The Evens Arts Prize 2023

© Sander van Wettum

  • The Jury of the Evens Arts Prize 2023

    Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Artistic Co-Director, Kunstenfestivaldesarts; Nicolas Bourriaud, Artistic Director, 15th Gwangju Biennale, and Founder, Radicants; Elena Filipovic, Director and Curator, Kunsthalle Basel; Matteo Pasquinelli, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science, Ca’ Foscari University; Gosia Plysa, Director, Unsound.

    Jury Chair: André Wilkens, Director, European Cultural Foundation.



  • The Nominators of the Evens Arts Prize 2023

    Ramon Amaro, Senior Researcher in Digital Culture, Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; Zdenka Badovinac, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Lars Bang Larsen, Head of Art & Research, Art Hub, Copenhagen; Leonardo Bigazzi, Curator, Foundation In Between Art Films, Rome; Mercedes Bunz, Professor Digital Culture & Humanities, King's College, London; Francesca Corona, Artistic Director, Festival d'Automne, Paris; Julia Eckhardt, Artistic Director, Q-02, Brussels; Silvia Fanti, Artistic Director, Live Arts Week /Xing, Bologna; iLiana Fokianaki, Founder, State of Concept, Athens; Cyrus Goberville, Head of Cultural Programming, Bourse de Commerce | Pinault Collection, Paris; Stefanie Hessler, Director, Swiss Institute, New York; Mathilde Henrot, Programmer, Locarno Film Festival; Nora N. Khan & Andrea Bellini, Artistic Directors, Biennale Image en Mouvement 2024, Geneva; Peter Kirn, Director, MusicMakers HackLab, CTM Festival, Berlin; Inga Lace, Curator, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; Andrea Lissoni, Director, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Frank Madlener, Director, IRCAM, Paris; Anna Manubens, Director, Hangar, Barcelona; Anne Hilde Neset, Director, Henie Onstad, Høvikodden; Nóra Ó Murchú, Artistic Director, transmediale, Berlin; Maria Ines Rodriguez, Director, Walter Leblanc Foundation, Brussels; Nadim Samman, Curator for the Digital Sphere, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Andras Siebold, Artistic Director, Kampnagel, Hamburg; Caspar Sonnen, Head of New Media, International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), Amsterdam; Marlies Wirth, Curator for Digital Arts, MAK, Vienna; Ben Vickers, Curator, Publisher, CTO, Serpentine Galleries, London.



  • Artistic Director

    Anne Davidian, independent curator



  • Media enquiries

    communications@evensfoundation.be



 

Visual artist Femke Herregraven has been named the new laureate of the Evens Arts Prize 2023.

The 2023 edition of the biennial European award focuses on artistic practices that critically engage with AI and address its democratic challenges. The laureate was selected by an independent jury from proposals put forward by leading cultural institutions across Europe. The award ceremony will take place on 25 April 2024 at BELvue Museum, Brussels.

The Laureate

Femke Herregraven investigates material realities, geographies, and value systems carved out by global finance and geopolitics. Spanning high-frequency trading, mineral mining, cat bonds, and algorithmic systems, her work makes tangible the effects of the financial and technological abstractions on ecosystems, historiography and individual lives. Meet our laureate here (video)

The Evens Arts Prize was awarded in recognition of the artist’s critical investigation into these extractive technologies and the consistent use of AI to unsettle established capitalist models, convoking alternative imaginaries and voices for new liberatory agency. The artist was nominated by Stefanie Hessler, the director of the Swiss Institut, New York.

Femke Herregraven lives and works in Amsterdam. She was nominated for the Prix de Rome 2019, is part of On-Trade-Off (artist collective) and a Creator Doctus candidate at Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. Recently she exhibited in group shows at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019); Gropius Bau (2020); 12th Taipei Biennial (2021); 13th Gwangju Biennial (2021); Talbot Rice Gallery (2021); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021); Art Encounters Biennial (2021); Nottingham Contemporary (2021); BAK (2021); Z33 (2022); Lubumbashi Biennial (2022); Reina Sofia (2023), 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennial (2023), Kunsthall Trondheim (2023).

