The Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art has awarded three six-months work grants for 2016. 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.

The grants from the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art 2016, each endowed with 10,000 Euro are awarded to:

Doireann O'Malley: Prototypes

Zorka Wollny: Impossible Opera

Amir Yatziv: Cold Fronts or Winter Wonderlands?

Jury:

Sebastian Cichocki
Galit Eilat
Edit Molnár
Marcel Schwierin

Jury statements:

Doireann O'Malley
Prototypes

Doireann O'Malley's film Prototypes brings together transgender studies, science fiction, biopolitics, psychoanalysis, AI, and experimental music. She skillfully ties these to phantoms of modernist utopias, epitomized by the postwar architecture of Berlin, which serves as a dreamlike scenography for the main, protagonists' ghostly actions. The work combines glimpses of the future with (unfulfilled) promises of the past. The artist goes through an in-depth process of understanding female-to-male transitioning from psychiatric, linguistic, and medical perspectives. The jury was captivated by the brutal beauty and originality of Doireann O'Malley's vision, which has the possibility of materializing into a unique and astute work that will reach audiences beyond the art world.

Zorka Wollny
Impossible Opera

Zorka Wollny's proposal, titled Impossible Opera, is an interdisciplinary performative work that uses components such as the architecture of the art gallery, a choir of performers, and several drums. It will be realized through a series of gatherings, with the participation of both professional and amateur musicians. Wollny brings together social and sonic forces, collaborating with different groups of people, with the aim of activating the gallery as a large instrument. The work, sculpted of invisible materials like murmurs, slurps, and whistles, is both abstract and political, poetic and down-to-earth. The jury was impressed by the open-ended, flexible, process-based character of Zorka Wollny's work, which will be specified to and modified by the architectural features of the Edith-Russ-Haus. The site-specifity of the proposal and its open structure holds the promise of a close and adventurous institutional relationship with the artist.

Amir Yatziv
Cold Fronts or Winter Wonderlands?

Amir Yatziv's video works subvert the conventional boundaries between documentary and the simulation of non-fiction matters and facts. Yatziv examines cinematic visual language to confront the history of the moving image and echo back reality in a critical way. This form of filmmaking is part of the current search for a trustworthy means of portraying significant knowledge from the near past while eschewing the "passive witness" implications of documentary. Truth, fiction, and collective (cinematic) memory intertwine through Yatziv's works, examining and at the same time challenging the conventions of the visual representation of history. For his upcoming production, Cold Fronts or Winter Wonderlands?, the point of departure is a forensic 3D simulation of Auschwitz created by the Stuttgart police to aid in the prosecution of Nazi crimes. Yatziv inserts recent interviews with people who are designing these virtual spaces for police or military use, using the very tools of the police's forensic simulation to challenge the authorities' version of events. The jury was enthusiastic about the way Yatziv underscores some of the dynamics of collective history that are narrated through literature, cinema, and war-based computer games, and their possible ideological significance. He emphasizes the unforeseeable changes that can occur in real situations, generating tangible and paradoxical consequences.