Press Release May 30, 2011 The ars viva Prize 2011/12 on Language goes to Erik Bünger, Philipp Goldbach, and Juergen Staack Berlin. Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V. awards this year’s ars viva Prize for Fine Arts to the three artists Erik Bünger (born in 1976), Philipp Goldbach (born in 1978) and Juergen Staack (born in 1978). The prize includes three exhibitions domestically and abroad, the publication of a bilingual catalog, an artist’s edition, as well as a financial award of 5,000 Euros for each artist. This year’s competition explored the subject of language. The jury of twelve was unanimous in choosing Berlin-based Swedish artist Erik Bünger as well as Philipp Goldbach and Juergen Staack, two artists who live and work in the Rhineland. All three convinced the jury with their conceptual rigor and their complex engagement with the subject of language. In his lecture performances, Erik Bünger analyzes the power and irrationality of language in popular music, speeches, and interviews. Philipp Goldbach, in contrast, studies the consistency and temporality of the supports used for written language, while Juergen Staack translates images into language by way of various processes of transformation and transcription, then re-rendering them as data on the image support. At the jury’s first meeting, 12 finalists were chosen from among 39 competitors. These 12 finalists then personally presented their work at their studios during the two-day final jury round. On the basis of these presentations, the jury selected the three prizewinners. According to Dr. Arend Oetker, the chairman of the Fine Arts Committee at Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft, “These artists plumb the limits of language’s possibilities, for example at the intersection between sound and photography. They undertake a ‘search for clues,’ and reflect complexly on our approach to language and forms of transmission.” This year’s jury, chaired by Dr. Arend Oetker, included the curators Peter Friese (Weserburg/Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen), Dr. Sabine Maria Schmidt (Museum Folkwang, Essen), and Inga Steimane (Riga Art Space), as well as advisor Andreas Hapkemeyer (Museion: Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Bozen) and six members from the Fine Arts Committee, Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI. The prizewinners will be awarded the ars viva prize during the sixtieth anniversary meeting of the Kulturkreis, which will take place in Essen from October 7 to 9, 2011. On Saturday, October 8, 2011, the first ars viva exhibition station will open at Essen’s Museum Folkwang (exhibition until January 15, 2012). Subsequent exhibition stations are: Riga Art Space (March–May 2012) and Weserburg/ Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen (June–September 2012). Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V. Antonia Ruder / Katja Mittag Annette Welling Fine Arts Public Relations Haus der Deutschen Wirtschaft Haus der Deutschen Wirtschaft Breite Straße 29 Breite Straße 29 D-10178 Berlin D-10178 Berlin T +49 (0)30-20 28-14 97 T +49 (0) 30-20 28-14 35 F +49 (0)30-20 28-24 97 F +49 (0) 30-20 28-24 35 [email protected] [email protected] www.kulturkreis.eu www.kulturkreis.eu ars viva 11/12 – Language The Prizewinners Erik Bünger , born in 1976 in Växjö, Sweden, studied composition and electroacoustic composition at Stockholm’s Kungliga Musikhögskolan (Royal College of Music) in Stockholm and Berlin’s Universität der Künste (University of the Arts). For his lecture performances, videos, and installations, he uses already existing musical pieces, video clips, film, and documentation. By recontextualizing the found material, he examines the use of language in sound and visuals from popular culture. The starting points for Bünger’s studies include the human voice and the spoken word. In so doing, he uses the endless range of recordings accessible from our collective and cultural memory through the media, rearranging them, drawing parallels, commenting on and questioning common productions of meaning. Language, which Bünger makes available to experience in a new way, clearly reveals manipulations, myth formations, and irrational phenomena in our cultural and media world. He is interested equally in the unsaid, the absent, yet subliminally present, which is responsible for our feelings and moods. His interactive web art project Let Them Sing It for You has been visited 4 million times so far. Here, he relentlessly breaks the close alliance of image/medium and sound and/or language. Philipp Goldbach , born in Cologne in 1978, studied media art at Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, and art history, sociology, and philosophy at Universität Köln. His works focus not only on language as an instrument of communication, but also on the complex relationship between the support and writing, the reevaluation or reinterpretation that the object or medium is subjected to by way of contact with written or printed text. The transience of the material and the informational value of writing are reflected in the photograph series Tafelbilder (Panel Pictures). Traces of chalk on historic blackboards from universities and research institutes document the process of the inscription and deletion of knowledge, at the same time indicating the absent and the forgotten. In their photographic mise en scène, the chalkboards are given an auratic charge reminiscent of panel paintings and triptychs. Goldbach explores in various ways the emergence and reproduction of text and the textual image as well as their function—by engaging with the technique of phototypesetting as a combination of analog photography and writing or in meticulously copying major works of idealist philosophy and travelogues from the nineteenth century. Juergen Staack , born in Doberlug-Kirchhain, Brandenburg, in 1978, studied with Thomas Ruff at Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. In his works, Staack moves repeatedly to the limits of photography. He places a special emphasis on the possibilities of rendering photography in language and sound. In this way, he creates a displacement and an expansion of perception that is first made possible by the abstraction or deletion of the original. In the series Transcription Image, the content of photographs changes media from image to sound (a linguistic reproduction of what is shown) and back to the abstract image as encoded data set. Language serves here as a visual imaginative moment. At the same time, processes of communication are questioned, for the model sender-message- recipient is seriously disrupted by the use of languages that are only spoken by a small number of people and their translation to illegible codes. In his work Juergen Staack poses the central question of the elements that generate images. What makes an image an image? He interrogates the importance of images in a world that is shaped by an overflow of visual stimuli and looks for new forms of representation in language. .