Rundgang Prizes 2023

Three prizes were awarded on Thursday evening (July 13th 2023) during the opening of the Rundgang the Kunsthochschule Kassel. The jury consisted of Aliaa Aboukhaddour (artist, art historian), Andrea Linnenkohl (General Coordinator, documenta and Museum Fridericianum gGmbH) and Zaki Al-Maboren (artist, curator, art educator).

This year's Rundgang Prizes were awarded to three individual works. The prize money of 2,500 euros from SV SparkassenVersicherung Holding AG went to Vreneli Harborth (New Media). The Birgitt-Bolsmann-Prize (1,100 euros) went to Colo Kraft (illustration and comics). The prize of the staff of the Kunsthochschule Kassel (800 euros) was awarded to Sander Bartel (Visual Arts).

Prize of the SparkassenVersicherung
"Sisypha" by Vreneli Harborth
With her multimedia work "Sisypha" Vreneli Harborth takes up the conflict between machine work and manual labor and critically refers to the successive takeover of human work by technology. Projected onto textile, one sees a person, represented by the artist herself, knitting a cloth, which at the same time is being unraveled by a machine on the lower surface. Exactly this machine is also part of the installation and dissolves the textile projection surface during its presentation. Referring not only to the mythological Sisyphus, who despairs of his work not leading to the goal, but also to Albert Camus, who claims in his writings that infinite work leading to the absurd can also be meaningful, the artist provides us with a further theoretical context.

Birgitt-Bolsmann-Prize
"Solastalgia" by Colo
Kraft With "Solastalgia," the illustrator Colo Kraft has taken up the serious and current topic of environmental destruction. Coined by Australian natural philosopher Glenn Albrecht, the term "solastalgia" is used to describe a distressing sense of loss that occurs when someone directly witnesses the alteration or destruction of their own home or habitat. In the illustration, this happens to a pair of siblings who are searching for the place they played in as children in a destroyed patch of forest.

Prize of the staff of the Kunsthochschule Kassel
"Infant" by Sander Bartel
Sander Bartel combines in his work "Infant" the drawing with cinematic accents from found footage and performative action. Like a call to finally recognize the fatal destruction of the world by climate change and to stop the excessive consumption of farm animals and their products that is responsible for this, this work presents itself in space. Especially the strong reactions of the employees to the secretly filmed action, during which the artist sticks warning stickers - similar to the notices on cigarette packets - on milk cartons in the supermarket, shows how little attention and understanding is given to this issue. Consumption and the market have the upper hand.

Rundgang
Prizes Every year, the Kunsthochschule Kassel awards prizes to students of the Kunsthochschule within the framework of the Rundgang with the support of its long-standing prize sponsors. The prize money directly benefits the winners and honors the work they present during the Rundgang.