The Jury Statement

The jury praised the artist’s investigation into the social and colonial implications of new technologies and their inscription into the workings of global extractivism. Of particular interest is Herregraven's in-depth research on the concept of catastrophe and the financialization of human lives as liability and risk, revealing historical and contemporary connections between capital flows, pandemics, and climate change.

The jury acknowledged Herregraven’s consistent use of highly exploitative technology, such as AI, to unsettle and undo established capitalist models. The artist draws attention to zones of opacity, to elements resisting technological categorizations—noise, illness, or unstable terrains such as swamps, seas or erupting volcanoes—to destabilize the codes that have subjected lives and natural environments to monitoring, prediction, and financial speculation. In this light, her exploration of the friction between AI as a language model and living language of everyday life is exemplary. Through experimentation with AI, the artist illuminates the complexity of human communication, convoke alternative imaginaries and rationalities, amplifying a collective voice for new liberating possibilities.

“My work starts from a question of agency: what is left to say about a future that is already mapped, calculated, and financialized as a catastrophe? To overcome this initial moment of paralysis, the core questions of my research are: how can the catastrophe become an emancipatory moment in navigating our current biological, political, and technological ecosystems? And how can the entanglement of languages, codes, bodies, landscapes, and predictive structures become a new protocol for 'image' making and world-building?", says Herregraven.

Read more about Evens Arts Prize.

Visual artist Femke Herregraven has been named the new laureate of the Evens Arts Prize 2023.

The 2023 edition of the biennial European award focuses on artistic practices that critically engage with AI and address its democratic challenges. The laureate was selected by an independent jury from proposals put forward by leading cultural institutions across Europe. The award ceremony will take place on 25 April 2024 at BELvue Museum, Brussels.

The Laureate

Femke Herregraven investigates material realities, geographies, and value systems carved out by global finance and geopolitics. Spanning high-frequency trading, mineral mining, cat bonds, and algorithmic systems, her work makes tangible the effects of the financial and technological abstractions on ecosystems, historiography and individual lives. Meet our laureate here (video)

The Evens Arts Prize was awarded in recognition of the artist’s critical investigation into these extractive technologies and the consistent use of AI to unsettle established capitalist models, convoking alternative imaginaries and voices for new liberatory agency. The artist was nominated by Stefanie Hessler, the director of the Swiss Institut, New York.

Femke Herregraven lives and works in Amsterdam. She was nominated for the Prix de Rome 2019, is part of On-Trade-Off (artist collective) and a Creator Doctus candidate at Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. Recently she exhibited in group shows at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019); Gropius Bau (2020); 12th Taipei Biennial (2021); 13th Gwangju Biennial (2021); Talbot Rice Gallery (2021); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021); Art Encounters Biennial (2021); Nottingham Contemporary (2021); BAK (2021); Z33 (2022); Lubumbashi Biennial (2022); Reina Sofia (2023), 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennial (2023), Kunsthall Trondheim (2023).

The Jury Statement

The jury praised the artist’s investigation into the social and colonial implications of new technologies and their inscription into the workings of global extractivism. Of particular interest is Herregraven's in-depth research on the concept of catastrophe and the financialization of human lives as liability and risk, revealing historical and contemporary connections between capital flows, pandemics, and climate change.

The jury acknowledged Herregraven’s consistent use of highly exploitative technology, such as AI, to unsettle and undo established capitalist models. The artist draws attention to zones of opacity, to elements resisting technological categorizations—noise, illness, or unstable terrains such as swamps, seas or erupting volcanoes—to destabilize the codes that have subjected lives and natural environments to monitoring, prediction, and financial speculation. In this light, her exploration of the friction between AI as a language model and living language of everyday life is exemplary. Through experimentation with AI, the artist illuminates the complexity of human communication, convoke alternative imaginaries and rationalities, amplifying a collective voice for new liberating possibilities.

“My work starts from a question of agency: what is left to say about a future that is already mapped, calculated, and financialized as a catastrophe? To overcome this initial moment of paralysis, the core questions of my research are: how can the catastrophe become an emancipatory moment in navigating our current biological, political, and technological ecosystems? And how can the entanglement of languages, codes, bodies, landscapes, and predictive structures become a new protocol for 'image' making and world-building?", says Herregraven.

