Rike Suhr and Sebastian Gneiting receive Exam Award 2022

In total, the jury viewed 22 works by graduates and master students of the Kunsthochschule Kassel, which can be seen in the documenta hall from December 14 to 18. The jury consisted of Viktoria Lea Heinrich (Research Associate, Theory and Practice of Design, Kassel School of Art), Moritz Micalef (Cultural and Public Relations Officer, cdw Foundation) and Mirjam Thomann (Substitute Professor of Artistic Practice with an Expanded Concept of Material, University of Cologne).

The EXAMEN sponsorship award is intended for the creation of a new artistic or design position, which will in turn be exhibited as an alumni project at the exam exhibition the following year. The three-member jury of the 2022 Exam Promotion Prize justified its decision thus:

Rike Suhr's video and spatial installation "Envy and Neighbors*" raises the question of how gentrification is specifically experienced and whether envy can be understood as a reaction to social and economic inequality. Suhr playfully engages with architectural arrangements and structural occurrences. The view from the window of a spacious new building - a view that can be found in every city - generates interest in structural occurrences and one's own emotions. In a parodic way, Suhr thus explores the emotion of envy and finds a way of dealing with it through an artistic language all his own. Fiction and self-reflection combine in the installation with an in-depth examination of socially relevant issues.

Sebastian Gneiting's clothing sculptures "Ornate for the Lonely" are accompanied by the glossary of gay cosmology. The artist deconstructs the domination fantasy of the men's shirt with relish and precision. He translates his concentrated research on gay aesthetics, camp codes and queer iconographies into clothing sculptures that move weightlessly in space while being of totally present physicality. Gneiting's penchant for fetishization, on the one hand, and his very delicate material sensibility, on the other, won over the jury.

From December 15 to 18, the works of the prize winners as well as other positions of the graduates and master students of the Kunsthochschule Kassel can be seen in the documenta hall. The exhibition was curated by Marlene Bürgi.

Press contact
Çiğdem Özdemir
Kunsthochschule Kassel
presse[at]kunsthochschulekassel.de