges in thematic diversity from music and pop culture, film and literature, to site specificity and architecture, migration, legacies of displacement, and feminism.”
As part of the award, HfbK is hosting a solo exhibition of Green’s work: Vide ma tête/Selection/Combination: All Variable Elements; Green reconfigured the newly built Galerie der HfbK in Hamburg and presented her new Space Poem #8 (Vide ma tête) in a library-like environment featuring all the publications by the artist, which now form part of HfbK’s Library collection.
These new elements were recombined with a selection of recent and past film and video works by Green, presented in two different spaces in the gallery; with a practice ever attentive to the exhibition context, one room featured monitors displaying Green’s 2005 film series Relay, which focuses on the aspirations for art, culture, and technology within a higher education environment in a variety of international contexts, as well as her film Here until October 2004 (2004); another space, akin to a cinematic environment, screens Green’s ED/HF (2017) and Americas : Veritas (2018).
In addition, the presence of Green’s book-sculpture Contact (A Participant) (2019) prompted the second printing of Green’s chapbook Hubert Fichte, Tour-isms, Negotiating in Contact Zones, and Contact, produced for this occasion by HfbK; the chapbook is available for the audience to take with them.
The official award reception and the exhibition opening took place on June 1st, while on June 3rd, Green made a public presentation in the exhibition space. Vide ma tête will remain open until June 25th, 2022.
More information about the Finkenwerder Award.