Read more about Evens Arts Prize.

  • The Jury of the Evens Arts Prize 2023

    Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Artistic Co-Director, Kunstenfestivaldesarts; Nicolas Bourriaud, Artistic Director, 15th Gwangju Biennale, and Founder, Radicants; Elena Filipovic, Director and Curator, Kunsthalle Basel; Matteo Pasquinelli, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science, Ca’ Foscari University; Gosia Plysa, Director, Unsound.

    Jury Chair: André Wilkens, Director, European Cultural Foundation.



  • The Nominators of the Evens Arts Prize 2023

    Ramon Amaro, Senior Researcher in Digital Culture, Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; Zdenka Badovinac, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Lars Bang Larsen, Head of Art & Research, Art Hub, Copenhagen; Leonardo Bigazzi, Curator, Foundation In Between Art Films, Rome; Mercedes Bunz, Professor Digital Culture & Humanities, King's College, London; Francesca Corona, Artistic Director, Festival d'Automne, Paris; Julia Eckhardt, Artistic Director, Q-02, Brussels; Silvia Fanti, Artistic Director, Live Arts Week /Xing, Bologna; iLiana Fokianaki, Founder, State of Concept, Athens; Cyrus Goberville, Head of Cultural Programming, Bourse de Commerce | Pinault Collection, Paris; Stefanie Hessler, Director, Swiss Institute, New York; Mathilde Henrot, Programmer, Locarno Film Festival; Nora N. Khan & Andrea Bellini, Artistic Directors, Biennale Image en Mouvement 2024, Geneva; Peter Kirn, Director, MusicMakers HackLab, CTM Festival, Berlin; Inga Lace, Curator, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; Andrea Lissoni, Director, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Frank Madlener, Director, IRCAM, Paris; Anna Manubens, Director, Hangar, Barcelona; Anne Hilde Neset, Director, Henie Onstad, Høvikodden; Nóra Ó Murchú, Artistic Director, transmediale, Berlin; Maria Ines Rodriguez, Director, Walter Leblanc Foundation, Brussels; Nadim Samman, Curator for the Digital Sphere, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Andras Siebold, Artistic Director, Kampnagel, Hamburg; Caspar Sonnen, Head of New Media, International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), Amsterdam; Marlies Wirth, Curator for Digital Arts, MAK, Vienna; Ben Vickers, Curator, Publisher, CTO, Serpentine Galleries, London.



  • Artistic Director

    Anne Davidian, independent curator



  • Media enquiries

    communications@evensfoundation.be



 
Evens Arts Prize 2023 | Focus

The 2023 edition of the Evens Arts Prize is dedicated to exploring artistic practices that critically engage with AI and address its democratic challenges.

The widespread use of AI applications, particularly in the form of text-to-image generators and large language models, has sparked intense scrutiny and debate. These discussions, fueled by both excitement about their potential and concerns about their biases, bring to the forefront crucial questions about human subjectivity, autonomy, and agency.

How can we better understand and address the major technological and cultural challenges of our time? What new imaginaries can we cultivate between humans and machines?

Technical systems are deeply intertwined with social systems, and the issues raised by these technologies have implications for our democratic principles. In response to these challenges, the 2023 edition of the Evens Arts Prize will focus on artistic practices that critically engage with AI from cultural, political, and ethical standpoints. The goal is to support artists who address the democratic dilemmas and opportunities arising from AI and the broader constellation of digital technologies and algorithmic politics.

We are seeking artistic projects that investigate the impact of algorithms and AI on our experiences, imaginaries, aspirations, and politics. They shed light on issues such as surveillance, privacy, manipulation, extractivism, digital governance, justice, care, and responsibility in the age of machine intelligence.

We value practices that explore alternative cosmologies and epistemologies, question human exceptionalism, and cultivate alliances between living beings and machines. Of particular interest are practices that experiment with AI to challenge prevailing systems of knowledge and power asymmetries, mobilize technologies towards emancipatory community outcomes, and envision democratic futures.