The 2019 Wolfgang Hahn Prize is to go to Jac Leirner, the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig announced on Monday. The Brazilian artist is, according to juror Jochen Volz, ‘one of the most important exponents of Conceptual Art today as well as of so-called Institutional Critique. Since the 1980s her sculptures, paintings, and installations have questioned the notion of the original and the value of artworks. She assimilates found, collected, and even stolen objects, most of which are industrially produced. The work Museum Bags (1985/2018), for instance, consists of a collection of ordinary plastic bags that she purchased at various museum stores. Here, the bags, which are typically used by visitors to transport a souvenir from a public museum to their private space, become part of a large-scale collage.’ Staying with Brazil, officials in charge of sifting through the rubble and ashes left of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which suffered a devastating fire in September destroying up to 90 per cent of the collection, announced they have found pieces of ‘Luzia,’ the museum’s oldest human fossil. They hope that it artifact can be repaired.
On Tuesday the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in upstate New York announced that its annual Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence would go to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. The director of Castello di Rivoli in Turin, and curator of the 2012 Documenta, will receive $25,000 at a gala in April. Downstate in New York City meanwhile, the Department of Cultural Affairs has been allocated $198.4 million to be spend on the arts in the 2019 financial year, the largest budget the department has ever received.
Curator Franciska Zólyom has selected Natascha Süder Happelmann for the German Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, it was announced on Thursday. Happelmann, more widely known as Natascha Sadr Haghighian, will work, according to the official literature, with a ‘personal spokeswoman’ named Helene Duldung, about whom no further information was given, on a project that considers the relationship between names, citizenship, bureaucracy, technology and identity. Or at least that’s what ArtReview could piece together from a deliberately bewildering press release. On the same day Hito Steyerl, who represented Germany at the 2015 Venice Biennale, was named as the recipient of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019. The prize, worth €12,000, will be awarded in February by the Berlin Academy of the Arts.
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