The Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art has awarded three six-months work grants for 2015. The grants of 10.000 Euro are sponsored by Stiftung Niedersachsen.

Stiftung Niedersachsen sponsors the grants at Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art continually since 2001. Many of the works developed in Oldenburg have been shown in international exhibitions and have been awarded various prizes.

With their support Stiftung Niedersachsen intends to encourage one of the leading sites for media art in Germany, in its highly qualitative profiling to make art creation possible and to create international networks as well as local cooperations.

Jury:

Inke Arns
Nataša Ilic
Edit Molnár
Marcel Schwierin

The grants from the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art 2015, each endowed with 10,000 Euro are awarded to:

Mahmoud Khaled: The New Commission

Szabolcs KissPál: From Fake Mountains to Faith (Hungarian Trilogy)

Anette Rose: Captured Motion

Jury statements:

Mahmoud Khaled
The New Commission

In his new research-based project Mahmoud Khaled turns to the iconic building of “Maamoura,” which belongs to a summer resort in Alexandria opened in 1960. It was originally commissioned by the Egyptian state after the 1952 military coup d'état, was designed by a large group of Egyptian architects, and was intended to accommodate and brand the new elite of the “New Nation of Egypt.” By revisiting an important and not so well-known monument of modernity that was initiated and built by the army, the project tries to imagine the artist/the architect and his creative dilemmas behind the architectural project in a country that at the time was in the midst of “officially rebranding itself.” By revisiting this particular story, Khaled addresses a number of pertinent questions that establish a direct dialogue with the political realities and disappointments of contemporary post-revolutionary Egypt.

Szabolcs KissPál
From Fake Mountains to Faith (Hungarian Trilogy)

Szabolcs KissPál’s proposed projects The Rise of the Fallen Feather and The Middle of the World will be the second and the third part of the docu-fiction video trilogy From Fake Mountains to Faith, which analyzes and describes the anatomy of the current political and cultural philosophy that forms the ideological basis of authoritarian, “illiberal” Hungarian state policy. In the middle of the radical political transformations affecting the European Community, we consider KissPál’s critical analysis of the dominant Hungarian political philosophy and its cultural practice, including the way it translates its urgencies into international context, to be particularly important.

Anette Rose
Captured Motion

Captured Motion by Anette Rose examines processes of industrial automation that significantly influence our working environments. She analyzes the complex movements of machines in the textile industry, such as the Radialflechter manufactured in Oldenburg by the Herzog company, as well as the scientific motion studies that are used for the development of such machines. She transfers the material thus obtained in a fascinating way into artistic media, such as video installations and printed, three-dimensional sculptures.

“I observe how manual work is replaced by machines, but also how hands explain machines with gestures.”