Dina El Kaisy Friemuth and Leonie Kellein are the recipients of the 2021/22 Arthur Boskamp Stiftung Advancement Awards.

The call for proposals took place under the curatorial focus of IN:VISIBILITIES, which looks at the visible and invisibile dimensions of media technologies over the next two years. The focus is on the social and political aspects of a long-digitalized everyday life, which also includes material and physical processes.

The jury chose two positions that work with hybrid and critical forms of the public sphere, composing them differently depending on their degree of invisibility – and allowing new subjectivities to emerge from them.

Dina El Kaisy Friemuths critical and collective artistic practice unpacks the complexity of collectivity and belonging. Their work questions gender, ethnicity, and class and aims to create environments that center marginalized voices as well as decolonial and institutional critique. Their activist practice is often created in collaboration with other cultural workers and involves curating, writing, performance, and video works. El Kaisy Friemuth (b. 1988) lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. They are co-founder of the collective – Feminist Collective With No Name with Anita Beikpour. They graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and Berlin University of the Arts in 2016. Recent group exhibitions include the 11th Berlin Biennale, Ariel (Copenhagen), 1-1 (Basel), Bergen Konsthall and 55-11 Gallery (New York). El Kaisy Friemuth has been the initiator and member of several artist groups and networks such as The Cultural Workers Union for People of Colour (Denmark), Another Dinner Ruined (Beirut), and Speculative Bitches (Berlin).

Leonie Kellein (*Switzerland) is a visual artist and filmmaker. She studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and at Goldsmiths University of London. In her work she deals with plasticity, memory as well as (ecological) trauma and questions her relationship to material and materiality. She has received several awards and grants, including the DAAD scholarship and a scholarship of Art School Alliance. She won the jury prize for her short filmDream City within the exhibition Urban Ecologies at Weltkunstzimmer Düsseldorf. Her work has been shown internationally at film festivals and galleries, including the Max Ophüls Preis Film Festival and the Visions du Réel International Film Festival.

This year’s jury consisted of Cana Bilir-Meier (artist), Ulrike Boskamp (Board of Directors, Arthur Boskamp Foundation), María Inéz Plaza Lazo (critic and curator, Arts of the Working Class) and Agnieszka Roguski (Artistic Director 2021/2022, Arthur Boskamp Foundation).

The award is endowed with 3,000 Euros and is conferred every two years. It is aimed at artists with a connection to northern Germany (through their place of birth, place of study, current place of residence, or focus of their work). In addition to the award, the winners will be provided with an apartment and studio in Hohenlockstedt for three months, as well as the opportunity to realise a final presentation and a publication.

The call theme IN:VISIBILITIES was set by Agnieszka Roguski as Artistic Director to connect to her overall programme of the same name for 2021/2022. This curatorial focus highlights the possibilities of articulating, criticizing or changing in:visibilities; and thus questions subjectivity and authenticity as well as their forms of representation and publicness, manipulation and connectivity.